The Pilgrims Society: A study of the Anglo- American Establishment; Rockefeller, Mellon, Luce, Rothschild, Cecil, Windsor, the Federal Reserve, WWII, the CIA, and So Much More
Apart from a 1902-1903 list, this author is the first to publish about two dozen Pilgrims Society membership photocopies, ranging from 1907 to 2014.
Sources for membership identification only appear in the membership list.
PART I: the Pilgrims network |
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1. | Notes beforehand |
2. | Intro |
3. | The WASP elite |
4. | Pilgrims history |
5. | The Pilgrims network: |
PART II: World War II |
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6. | Pilgrims and international fascism |
*****
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?
"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."
John T. Whiteford asking very reasonable questions in his 1940 pamphlet 'Sir Uncle Sam: Knight of the British Empire'. |
"[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."
August 19, 2015, The National Interest, 'The Interview: Henry Kissinger'. Kissinger is a vice president of the Pilgrims Society. |
*****
To avoid confusion in the future, this is the first article - or book, or ahum, Ph.D. dissertation - 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. Not too long ago, one wouldn't be able to find 5 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 question: "The Pilgrims are mentioned on Wikipedia, so what's the secret?".
The secret is probably that a complete analysis will prove that:
- yes, an Anglo-American establishment, including an Eastern Establishment, has existed for well over a century;
- a truly amazing amount of influence has historically been concentrated within the Pilgrims;
- and the banks and multinationals countless leading members represented have sponsored domestic and foreign fascism in the run up to World War II.
The article you see here today is version III of the original. Version I was written in 2005 and only was a couple of pages long. It was replaced in 2008 by a vastly expanded version II, after a number of membership lists and executive officers lists were obtained. In 2017 this article again was vastly expanded to a version III. I was only able to acquire lists from 1990 to 2014, as well as countless older lists, at the last stages of writing version III. Key updates have been made and a few additional ones might follow in the future, but for now it looks as if version III+ will be the final version of this article.
Equally important: at the time version I and II of this article were written I had not yet developed my three and four establishment models, let the alone the much later "anti-establishment" "liberal CIA", "anti-establishment" "conservative CIA" and the full "boxes model". In this article I generally also refer to the globalist establishment as the "liberal establishment", as it has often been called in history. In the end, the liberal and conservative establishments both are part of the globalist establishment, but the basic operating differences tend to be as follows:
Liberal establishment |
Conservative establishment |
Pro-containment | Anti-containment |
Pro-detente | Anti-detente |
Anti-roll back | Pro-roll back |
Anti-SDI (Star Wars) | Pro-SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) |
Pro-United Nations | Anti-United Nations |
Anti-tactical nukes | Pro-tactical nukes |
Pro-Arab (for oil) | Pro-Arab (new right) / anti-Arab (neocons) |
Pro-Afghanistan invasion | Mixed feelings over Afghanistan invasion |
Mixed feelings over Iraq invasion | Pro-Iraq invasion |
Pro-CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg | Anti-CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg |
Moderately religious, atheist or new age | Usually religious in very rigid ways. |
However, as this article demonstrates in Part III, various key Pilgrims most definitely have had a hand in the rise of neoconservatism.
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:
"There is an establishment in the United States. The word "establishment" is a general term for the power elite in international finance, business, the professions largely from the Northeast, who wield most of the power regardless of who is in the White House.
"Most people are unaware of the existence of this "legitimate Mafia." Yet the power of the establishment makes itself felt from the professor who seeks a foundation grant, to the candidate for a cabinet post or State Department job. It affects the nation's policies in almost every area.
"For example, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, subsidized by Rockefeller interests since 1927 boasts a membership of at least 90 per cent establishment figures." 1
We will be getting back to the person who wrote this column later in this article.
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):
- It is a social elite centered around a number of universities, a group of banks, insurance companies and law firms, and a group of influential, privately-funded foundations and think tanks.
- It is centered in and around New York, even though at any moment a large portion of this group is active within the government and non-government institutions in Washington.
- There is a close relationship with the British aristocracy and the British royal family via diplomatic officials, individual contacts, and private clubs.
- The dominant religion is Protestant, in particular the Episcopal (Anglican) and Presbyterian churches, which overall have no problem with Darwinism.
- British branches of Freemasonry and Templar orders are still quite popular.
- This is the group behind the globalization process and members are generally great supporters of the United Nations and the sustainable development movement.
- Catholic and especially Zionist interests are not very much appreciated, although diplomatic ties are always maintained.
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.
At the turn of 20th century there was an increasingly strong belief among British and American elites that a partnership between the two countries - instead of the historic anymosity - would be to the benefit of both countries. 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 would come to organize 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 Frederick 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, a position he held until his death in 1914. 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, 1902 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 former U.S. president Grover Cleveland, also a trustee of the Peabody Education Fund from 1885 to 1889, alongside J.P. Morgan. 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
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 the following families:
Astor | Duke | Mellon | Schiff |
Aldrich | (Copeland) Du Pont | Meyer | Schroder |
Belmont | Gould | Morgan | Stillman |
Baker | Harkness | Peabody | Vanderbilt |
Carnegie | Harriman | Pyne | Warburg |
Dillon | Lamont | Reynolds | Watson |
Dodge | Lodge | Rockefeller | Whitney |
Drexel | Loeb | Sassoon | Windsor |
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:
Am. Securities Corp. | Federal Reserve | Kidder, Peabody and Co. | Morgan Joseph & Co. Inc. |
Banker's Trust | Fidelity Int. Trust | Kleinwort Benson | New York Savings Bank |
Bank of England | Fifth Avenue Bank | Kuhn, Loeb & Co. | N.M. Rothschild & Sons |
Barclays Bank | First Boston Corp. | Lazard | Oppenheimer & Co. |
Barings Bank | First National Bank | Lehman Brothers | Paine, Webber |
Blackstone Group | Fourth Nat. Bank of N.Y. | Loeb, Rhoades & Co. | Rockefeller Center, Inc. |
Bowery Savings Bank | Goldman Sachs | Manufacturers Hanover | Rockefeller Family & Ass. |
Brown Brothers Harriman | Gotham National Bank | Marine Midland | Salomon Brothers |
Bullock Fund | Hambro | Mellon Bank | S.G. Warburg |
Chase National Bank | Harriman National Bank | J. P. Morgan & Co. | Shearson Loeb Rhoades |
Chase Manhattan US/UK | Internat. Banking Corp. | J. P. Morgan Chase | U.S. Trust Corp. of N.Y. |
Chemical Bank | Irving Trust | Morgan Grenfell (UK) | * |
Citibank | J. G. White & Co. | Morgan Guaranty Trust | * |
Drexel & Co. | J. Henry Schroder & Co. | Morgan Stanley | * |
Law firms and insurance companies
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Chrysler | Forbes * | ICI | R.J. Reynolds |
Corning Glass Works | General Electric | Int. Nickel Co. of Canada | Rio Tinto |
De Beers/AngloAmerican | General Motors | Jardine Matheson | U.S. Steel |
Dodge | IBM | Phelps-Dodge | W.R. Grace & Co. |
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:
"Paley's own friendship with Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry. He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the debriefing of reporters, and in many ways set the standard for cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s... The [Washington] post men continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles at a private club called the Alibi... membership is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only." 4
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 actually was a late-comer. The most important reporter on the relationship between the CIA and reporters is famous Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. 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 October 1977 article for the "new left"/"liberal CIA" Rolling Stone magazine, Bernstein unveiled countless other interesting facts involving CIA cooperation with the media:
"Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company [ABC], the National Broadcasting Company [NBC], the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune... By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc...
"A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times among them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—"The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown," said one source. ... "[Sulzberger] was very eager, he loved to cooperate." On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist's byline in the Times. ...
"Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience. For many years, Luce's personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson...
"Malcolm Muir, Newsweek's editor from its founding in 1937 until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, said ... "Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I'd call him up.... At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters, a chap that I knew but whose name I can't remember. I had a number of friends in Allen Dulles' organization." ...
"When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner dealt with him." Wisner, deputy director of the CIA [for operations 1951-1958] was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press. Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend.
"[However,] information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees... Katharine Graham, Philip Graham's widow and the current publisher of the Post, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with either Post or Newsweek personnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers. ...
"According to CIA officials, ABC continued to provide cover for some CIA operatives through the 1960s. ... At the time of the Senate hearings, Agency officials serving at the highest levels refused to say whether the CIA was still maintaining active relationships with members of the ABC News organization. ... These same sources professed to know few specifies about the Agency's relationships with NBC, except that several foreign correspondents of the network undertook some assignments for the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. ...
"James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency's head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files." 7
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 also were 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:
"A. Media. 1) Current program: a) PAO [CIA's Public Affairs Office] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods." 10
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:
"[1001 Club member Frits] Philips had been approached by H.A. Lunshof, who was on a crusade against the leftist tendencies in the liberal press. The controversial Lunshof was columnist and chief editor of Elsevier. His position was in jeopardy, however, because the anti-communist course of the weekly magazine under his leadership wasn't doing the subscription growth any good. ...
"In the advisory board meeting of 25 March 1964 [1001 Club member Sidney] van den Bergh said that he had heard from [Philips director] Guepin that at Philips 'serious consternation has arisen about the editorial course of the NRC and that they were willing to make funds available to change this course.' According to van Lennep these same feelings towards the NRC could also be found in Rotterdam business circles.
"In a next meeting Van den Bergh, who at that point could hardly still take Lunshof serious, said that Lunshof claimed to have gotten insight in dossiers of the German secret service through German president [Heinrich] Lubke. From these it became clear to him that the communists were trying to infiltrate the Dutch newspapers and that they had succeeded in this at the Handelsblad and the NRC with several young editors. So the worries of Lunshof and the NRC did not just go for the NRC, but also, to a lesser extent, the Handelsblad, of which 'many prominent Amsterdammers', according to Lunshof, thought 'there was a threat that it would move too far into leftist water, especially due to deputy editor Hofland.' To increase the pressure, Lunshof hinted to Van den Bergh of a potential withdrawal of Elsevier as publisher of the Handelsblad and the erection of a rival newspaper.
"Van den Bergh and other commissioners of the Handelsblad didn't trust the manipulative Lunshof one bit, but did share his worries about the "red ideas" of the NRC. However, in discussions with the NRC management and their colleagues the commissioners of the Handelsblad were quickly satisfied after finding out that over there they also were not interesting in the red virus and that banning leftist ideas from the newspaper could be seen as a joint objective." 12
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.
The British publishing house William Collins, Sons was represented in the Pilgrims by its head, Sir William A. R. Collins, from 1951 until the mid 1970s. William Collins, Sons was founded in 1819 and eventually, in 1990, merged with Harper & Row to form HarperCollins, to this day one of the "big five" English-language publishing firms alongside names as Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster.
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:
"I have been involved with a number of journalists in researching this story [arms-to-Iraq affair]. At any one time there might be as many as half a dozen following up this or that line of inquiry and we keep constantly in touch by telephone. It is to our mutual benefit, except that the relationship, which has now been going on for nearly five years, has frequently been marked by sudden changes of policy by newspaper editors or the unexplained removal of a journalist from the case or even from the paper (sometimes to a more exalted position on another where the arms-to-Iraq inquiry is not part of the brief.)... It never really surprised me until I was amazed to receive, from one of my other sources, a list of journalists with affiliations to MI5, on which were posted some of my own contacts in the press, indeed some who had at the beginning made something of a name for themselves on the back of the arms-to-Iraq affair." 14
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.
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.
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:
"Father [Cornelius Vanderbilt III, a Pilgrims executive] had business friends whom Mother did not invite to parties at the house--at least, not until she found they were accepted, as sometimes happened, by people she liked in England. Then there were people who liked Mother but not Father. One of these was J. P. Morgan the elder [a Pilgrim]... At St. Thomas's on Sunday, when the Morgan car drove up behind ours--their footmen in dark blue, ours in maroon--Mr. Morgan would call Mother by her first name but hardly speak to Father." 19
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:
"Nevertheless I feel sure that if Roosevelt were alive today he would disagree with Senator Kennedy [JFK, a Catholic] about the desirability of Catholics in high places. True, FDR nominated Al Smith and made Joseph Kennedy, the young Senator's wealthy dad, our ambassador to England. But Smith eventually took a famous walk, and I'm not sure that the Kennedy appointment was made with any degree of enthusiasm; it was partly to please Jimmy Roosevelt, a business associate of Joe Kennedy's. Certainly the English raised a terrific hue and cry over the appointment. And in private FDR did not hesitate to mention Catholic connections as a bar to political trust. Among high churchmen, the only one he trusted was Cardinal Stritch." 20
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:
"Non-Catholic churches here put up a big howl [after FDR appointed Myron C. Taylor as ambassador to the Vatican]. Mr. Roosevelt told me one evening in the Lincoln Study at the White House why he had done this. He told me, first of all, he had wanted to make peace with the Catholic Church in the United States as represented in his cabinet by James Farley, the postmaster general, and with various other high Catholic personages, such as Archbishop Stritch of Chicago and Spellman of New York. But in addition, he said, he had appointed Mr. Taylor because the best intelligence system in the entire world, better even than the British, was the intelligence system of the Catholic Church, as received through its priests and high church personnel throughout the entire world. I remembered my reference to the Vatican dossier back in the twenties, and agreed." 22
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:
Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite | Order DeMolay |
Descendants of the Knights of the Garter | Order of the Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priest |
Grand Lodge of the State of New York | Shriners |
International Society Fraternal Chief Executives | Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia |
Knights Templar | United Grand Lodge |
Knights of Pythias | Order of Plantagenet |
Masonic Brotherhood Foundation | Order of the Merovingian Dynasty |
"Mason" | Order of the Crown of Charlemagne |
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:
"The Scottish Rite degrees give insight to the expansion of Masonic legends. The Lodge of Perfection, 4°–14°, is concerned with events following the murder of Hiram Abiff [linked to the sacred geometry architects of the Cult of Dionysis]: burying him; capturing and punishing his murderers; finding a new master builder; and discovering treasurers buried under King Solomon's temple. The 15° and 16° explain the return of Zerubbabel from Babylon to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. The 17° and 18° center around re-instituting the word under the Law of Love as taught by Jesus and other religious reformers. The 19°–30° culminate with the Degree of Knight Kadosh, a spiritual knighthood similar to the Knight Templar, and develop the Scottish Rite's myth of Masonic succession from crusading knights." 24
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. 26 This society regularly meets at the prestigious Army and Navy Club. 27
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: Morgan, Rockefeller, CFR, etc.
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 no biography has been written about here, plus a (much) smaller number we don't know about. Also, there are many other political institutes Pilgrims have been involved in that have been left out here for practical reasons. The IISS, the Atlantic Councils, the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Aspen Institute all are examples of this.
Note: The numbers in this oversight need heavy updating, due to the addition of hundreds of members. The conclusions remain the same though.
CFR members | 235 |
This means that about 18% of the US Pilgrims are CFR members. |
CFR executives | 47 |
About half of total leadership until late 1980s, including all four chairmen and all vice chairmen until at least 1991. All presidents until 1971, except Norman Davis. |
Rockefeller interests | 108 |
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Percy Avery Rockefeller, James Stillman Rockefeller, and William Rockefeller (d. 1990) all were members of the Pilgrims Society. The count here also includes executives from Rockefeller-controlled interests as Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank, and the foundations, as well as various inlaws. Not included are most of the board members of National City Bank, quietly controlled by the Rockefeller interests from 1891 under bank president James Stillman, a double Rockefeller inlaw through his daughters 28, until at least 1967 when James Stillman Rockefeller ceased being chairman of the bank. This is the bank where all the Rockefeller's Standard Oil profits were stashed, blowing up the bank to the largest in the country in record time. 29 Around 1910 the bank was an incredible powerhouse, with all the biggest financial interests on its board: William Rockefeller, Rockefeller inlaws James Stillman and Cyrus McCormick, Rockefeller-partner Henry Frick, Edward H. Harriman, Harriman-inlaw Cleveland Dodge, J. P. Morgan Jr., Jacob H. Schiff, Robert Lovett of Skull & Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman fame, Knight of Malta Joseph P. Grace, the father of J. Peter Grace; and Federal Reserve co-founder Frank Vanderlip. 30 Also not included are most directors of the (again, quietly) Rockefeller-controlled Equitable Trust in the 1919-1930 period 31, when it took over the Albert Wiggin's Chase National Bank (Wiggin was a Pilgrim), which at that point became a Rockefeller-controlled bank. 32 Carnegie and Rockefeller inlaw Winthrop Aldrich was the key overseer at Equitable Trust and Chase National Bank for the Rockefeller interests. 33 Also not included are all the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, even though this museum has been controlled by the Rockefellers for decades and as a result has been loaded with close Rockefeller friends and associates. |
Morgan interests | 105 |
Includes executives from all the different Morgan banks, trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and also family and close friends of the Morgans. J. P. Morgan, Sr., J. P. Morgan, Jr., Harry Morgan and Junius Morgan were all Pilgrims. |
United Nations posts | 84 |
Ambassadors or other representatives to the United Nations, including a number of founders. Also board members of the private UN Association. The League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, was also dominated by Pilgrims. |
Carnegie network | 53 |
Includes anyone associated with the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, and also family and close friends of the late Andrew Carnegie. The Carnegie Corporation gives huge research grants to virtually all the major universities in the United States and southern Africa. Andrew Carnegie was a member of the Pilgrims Society. |
Ditchley | 44 |
Mostly governors of either the American or British Ditchley Foundation. Ditchley is an important Anglo-American discussion group. |
Federal Reserve System | 33 |
The vast majority of these have been senior officers in the New York branch or the overall Federal Reserve Board. |
Trilateral Commission | 27 |
Didn't specifically look for this while putting together biographies, so there are probably more. |
Bilderberg | 26 |
Didn't specifically look for this while putting together biographies, However, many of the most important Pilgrims also tend to be important Bilderberg members. Bilderberg chairmen Lord Carrington and Lord Roll are among the Pilgrims. |
Foreign Policy Association | 24 |
Directors. |
Atlantic Institute of International Affairs | 11 |
Executive level members. There are likely quite a number more among the Pilgrims, as not that many names of the AIIA are known. The AIIA appears to be mainly a think tank for NATO, the OECD and European integration along the lines of Jean Monnet (who was sponsored by a clique of Pilgrims bankers). |
None of these institutes and big interests really should come as a surprise, as they have been talked about for decades in both "authoritative" and "less authoritative" media outlets. Let's provide a list of examples to see just how often these big interests have cropped up in history, despite the populations in the West not being taught about them in schoolbooks, or really on any regular basis in the media or politics:
- 1869-1877: As sourced in ISGP's article 'Managed Democracy', U.S. president Ulysses Grant and his secretary of state both were trustees of the Peabody Education Fund before being elected and appointed to these official positions. The Peabody Education Fund was the home of the Peabody-Morgan clan.
- 1897-1945: As structurally laid out in ISGP's article 'Managed Democracy', the Mckinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and FDR presidencies, including its senior ministers, all had important pre-existing ties to the Morgan and Rockefeller interests.
- 1901: At the time, Ian Tabell's McClure Magazine described J.P. Morgan, Sr.'s rise and influence as follows:
"In 1860, at the age of twenty-three, he became the American agent for George Peabody & Co., of London, and with that firm his experience began in the handling of large funds... In 1871, he formed ... Drexel, Morgan & Co. In 1895 Drexel, Morgan & Co. became J. P. Morgan & Co. ...
"Significant of the changing centers of the world’s money power is the fact that J. S. Morgan, the father, directed his banks from London, while J. Pierpont Morgan, the son, directs the larger system from New York. It was characteristic also that Morgan should have finally dominated every man and every firm with whom he came in contact; he must, by nature, be absolute dictator or nothing. ...
"He is a dominating influence in other banks and financial institutions, and a director never without much influence in twenty-one railroad companies... He is at present practically dictator of the vast steel interests of the country..." 34 - 1904: McClure Magazine series 'The History of the Standard Oil Company' (1904) prominently exposes the deceitful "robber baron" practices that John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s fortune was based upon.
- 1906: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. is held responsible for the Ludlow Massacre, involving a strike-breaking attempt on a tent colony of coal miners and their families.
- 1906-1911: An anti-trust lawsuit against the Rockefeller's Standard Oil began in 1906, followed by its breakup in 1911. Rockefeller Sr.'s wealth continued to increase for some time still, reaching a peak in 1913 with $900 million ($30 billion in 2024).
- 1912-1913: U.S. Congress' Pujo Committee exposes the existence of the "Money Trust" 35, consisting of Morgan, Rockefeller and banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb & Co., in this last case controlled by the Warburgs and Schiffs. More on the "Money Trust" in the next section.
- 1913: The "money trust" conspires at a Jekyll Island hideout to create the Federal Reserve System. The Rockefeller-Aldrich, Morgan, Schiff and Warburg families all were involved, directly and indirectly.
- 1914-1918: It's World War I, President Wilson allows the Morgan bank to have a virtual monopoly on Allied war supplies procurement in the United States, giving rise to acusations of war profiteering 36, apart from the fact that the Morgans and Rockefellers were allied in the National Security League to bring the U.S. into World War I on the side of the Entente / Allied forces.
- 1919: Morgan partners Thomas W. Lamont, a key advisor to President Woodrow Wilson; John W. Davis and Dwight Morrow attended and dominated the Versailles Peace Treaty from the American side. The Dulles brothers, young lawyers who grew up with the Rockefellers, were stationed at Versailles as well. This is discussed in a bit more detail in ISGP's International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) article. All these men also were Pilgrims.
- 1919: Largely through the Versailles proceedings, Rockefeller and Morgan agents are key founders of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), a pre-World War II Davos.
- 1921: The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is founded by agents and allies of Morgan, Rockefeller, Warburg and other banking houses.
- 1924: Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, chairman of the Pilgrims of the United States, writes a letter on February 8, 1924 in which he clearly identified the influence of the Morgans and Rockefellers:
"That bounder Charles Sherrill [who had been forced to resign as chairman of the Pilgrims]. By his tactlessness and indiscretion, he had queered himself with everybody, with the Government at Washington... with the British Embassy... as well as with the French Embassy, with the Morgans, the [Rockefeller's] Standard Oil people and all the big interests including the Chamber of Commerce of New York..." 37 - 1920s-early 1940s: Pilgrims Society-, CFR- and ICC-tied multinationals and banks are building up the fascist regimes of Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, and Hitler in Nazi Germany, all with the intent of crushing domestic labor unions and foreign Soviet communism. The Rockefeller's Standard Oil is deeply involved, with the House of Morgan providing a $100 million loan to Mussolini. Both ISGP's ICC article and this Pilgrims Society article discusses these events in a lot of detail.
- 1933-45: The socialist-inclined FDR is elected U.S. president. Back in the day he was tutelaged at the Groton School by the Morgan-Peabody clan. See ISGP's article 'Managed Democracy' for details and sources.
- 1939-40: Neil Vanderbilt, a son of Pilgrims executive Cornelius Vanderbilt III, noted how the likes of Morgan, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller, as well as New York high society in general, "often represented important forces or areas of influence", which in this case were looking to undermine the FDR reelection of 1940. 38
- 1940-41: The Morgans are continually attacked for being part of a campaign to bring the United States into World War II on the side of England.
- 1940-45: Specific measures are taken by the FDR administration to prevent letting "Morgan and DuPont men run the war" 39, as they had done during World War I.
- 1954: Bilderberg is founded, with David Rockefeller and a Paris-based member of the Morgan bank, Nelson Dean Jay, being involved.
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. Leaving the family free to maintain a significant interest in several of the new companies, it actually made John D. Rockefeller, Sr. the richest man on the planet, his fortune peaking in 1913 with $900 million ($30 billion in 2024). Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey) was the most important of these new oil companies and was dominated by the Rockefellers until at least the late 1980s. 40
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874-1960) continued to oversee his father's business and philanthropic interests. From at least 1908 he attended the occasional meeting of the Pilgrims Society, but wouldn't be a formal member until at least 1933. His cousin, Percy Avery Rockefeller, a son of Standard Oil co-founder William Rockefeller, Jr., was a member from 1914. David Joined the Pilgrims between 1945 and 1948. His brother Nelson only joined in the early 1970s.
As for the CFR, apart from playing a founding role through some of its agents, only in 1931 the Rockefeller family became directly involved in the CFR as members, this through John D. Rockefeller III. In 1938 Nelson Rockefeller became a member. In 1942 yet another brother of the then-emerging "Rockefeller Five" became a CFR member: David Rockefeller. David, in particular, became the face of globalism in the later decades, co-foundering Bilderberg in 1954, founding the Trilateral Commission in 1973, and becoming chair of the CFR from 1970 to 1985. The family, as a whole, also was involved in the founding of the United Nations in 1945.
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. THeir brother, Laurance, in his turn, was mainly focused on environmentalism and the new age aspects of globalism.
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.
Hulbert S. Aldrich | 1907-1995 |
Cousin of the Rockefellers. President of Greer School with Mrs. David Rockefeller (1942-1947). Vice chairman and a director the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company. |
Winthrop W. Aldrich | 1885-1974 |
Son of Sen. Nelson Aldrich, who aided in the founding of the Federal Reserve, and brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Advisor to the Rockefeller's Equitable Trust from 1919 on and later a president and chair of Chase National Bank. Early member CFR. Key player in the International Chamber of Commerce. |
Hoyt Ammidon | 1909-1988 |
Personal-investment manager for Vincent Astor in the 1950s. Chair U.S. Trust Co. Fellow Pierpont Morgan Library. His son became managing director of Chase Manhattan Investment Bank and shared a board with Peter C. Rockefeller. |
Kingman Brewster | 1919-1988 |
Special assistant in the governmental office of Nelson Rockefeller. Member CFR. Trustee Carnegie Endowment. |
Eli Whitney Debevoise | 1899-1990 |
Heir to the Rockefeller-Whitney Standard Oil fortune through his mother. Associate of Winthrop W. Aldrich, an uncle of Nelson Rockefeller. Trustee of Rockefeller University. Member CFR. |
C. Douglas Dillon | 1909-2003 |
Schoolmates had included Nelson, Laurance and John Rockefeller III. Director and later chair of Dillon, Read & Co. which financed the Nazis. Chairman Rockefeller Foundation. Board member Chase Manhattan Bank. Vice chair CFR. Associated with many other important people and institutions. |
John R. Drexel III | 1919-2007 |
The Drexel banker firm historically were partners of J.P. Morgan. The Astors, Aldriches and Rockefellers were among John Drexel's friends. John's son, John R. Drexel, IV, also became a Pilgrims executive. |
John W. Gardner | 1912-2002 |
Associate of Nelson Rockefeller. Director or advisor of Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller University. President of the Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Foundation. Member CFR. |
Thomas S. Gates | 1906-1983 |
CEO and chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Member CFR. |
S. Parker Gilbert | alive |
Son and godson of two J. P. Morgan partners who were early CFR members. Chairman of Morgan Stanley and trustee of the Morgan Library who still keeps a close eye on the traditional Morgan interests. CFR member. |
Alfred Hayes | d. 1989 |
Employee. National City Bank. Chair Morgan Stanley. Member CFR. |
Henry Kissinger | b. 1923 |
The undisputed number 1 in ISGP's Superclass Index. Decades-long close associate of David Rockefeller in groups as the CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and Le Cercle. He also used to be extremely close to Nelson Rockefeller. |
Robert V. Lindsay | b. 1926 |
Assistant vice president J.P. Morgan & Co. Chair Morgan Guarantee Trust. Director Americas Society. Member CFR. |
John M. Meyer, Jr. | d. 1996 |
Chair and CEO of J.P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Guaranty Trust. Member CFR. |
Henry S. Morgan | 1900-1982 |
A son of J.P. Morgan, Jr. Partner in J. P. Morgan & Co. and co-founder Morgan Stanley. Trustee of the Morgan Library. Early member CFR. OSS during WWII, together with his brother. |
Ellmore C. Patterson | 1913-2004 |
Married into the Choate family, which was intimately connected to the Rockefeller and Morgan interests, just as the Pilgrims. Chair J.P. Morgan & Co. Shared at least two boards with Laurance Rockefeller. Member CFR. |
Pulling, Thomas L. | alive |
Assistant treasurer J.P. Morgan & Co. Inc., New York City, 1962-1968. Retired as a managing director of Citigroup in 2006. |
Eben W. Pyne | 1917-2007 |
President and director of National City Trust and senior vice president National City Bank. |
William Rockefeller | 1918-1990 |
Son of William Avery Rockefeller and descendant of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Chair Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation. |
Dean Rusk | 1909-1994 |
Rhodes Scholar. President Rockefeller Foundation. Co-founder Club of Rome. CFR member. |
Paul Volcker | b. 1927 |
Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index and a decades-long close associate of David Rockefeller. Economist Chase Manhattan Bank 1957-1961, and vice president 1965-1968. Director Institute for International Economics with David Rockefeller, George Shultz, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, etc. Also: chair J. Rothschild, Wolfensohn & Co. 1992-1995. |
Warner, Miner | b. 1942 |
Vice president Salomon Brothers. Director Merrill Lynch. In the early 1990s on the advisory board of the Americas Society, which was founded by David Rockefeller. |
John C. Whitehead | alive |
Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index and a long-time friend of David Rockefeller. Director Rockefeller University. |
John Hay Whitney | 1904-1982 |
Brother-in-law of Vincent Astor. Worked on inter-American cooperation with Nelson Rockefeller during WWII. Chair of the Museum of Modern Art, which has a very strong Rockefeller influence. Trustee Carnegie Foundation. |
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 also are quite strongly represented among the recent Pilgrims leadership, just as most of the other think tanks listed earlier in this paragraph.
1912-1913: The "Money Trust": Morgan, Rockefeller, Warburg, Schiff
In the previous section we briefly mentioned that in 1912 and 1913 the U.S. Congress' Pujo Committee exposed the existence of the "Money Trust", consisting of the Morgan and Rockefeller interests, as well as banking houses as Kuhn, Loeb & Co., in this last case controlled by the Warburgs and Schiffs. A summarizing section of the 1913 Pujo Committee's report read as follows:
- J. P. Morgan & Co.*
- First National Bank of New York.*
- National City Bank of New York.
- Lee, Higginson & Co., of Boston and New York.
- Kidder, Peabody & Co., of Boston and New York.
- Kuhn, Loeb & Co. ...
"Besides the group composed of Morgan & Co. and the First National Bank and the National City Bank, the principal banking agencies through which the greater corporate enterprises of the United States obtain capital for their operations are the international banking firms of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., of New York, and Kidder, Peabody & Co. and Lee Higginson & Co., of Boston and New York.
"While it does not appear that these three last-named houses are affiliated with the group consisting of the first three in so definite and permanent a form of alliance as that existing between the latter, it is established that as issuing houses they do not as a rule act independent in purchasing security issues but rather in unison and cooperation with one or more members of that group, with the result that in the vastly important service of arranging credits for the great commercial enterprises of the country there is no competition or rivalty between those dominating that field, but virtually a monopoly the terms of which the borrowing corporations must accept.
"The full extent to which they participate in one another's issues does not appear, owing to the absence of data as to the names of underwriters..." 41
First National Bank was ran and majority-owned by Morgan agent George Baker. Its second largest stockholder was J.P. Morgan & Co., with J. P. Morgan himself and fellow Morgan partners Thomas W. Lamont and Henry P. Davison all on the board at the time of the Pujo Committee investigation. 42 As stated above, the Morgan family also controlled Guaranty Trust and Bankers Trust, "the first and second largest trust companies in the United States." 43
At the time of the Pujo Committee, J.P. Morgan, Jr. was on the board of National City Bank 44, but the Morgans did not control the bank. As discussed and sourced in the previous section, National City was semi-secretly controlled by the Rockefellers, who blew up the bank's size from 1891 on by stashing its Standard Oil profits there. William Rockefeller, Rockefeller inlaws James Stillman and Cyrus McCormick, Rockefeller-partner Henry Frick, Edward H. Harriman, Harriman-inlaw Cleveland Dodge, J. P. Morgan Jr., Jacob H. Schiff, Robert Lovett of Skull & Bones and Brown Brothers Harriman fame, Knight of Malta Joseph P. Grace, the father of J. Peter Grace; were among the directors around the time of the Pujo Committee. 45
The earlier-cited United Press International press release of December 18, 1912 only focused on a Pujo Committee presentation discussing the Morgan influence. At that point William Rockefeller, Jr. had been subpoenaed by the committee as well 46, and scheduled to appear on January 13, predominantly to answer questions about his role in the 1907 Bankers' Panic. 47 Rockefeller refused to testify though. Only on January 4, 1913, with 40 members of Congress' security wing and Pinkerton detectives camping outside his house 48, did his lawyers acknowledge the subpoena. 49 Claiming to be too ill to testify 50, Rockefeller left for sunny Palm Beach on January 13, the day he was supposed to testify. By that time the Pujo Committee already had lost hope that they could force Rockefeller to testify. 51 He never did, but only died 9.5 years later, in 1922, at age 81.
When we read the Pujo Committee's report, released on February 28, 1913, we see that "Morgan" appears on 57 different pages. In contrast, Rockefeller only is mentioned on pages 72 to 74 with regard to various boards of directors of banks and corporations. That's it. There's not even a mention how he weasled himself out of testifying. The family's dominant influence in National City Bank was known though at the time 52, so a bit more history would have been welcome.
Jacob Schiff, Mortimer Schiff, Otto Kahn, Paul and Felix Warburg all are mentioned as partners in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in the Pujo Committee's report, as are some of these partners' additional directorships. 53 There's not really any investigation though how well all these elite members of society knew one other though, for example through the Pilgrims Society the board of the Museum of Natural History. No questions were asked about this.
All these names belonged to the "money trust" though; not just the Morgans.
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:
Sir Evelyn Baring: | J.P. Morgan, IMF, World Bank, IBM. | |
Laurence John Cadbury: | Cadbury Bros, Eugenics Society. | |
Lord Thomas Catto: | Morgan Grenfell, Royal Bank of Scotland. | |
Lord Cameron Cobbold: | Hudson's Bay Company, BP, Chemical Bank. | |
Sir Patrick Cooper: | Hudson's Bay Company. | |
Sir Andrew Rae Duncan: | Imperial Chemical Industries. | |
Edward C. Grenfell: | Morgan Grenfell. | |
Baron Brian Griffiths: | Goldman Sachs. | |
Sir Charles Hambro: | Hambros Bank. | |
Sir William Keswick: | Jardine Matheson and Hudson's Bay Company. | |
Sir John Keswick: | Jardine Matheson and Hudson's Bay Company. | |
Lord Robert Kindersley: | Lazard. | |
Lord Hugh Kindersley: | Lazard, Rolls Royce. | |
Sir Maurice Henry Parsons: | IMF. | |
Lord R. Leigh-Pemberton: | National Westminster Bank. | |
Sir James Pitman: | - | |
Lord Roll (the Court): | Warburg, Kissinger Associates. | |
Sir David Walker: | Lloyds Bank, Morgan Stanley, Reuters. |
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:
3rd Marquess of Salisbury | Member of a prominent Pilgrims Society family. Co-founder and first chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1920 |
Waldorf Astor | 1950 list. Chairman of the Royal Institute for International Affairs from 1935 to 1949 and had helped to establish it in 1920. |
Sir Henry Philip Price | Co-founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. |
Sir John Wheeler-Bennett | Information Secretary RIIA 1927-1931 and council member 1930-1938 and 1959-1967. |
Sir Roderick Jones | Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs around the 1940s and 1950s. |
Christopher Woodhouse | Both his father and older brother were Pilgrims. Director general of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1952 to 1955. Primary British organiser 1953 coup in Iran. |
Sir Duncan Oppenheim | Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1966 to 1970. |
Lord Humphrey Trevelyan | Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1970 to 1977. |
Sir David Ormsby-Gore | Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1978 to 1984. |
Lord Greenhill | Chaired some of the meetings of the Royal Institute of International Affairs back in the 1970s. |
Lord Shackleton | Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1980 to 1986. |
Lord Gordon Richardson | In early 1984 The Times named Lord Richardson as the soon-to-be-appointed chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Can't tell if he was actually appointed. |
Lord Carrington | Long-time president of the Pilgrims Society. Member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. |
Sir Frank Roberts | Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs somewhere in the 1970s. |
Sir John Birch | Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1997 to 2003. |
Lord Paddy Ashdown | One of today's three presidents of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. |
Lord George Robertson | Another one of today's three presidents of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Previously he was on RIIA governing council for seven years. |
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.
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:
"It's good to have an outpost of the council right here down in the street of the State Department. We get a lot of advise from the council, so this will mean I don't have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future." 54
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. Whilenever 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. 55 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.
A 1990 membership list also reveals name of Donald Rumsefeld, secretary of defense from 1975 to 1977 under Gerald Ford and then under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006. Despite his neocon affiliations, Rumsfeld also has endless ties to the Eastern Establishment and its NGO network. He swings both ways.
Equally surprising, Reagan's secretary of defense from 1981 to 1987, Caspar Weinberger, was a Pilgrims Society executive. 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, another individual who is both a Rockefeller liberal elitist as a neocon.
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 (his older brother became a Pilgrim), Bush's vice presidential national security advisor Donald Gregg (Pilgrims), chief of staff James Baker (not a Pilgrim), early secretary of state Alexander Haig (Pilgrims executive and vice president), secretary of state George Shultz (Pilgrim), Shultz' deputy John Whitehead (Pilgrims vice president) 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 56 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. 57 It could be a coincidence, but the ties are there and definitely a correction in foreign policy was made.
ISGP investigates the neocon ties of the supposedly liberal Eastern Establishment in a little more detail in Part III.
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. In 2007 she was a founding director of the Center for New American Security (CNAS), a group filled to the brim with superclass members that have been part of past and future presidential administrations. Madeleine Albright was another founding director of CNAS.
Rice left CNAS and 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.
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. 58
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 59 - 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 relentlessly, trying to find solid evidence of his wheeling and dealing. [37] 60 Incredibly, even Dulles' son used to say, "My father was Nazi spy" until he received his "anti-paranoia medication". 61
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." 62 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 appointment 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. 63
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 Bernhard, 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 64, 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. 65 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. 66
- 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. 67 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. 68 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. 69 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. 70 - 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 1973, by General Pinochet. This time the coup had been 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. 71 As discussed in a chapter of ISGP's "liberal CIA" article, in 1970, David Rockefeller also brought the owner of Chile's dominant newspaper, El Mercurio, into the fold of the CIA and Henry Kissinger's 40 Committee. At a later stage, the Rockefeller "Chicago boys" under Milton Friedman introduced neoliberal "shock therapy" to Chile under Pinochet.
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. 72 The same Rockefeller clique had also been able to temporarily dump the Shah in the Bahamas at Resorts International, a gambling and tourism resort. 73 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 74, the CIA's largest defense-related contractor in the 1960s and 1970s. 75 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. 76
- 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, in the same period that 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. 77 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". 78 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, Dillon, 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:
"At issue in the ABC situation in particular is an extraordinary story overlooked by most of the press and never taken up by congressional investigators: Who actually took over ABC when Capital Cities Communications bought it in March 1985? ... The CIA challenged ABC’s right to retain its broadcasting licenses just before Cap Cities bought out the company and during the period it was negotiating for the purchase. This attack had the result of driving down the price of ABC stock on the public market. In the Iran-Contragate aftermath, with some of the manipulations this administration and William Casey are wont to engage in becoming known, the Cap Cities-ABC deal and Casey’s possible role in it have to be considered high on the curiosity list of unexplored events of the last couple of years. For with the Cap Cities takeover, one of the three primary influences on America’s public consciousness was delivered into the hands of a company that may well have its own agenda. ...
"NBC is the most obvious case of just such a potentially political takeover. Until last year, NBC was owned by [Pilgrims-linked] RCA, whose other interests included consumer electronics, a record label, broadcast equipment and a fair amount of military electronics. Then RCA was acquired by [the very strongly Pilgrims-linked] General Electric (GE), an even larger defense contractor. The new GE, containing RCA, is one of the largest, if not the largest, military suppliers in the world. This led Ted Turner [a close friend of superclass members David Rockefeller, Maurice Strong, etc.] to deplore the acquisition because he felt NBC News would have a vested interest in perpetuating the arms race. Turner's Cable News Network, of course, competes with NBC News. However, Turner donates much of his time, his money and his cable "superstation's" prime time to agitating against nuclear escalation." 79
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 Establishment John Birchers). Just to provide a more complete discussion of the CIA here, here are the biographies of the remaining CIA directors:
James Schlesinger Feb. 1973 – Jul. 1973 |
BA, MA and Ph.D. from Pilgrims-dominated Harvard. At the Rand Corporation 1963-1969, a West Coast think tank with some historical Eastern Establishment ties through the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and about 10-15 percent of its trustees. 80 However, also many conservatives/neocons as Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Perle and Schlesinger could be found at Rand. At Rand Schlesinger became known and notorious for suggesting nuclear war strategies that would potentially make these wars winnable without the mass targeting of cities. Assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget (Office of Management and Budget (OMB)) 1969-1971. In part this was under future Pilgrim George Shultz, who was OMB director from July 1970 to June 1971, followed up by future Pilgrims executive Caspar Weinberger. In March 1971, Shultz and Schlesinger communicated an intelligence reform study to Nixon's national security advisor and future Pilgrim Henry Kissinger. This suggestion went through deputy national security advisor and future Pilgrims executive Alexander Haig, who wrote to Kissinger: "I agree with you that Jim Schlesinger might be an ideal person to work directly for the President and you in implementing this package. ... It is likely that you will have the PFIAB against you, the military, the entire Intelligence Community and a full array of Congressional opponents." 81
In February 1973 Nixon appointed Schlesinger CIA director and instructed him: "The CIA, like the State Department, is basically a liberal establishment bureaucracy. I want the personnel there cut ... at least by 35 to 40 percent and I want a definite improvement in so far as attitudes of those in CIA with regard to our foreign policy. There are some very good men there, but the great majority are the old Georgetown crowd." 82
Schlesinger and Nixon were of the (correct) opinion that the CIA was massively underestimating the Soviet defense budget and that the Agency was rife with waste due to an old boys network of mainly covert operators. In his 17 weeks as CIA director, Schlesinger fired about 500 CIA analysts and 1,000 covert operatives. He ordered all senior CIA officers to inform him on every CIA operation ever devised, especially those that fell out of the Agency's charter, culminating in the so-called CIA "Family Jewels". After receiving death threats, he added armed guards to his detail. |
William Colby Sep. 1973 – Jan. 1976 |
In July 1973 Nixon made Schlesinger secretary of defense, leaving his chief assistant William Colby to become the new CIA director. Colby had earlier been one of two recommendations by Helms to Nixon as his successor. 83 In contrast to Helms, Colby was considered by Nixon and Schlesinger as being reliable enough to go along with the administration's agenda and not make too many waves. By the time Colby was appointed the official head of the CIA, Nixon had stepped down as president, with vice president Gerald Ford taking over until the new elections of 1976. Ford, who earlier helped cover up the JFK assassination as a member of the Warren Commission, along with Pilgrims John McCloy and Allen Dulles, appointed their mutual friend and Pilgrim Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president. After a December 21, 1974 expose in the Pilgrims-dominated New York Times by Seymour Hersh about past illegal CIA experiments and domestic operations 84, Ford sets up the so-called Rockefeller Commission, headed by his new vice president. Rockefeller and Ford are instrumental in keeping crucial documents out of the hands of the subsequent Church Committee in Senate and the Pike Committee in Congress, which not only investigate illegal domestic CIA, FBI and NSA activities such as the undermining of anti-war movements (MHCHAOS) and Watergate, but also CIA activities as coups, assassinations, the Project Phoenix death squads, mind control programs (MKULTRA), Mockingbird (CIA domestic media infiltration) and the John F. Kennedy assassination. The latter becomes a huge public controversy with the first public showing of the Zapruder film. In September 1976 the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) is set up specifically to look into the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Colby's term as CIA director from September 1973 to January 1976 was one of the most impossible periods ever to be holding this position. Congressional investigations, new media exposes and public criticism involving the CIA were constant. Helms and his supporters never forgave Colby for caving in to pressure that led to a conviction for perjury of Helms about having lied to Congress in 1973 about the CIA's role in the overthrow of Salvador Allede in Chile. 85 Another (seemingly somewhat reluctant) admission from Colby led to the exposure that from 1969 to 1976 Kissinger was chairman of the 40 Committee 86, an unacknowledged government body that controlled CIA coups and other sensitive special operations. 87 Both Kissinger and his mentor Nelson Rockefeller had experience with earlier incarnations of this "Special Group". More on that later. Of course, a key question of this section is: was Colby Eastern Establishment? It appears so, because Colby received his Ph.D. from Princeton University, one of three key Pilgrims Society universities, Harvard and Yale being the other two. And he was a protege of Helms. Turns out, Colby's son, Jonathan; and grandson, Elbridge, became "made" members of the establishment. Both appeared in Pilgrims Society membership lists of later decades, Jonathan in the early 1990s and Elbridge in the 2010s. Looking at the bio of Jonathan in particular one wonders how deep the feud of Colby with Kissinger and Helms really went. During the Nixon administration (1969-1974) Jonathan actually worked as a National Security Council staffer for Henry Kissinger. Talk about keeping the secrets indoors. In later decades, Jonathan worked for Coudert Brothers, a law firm named after a major Pilgrims family; then as a general partner of the super-elite Blackstone Group of Pilgrims Peter Petersen and Sir Henry Grierson. Blackstone maintains a "strategic alliance" with Kissinger Associates and held the lease on WTC 7. Since 1998 Jonathan has been working as a managing director of the Carlyle Group, at that point still ran by top CIA veterans Frank Carlucci and George H. W. Bush. At the same time Jonathan has been involved in various elite think tanks, including the CFR, IISS, Carnegie Council and IISS. In other words, he has been operating as close to the inner core of the David Rockefeller clique as possible. Colby's grandson has been involved in the IISS, the Rand Corporation and countless sensitive intelligence and DOD assignments. Bizarrely, in 2011 he and Jonathan ended up in a public dispute with another son of William Colby, Carl, about a documentary the latter produced in which he put his father away as a mass murderer (Phoenix Program) who eventually, in 1996, committed suicide. In the documentary Kissinger protege Brent Scowcroft calls Colby a "tortured soul", adding weight to the suicide theory. In the Washington Post Jonathan and Elbridge countered that William Colby wasn't that bad of an individual and also that his death was an accident. What is strange here is that Jonathan and Elbridge happily mentioned all the anomalies associated with Colby's death - pointing to a potential assassination - without providing a clear explanation for them. |
George H. W. Bush Jan. 1976 - Jan. 1977 |
Bush has already been mentioned. The New York banking history of the Bush clan through Pilgrims-dominated banks as Brown Brothers Harriman, Dillon, Read & Co. and the Union Banking Corporation is well-known, as well as the family's close ties to Yale and Skull & Bones. However, the key family member here, Prescott Bush, apparently never was a member of the Pilgrims Society, despite the fact that many of his friends in banking were. At the CIA Bush was a reliable "old boy" of the Helms faction, while Carter was strongly opposed to U.S. support of death squads and military dictators around the world. Bush provided Carter with three hours-long intelligence briefings when the latter was a presidential candidate and then the president-elect. 88 Carter replaced Bush as CIA director as soon as he came into office. |
Adm. Stansfield Turner March 1977 - January 1981 |
For the CIA directorship Carter picked an old Naval Academy classmate of his, Admiral Stansfield Turner. 89 While Carter was groomed by the Trilateral Commission of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski 90, Turner graduated from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Thus both men clearly had an Eastern Establishment background. In later decades Carter became a major member of the NGO superclass network. Turner, on the other hand, largely faded into obscurity. When Carter appointed Turner the director of Central Intelligence, public skepticism of the CIA still was at an all-time high. It wasn't until 1978, for example, that the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA) published its finding on potential CIA involvement in the death of John F. Kennedy. In recent years even Turner made his establishment background clear during an interview with Ali G., who asked him if there had been a conspiracy with the death of John F. Kennedy. Turner answered: "My understanding of Oliver Stone's movie JFK is that there was a conspiracy of one of my predecessors and the whole captain of the United States to murder the president of the United States and it's absolutely nonsense." |
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?
This entire section has been turned into its own vastly expanded 'Managed Democracy' article. Instead of just looking at the Pilgrims, we look at pre-existing ties to the Morgans and Rockefellers in particular, depending on the era, including Rockefeller-dominated groups as the CFR, Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission. The conclusion is that Democrat, Republican and Independent presidential candidates and cabinet members always have had ties to a tiny handful of elite individuals and think tanks.
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 conferences, 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 versus 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, later Bechtel employees as George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger; Richard Helms, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski - all individuals who have been mentioned or discussed already to an extent, primarily in the chapter Early CIA ties, the "Company" and corporate coups. We should recap these ties and even dig a little deeper, because especially with regard to the Rockefeller family, the CIA ties discussed until this point have been 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 primarily 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.
The oldest of the three Rockefeller brothers singled out here, Nelson, born in 1908, maintained very interesting and very elite intelligence ties that go back to even before World War II. Even anno 2017, this hyper-obscure detail only appears in a 1987 biography on Sir Stewart Menzies, the SIS/MI6 chief from 1939 until 1952. In existence in New York City in the 1930s was an elite club called "The Room", whose members "believed that an Anglo-American understanding was fundamental to the containment and perhaps the liquidation of bolshevism." Pilgrims Society member Vincent Astor (full family bloodline here), a neighbor and private spymaster of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 91, is the one who largely initiated the founding of this group. Members included fellow-Pilgrims Society members Nelson Rockefeller, Winthrop Aldrich and soon-to-be London OSS chief David Bruce; as well as non-Pilgrims Kermit Roosevelt, a future big oil coup plotter for the CIA; OSS founder William Donovan; and a number of other establishmentarians. Sir William Wiseman, a former British SIS/MI6 chief in New York who had joined the Kuhn, Loeb banking house as a partner, served as the primary liaison of this group with with British intelligence in the run up to and during World War II. As far as the information goes, this club, which "essentially [acted as] a private intelligence service that worked in collaboration with the British secret service", went over into the equally secretive Walrus Club by the late 1930s or early 1940s. 92
While little detail is known, this information clearly reveals that names as Astor and Rockefeller were intimately involved in Anglo-American intelligence operations at the highest level since even before the OSS and CIA were founded.
Post-World War II, 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. 93 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. 94
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 95 and even Eisenhower's secretary of state John Foster Dulles. 96 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. 97
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. 98 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 Rockefeller, 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. At least some of this work was accomplished in coordination with the CIA. Take Joseph Retinger, the official primary founder of Bilderberg in 1954. Previously, in 1948, he and Winston Churchill set up the European Movement with the very similar purpose of uniting the European continent against the Soviet Union. From the very beginning the European Movement was financed by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and CIA, mainly through an outfit called the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). 99 As it so happens, the ACUE was founded and stacked by a board consisting of CIA directors, establishment CIA assets and employees and close personal friends of the Rockefellers. One of them, John McCloy, also served as trustee and later chairman of the Ford Foundation. 100 When Retinger founded Bilderberg, he first called on the support of this exact same group of men. 101 He had been doing so since at least 1946, when he set up his European League for Economic Cooperation (ELEC); Pilgrims as J.P. Morgan partner Russell Leffingwell, Nelson and David Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan and George Franklin all approved of it beforehand. So did Sir William Wiseman 102, largely bringing us back to the pre-World War II Anglo-American intelligence network of "The Room" and the Walrus Club. Parallel to this, this very same network of individuals set up domestic groups for the CIA to work through, the most notable example probably being the Crusade for Freedom 103, which would later serve as one of many "superclass CIA" links to the JFK assassination.
Now that we're dabbling in the slightly less legitimate aspects of the "superclass CIA", in a previous chapter it was already discussed that on occasion David Rockefeller and friends would lobby the U.S. government for an invasion (Vietnam) or the overthrow of an emerging Third World democracy (Chile). This type of activity makes all the sense in the world when we consider the words of high-level CIA official and reported Richard Helms friend Thomas Braden 104, who explained that David's ties to the CIA were "much, much, much closer" than Nelson's:
"[David Rockefeller] was a friend and confidant of Allen Dulles, and in some instances furnished a [CIA] front [group] ... I remember briefing him, in great detail, about the work of the division that I headed in the CIA. Allen asked me to brief him, and I gave him a full briefing, so that he knew everything that I was doing. And I think he did it with the other division chiefs, too. He was close to intelligence work — much, much, much closer than Nelson was." 105
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 (Pilgrims). 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. 106
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. 107
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, Gore Vidal and Richard Falk as senior scholars, the latter two soon-to-be 9/11 skeptics of the no-757-at-Pentagon kind - while the former became an equally irrational opponent of all conspiracy thinking surrounding JFK and 9/11.
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 handed Dulles the CIA directorship, so that was that. 108
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." 109 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. 110 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. 111
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. 112
On a side note, it might be interesting to mention that an otherwise pro-big business Stephen Bechtel, Sr. served on the board of trustees of the "liberal CIA", "new left" Ford Foundation from 1961 to 1970, the first three years under chairman and Rockefeller man John McCloy. And that Ford Foundation trustees as Henry Ford II, Robert McNamara and the Bechtels all ended up in the elite and secretive 1001 Club, alongside the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and royal houses of Europe. It should be clear that the Bechtels were very much on the inside.
As for Henry 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. 113 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. 114 As mentioned in a previous chapter, in 1970 David Rockefeller put Kissinger in touch with the El Mercurio newspaper owner, which became a key conduit for CIA propaganda in Chile that brought Pinochet to power in 1973. He is known to have been in the loop of the CIA-ran fascist-terrorist P2 Lodge115, making 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. 116 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, and Gerald Ford and his vice president Nelson Rockefeller losing the 1976 election to Jimmy Carter, effecitively put a stop to Kissinger's 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. 117 While rumors about this were already floating around, 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. 118
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. 119 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. 120 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. 121 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. 122 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 123, was invited to the Trilateral Commission 124, ran a successful law firm that represented numerous establishment corporations, more than a few with CIA ties 125; used Saudi money to get the Pilgrims-tied former CIA director Richard Helms off the hook for perjury in the 1970s 126, 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. 127
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. 128 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 129, 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 130 and General Colin Powell, an old associate of the Bush family and Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Knights of Malta-affiliated NGO AmeriCares 131, at the Forum For International Policy (FFIP), along with former CIA directors John Deutch and Robert Gates. 132 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. 133 Meanwhile, Rockefeller men as Kissinger, Brzezinski and Shultz continued to serve various administrations, including Bush, in independent advisory roles. 134 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. In 1965 David hired John D. Philipsborn to Chase Manhattan. Philipsborn went on to play a key role in building up Chase's European arm, retiring in 1997. From 1991 until his death he was a member of the Pilgrims of Great Britain. Philipsborn came from a wealthy family. In 1945 he briefly served as General Dwight Eisenhower's personal pilot. From 1958 to 1963, shortly before starting his career at Chase at the invitation of David Rockefeller, Philipsborn served as "first secretary" in Paris, in reality being a leading CIA agent who was in touch with the murderous fascist terrorist AOS group that attempted a coup on De Gaulle and tried to continue the French-Algerian colonial war. This episode is briefly discussed in ISGP's Cercle article.
Then there was 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. Paley 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. 135 Executive secretary of MoMa in 1949 was Tom Braden, who later headed the CIA's International Organisations Division with responsibility for Mockingbird. 136 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. 137 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 138, was equally linked to the CIA. 139 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. 140
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 1963 he followed up David 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 141 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. 142
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. 143 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. 144
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:
"We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device." 145
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. 146 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. 147 Abstract expressionist art fits 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 onto 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 all were 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, foundations and personal relationships. As for David Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller's Pilgrims Society friends with clear CIA ties, we have:
- Vincent Astor
- Brooke Astor*
- Alice Astor*
- 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*
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 the managing of fringe new age networks
We actually haven't yet discussed the above-listed names accompanied by an asterisk (*). That is what we'll do here.
As mentioned at the very beginning of the previous chapter, Vincent Astor's widow, Brooke Astor, maintained a life-long close friendship with Laurance Rockefeller, to the point that people began to think the two had an affair. From about 1990, Brooke Astor also grew very close to David Rockefeller, but she had known him very well since 1958 when Winthrop Aldrich took the Astors, his nephew David Rockefeller and others on a boat trip. She also knew Nelson Rockefeller very well. 149
The thing with Laurance Rockefeller is that he has been a key financier of new age, alien abduction, and other UFO disinformation throughout the Cold War and beyond. The ties to CIA directors and other top-level government officials maintained by his brothers David and Nelson, which go back to secret pre-World War II "The Room" network of Vincent Astor (and Winthrop Aldrich), undoubtedly played a key role in how these "alternative media" disinformation networks were built. Laurance wasn't alone either. He built this network in coordination with employees and assets of the CIA, AFOSI and DIA, as well as other elite CIA-linked families as the Bechtels and Von Liechtensteins. All this is discussed in detail in ISGP's article Cult of National Security Trolls: Art Bell and Coast to Coast AM.
While there's little information about Brooke Astor in relation to these adventures, it is known that her sister-in-law, Alice Astor, the sister of the late Vincent Astor, was involved in the exact same new age disinformation network that Laurance Rockefeller was involved in. In the 1950s she participated in Round Table Foundation sessions of suspected MKULTRA participant Colonel Andrija Puharich that supposedly involved the channelling of the Ennead gods of Ancient Egypt. Puharich later became involved in the Bechtel-dominated (with their Bohemian Grove and 1001 Club friends) Stanford Research Institute, when he brought bogus psychic and top Mossad asset Uri Geller over to the United States; the Laurance Rockefeller-influenced Esalen Institute, and eventually retired on an estate of R.J. "Josh" Reynolds III, a tobacco fortune heir whose family also stood at the basis of the Rockefeller-allied "liberal CIA" Arca and Tides foundations. A cousin and a number of company directors of Reynolds were involved in the Pilgrims Society.
Another participant with Alice Astor and Andrija Puharich in the Ennead channelling sessions, Round Table chairman Arthur M. Young, later set up the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness and the related Institute for the Study of Consciousness, which both greatly overlapped with Esalen and SRI. With that, Young stood at the basis of Robert Temple's bogus space aliens and Sirius theories in relation to the beliefs of the African Dogon tribe. At the same time he was the stepfather and employer of Michael Paine, who at one point was introduced to Lee Harvey Oswald, along with their respective wives, by CIA asset and Oswald handler Georges de Mohrenschildt. If that's not enough strangeness, Young's wife, a heir to the wealthy Forbes steel fortune who helped him set up his consciousness-focused institute, and her former husband, Lyman Paine, used to be close friends of Mary Bancroft, the long-time lover of CIA director, Pilgrims executive and close Rockefeller friend Allen Dulles. This latest set of bizarre assocations is primarily discussed in ISGP's article on the John F. Kennedy assassination.
Another Pilgrim and close Rockefeller ally (in bringing the Shah of Iran to the U.S.) who became deeply involved in disinformative UFO research in the 1980s and 1990s was Senator Claiborne Pell. UFO researcher C. B. Scott Jones, who ran the Laurance Rockefeller and Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein-financed Human Potential Foundation, used to be a staffer in Pell's office. The Pell family also was the main U.S. liaison of the princely Liechtenstein family. Those familiar with the UFO scene might be aware that Prince Hans Adam II von Liechtenstein financed the apocalyptic alien abduction "research" of Budd Hopkins while Laurance Rockefeller financed the work of the more optimistic John Mack, a person Laurance first met through the Esalen Institute network. Meanwhile, Hopkins received income from the Rockefellers, because his art was exhibited at their Museum of Modern Art, as well as the equally CIA-tied Whitney Museum. Von Liechtenstein is also known to have invited con artist Dr. Steven Greer - himself backed by Laurance Rockefeller - to a private meeting at one point. And so there are many more ties.
Interestingly, the Liechtenstein royal family, including Hans Adam, was invited to the 1001 Club, along with David and Laurance Rockefeller, Maurice Strong, the Bechtels and Prince Philip of Great Britain, all of whom known for having backed con artists that ended up becoming superstars through major book contracts and radio shows as Coast to Coast AM. We find these and other names in the overlapping Pilgrims Society group as well: Astor, Pell, Reynolds, Rockefeller, Bechtel (through key employees George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger), Prince Philip, Maxwell Rabb, James Woolsey (speaker). There's a good chance that the Clintons, prime movers, along with John Podesta, behind the Rockefeller UFO Initiative, have been involved in the Pilgrims as well. Greer stated to have interacted with an influential person who mentioned an interest in UFO-related matters by the Rothschilds, who have been involved in both the Pilgrims and the 1001 Club; and the Pilgrim Peter Peterson.
More recently I read in the journals of Jacques Vallee that senior researchers and executives of IBM were deeply interested in UFO research. IBM has been owned by the Watson family, generational members of the Pilgrims Society who also enjoyed membership in the 1001 Club. In those same journals George Vila, an alleged Pilgrim, was mentioned as an enthusiastic supporter of Vallee. Vallee also writes about attending an "exclusive UFO study group assembled in Silicon Valley" in 1986 that no one has ever heard about before or since. The group included John W. Hanes II, a former assistant to Rockefeller man John McCloy and then to Rockefeller friend John Foster Dulles - both Pilgrims. Hanes' father was a Pilgrim, while he himself, apart from being a man with overt and covert CIA ties, was invited to the 1001 Club.
In this regard we might also mention that in the mid 1960s the Harvard psychedelic clique of Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. Richard Alpert, Ralph Metzner and friends as Alan Watts found refuge at a giant estate of Richard Mellon "Billy" Hitchcock, a heir of the powerful Mellon family, after they were booted from Harvard. It allowed these men to write one of their most crucial books, continue their experimentation with LSD and other psychedelics, and to quite literally help spawn the hippie movement. Members of the Hitchcock and Mellon families belonged to the Pilgrims. The Mellon family is the well-known, of course, also for its ties to the OSS, CIA and certainly through David Bruce, who married a sister of Pilgrim and 1001 Club member Paul Mellon, also to the pre-World War II intelligence network of "The Room" and Walrus Club.
Gordon Wasson, who published his groundbreaking article on magic mushrooms in Henry Luce's Life magazine in May 1957 and became an ally of the Leary group, also maintained his elite connections. Henry Luce was a Pilgrim. Henry Luce III became president of the Pilgrims. Gordon Wasson was friendly with Pilgrims executive and CIA director Allen Dulles throughout the 1950s and 1960. He also was a long-time member of the Century Association, along with the Dulles brothers, Rockefeller brothers, and other Pilgrims Society elitists. In no-time Colonel Andrija Puharich, also with CIA backing, went down to the same Latin American shaman that Wasson had visited and began to run his own set of psychedelic experiments at the Round Table Foundation. Alice Astor, Arthur Young, Aldous Huxley and future pyramids-on-Mars pusher and Coast to Coast AM guest J.J. Hurtak all were in attendance of these experiments.
There are quite a few other such examples to be found, among them the fact that psychedelics pioneer Aldous Huxley, an associate of the Leary group, Wasson and Puharich, played a key role in the founding of the earlier-mentioned Esalen Institute, which from the very beginning was joined by about every psychedelics pioneer of some standing. Laurance Rockefeller became a key influence at Esalen and in later decades this network produced more than a few new age, conspiracy and alien abduction disinformation pushers whose works remain prominent to this day.
Notice a pattern here? Without going any deeper into this matter in this article, it seems rather clear that various early CIA directors, most notably Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, have made use of wealthy establishment families to run some of the most secretive and long-term CIA disinformation operations through, most notably the cultivating and maintaning of fringe new age, UFO and, to a lesser degree (as far as the evidence goes), conspiracy networks. The evidence is clear on that, yet there has never been one single news report about it. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
We see a similar trend in ultraright NGOs, but that is for another article.
What about the "new left", "liberal CIA" network?
Standing across from the neocons is the rather extensive "new left" network of foundations, media and action groups that ISGP has detailed in a separate "liberal CIA" article. At its core this network has foundations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Foundations (of George Soros), the MacArthur Foundation, the Bill Gates Foundation, the Omidyar Network, the Packard Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and a few dozen others. These foundations, together worth approximately $150 billion anno 2017, has been funding a network of thousands of non-profit groups, including well-known alternative media outlets and groups involved in organizing protests against right-wing presidents and prime ministers throughout the West, especially over immigration and global warming issues.
What might be interesting to mention is that the owners and leaders of these foundations hardly feature in the Pilgrims Society membership. Considering this author now has now acquired full Pilgrims Society membership lists from the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, this conclusion can now be drawn with a pretty decent degree of certainty.
Part of this undoubtedly has to do with the fact that many fortunes these foundations were built on aren't located in New York City. For example, a major driving force behind "new left" Democrat thinking, apart from George Soros and the ever-present Rockefeller family, are Hollywood and especially Silicon Valley: billionaires as Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Google and Apple. None of these individuals have a traditional Eastern Establishment background or even reside in New York City, so there's not too much chance of them getting a Pilgrims Society invitation.
Also, what we find in the Pilgrims Society is the traditional establishment: big bankers, industrial titans, and the most important NGO people from New York and London. These circles tend to vote Republican (or in Great Britain, the Conservative Party) and they tend to have views that range from the middle to the right of the political and economic spectrum. Ultraright Christian conservatives do not really fit in. And neither do "new left" Democrats. Trusted, elitist democrats are one thing, but the fact is that the Democrat Party has been pulled to the left in similar fashion that the Republican Party has been pulled towards Christian conservatism. The Pilgrims tend to sit between these two extremes. Thus, probably not too many of these elements are going to be invited. They're a key part of the political debate, but apparently not always welcome in private social clubs. Remember Bill Clinton deriding Bohemian Grove as a place for "wealthy Republicans"? Some establishments might not be the best of places for heavy duty Democrats.
William vanden Heuvel, a Pilgrim in the 1960s and again starting around 1990, is an interesting case. Despite his establishment ties, he and his daughter Katrina play a key role in the "new left" Democrat network, something that is actually very rare in Pilgrims circles. The Rockefeller family has been involved very deeply, but generally only through their foundations. These ties of Vanden Heuvel might well be the reason why his name was absent from Pilgrims Society membership lists for so long. Names as Clinton, Vernon Jordan, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, John Podesta, or George Soros' Democracy Alliance network - all of them Democrat "new left" supporters - have yet to make an appearance in available Pilgrims Society lists. As long as they went to one of a handful of universities and/or have establishment family ties, it is far from impossible that they'll be invited (Howard Dean's father was a Pilgrim, for example, in the 1990s), but it appears good-old, traditional Rockefeller Republicanism is what the Pilgrims continue to be the most comfortable with.
This doesn't mean that the "new left" Democrat network is independent of the Eastern Establishment. It appears the whole network is thoroughly managed through a private sector CIA program with, historically, the Rockefeller family at its core. How this network exactly was built and continues to be managed today is a really good question. But the Pilgrims network as a whole cannot be used to explain it. However, the core network within the Pilgrims, at least throughout the 20th century, is key to figuring out this puzzle, as it is key to figuring out just about every 20th and 21st century conspiracy-related mystery.
"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..."
~ |
1930s, liberal Catholic spokesman George N. Shuster (1939, George Seldes, 'The Catholic Crisis', pp. 9-10) |
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. 150 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:
"When industrialists ignore laws designed for social and economic progress, they will seek recourse to a fascist state when the institutions of our government compel them to comply with the provisions." 151
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. 152 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. 153
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. 154 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. 155 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. 156 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. 157
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 to be found. For starters, his son Francis was employed as a staffer at ICI. 158 And his first cousin, Arthur Chamberlain 159, 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. 160 Probably not by coincidence, Arthur was another fervent supporter of appeasement 161, a total reversal of policy before his cousin became British prime minister. 162
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. 163
The motives of men like the Chamberlains, Lord McGowan, Runciman, Ball, Brittain and their American counterparts seem to be pretty clear today. None of these motives involved a passion for human rights. Instead, these men saw fascism as a means to eradicate communism and socialism - so they supported it in every way possible.
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 164 and the Museum of Natural History (Darwinism) 165, inspired and financed the eugenics movement 166, 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". 167
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." 168 In later years Grant received a thank-you note for the book from Hitler, who considered it his "bible" 169, and quickly began to implement it by extermining the Jews, Slavs and mental patients. 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 170, to set up the core of the modern conservation moment 171: birth control, natural resources (above and below ground), and since the 1980s, the rise of CO2.
Only in 2024 did this author create a specific, more in-depth article on the book 'The Passing of the Great Race' and its ties to Hitler's policies.
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. 172 Incredibly, even Britain supported the fascist takeover of Franco over the more moderate republican-socialists. 173
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. 174 Some of them had cartel agreements with companies as Standard Oil and I.G. Farben. 175
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.
Fascism in France
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. 176 Chase Paris was equally pro-fascist 177, while the pro-fascist British branch of Lazard closely cooperated with its French counterpart. 178
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 reactionary movement known as "Synarchie" has been in existence in France for nearly a century. Its aim has always been to carry out a bloodless revolution, inspired by the upper classes, aimed at producing a form of government by "technicians" (the founder of the movement was a "polytechnician"), under which home and foreign policy would be subordinated to international economy...
"It is alleged that certain industrial circles in Great Britain are also in sympathy with the movement. Some headway is claimed to have been made in securing the adhesion of big U.S. industry to the movement...
"In regard to Germany, it is hoped ultimately to eliminate Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler with his Gestapo, from the political scene, thus facilitating the formation of an Anglo-Franco-German economic bloc...
"The source has added that in the Worms group it is believed that those circles in Great Britain who are favorably disposed to their plans, are most critical of [the pro-interventionist] Mr. Churchill..." 179
The Synarchy is generally dismissed by historians these days. While technically likely accurate, at the same time there's overwhelming evidence that big business was supporting 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. 180
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. 181 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. 182
Hitler understood Britain's position very well. Already in 1924, in his book Mein Kampf, he wrote:
"What England has always desired, and will continue to desire, is to prevent any one Continental Power in Europe from attaining a position of world importance…The consequences of England's war policy were and are disastrous for Germany. However, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that, as things stand to-day, the necessary interests of England no longer demand the destruction of Germany. On the contrary, British diplomacy must tend more and more, from year to year, towards curbing France's unbridled lust after hegemony..." 183
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" 184, 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:
"If new territory were to be acquired in Europe it must have been mainly at Russia's cost, and once again the new German Empire should have set out on its march along the same road as was formerly trodden by the Teutonic Knights… For such a policy, however, there was only one possible ally in Europe. That was England. Only by alliance with England was it possible to safeguard the rear of the new German crusade… No sacrifice should have been considered too great if it was a necessary means of gaining England's friendship. Colonial and naval ambitions should have been abandoned and attempts should not have been made to compete against British industries." 185
Hitler repeated his desire for an Anglo-German alliance on many occasions. 187 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.
Anglo-German Association 1929 |
At the time it was founded, the set up of the Anglo-German Association was compared to that of the Pilgrims and the Anglo-French Society, with both a domestic and a foreign branch. 188 The society's aims were "to promote general friendly relations between Great Britain and Germany." 189 First president of the society was the Pilgrim Lord Reading, who retired from the society in 1933 after public persecutions against Jews had begun in Germany. 190 President of the German branch was Wilhelm Cuno, who at the same time was chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika Line 191, the shipping line which throughout the 1930s worked in cooperation with the Harriman and Walker-Bush families in bringing Nazi propaganda and German agents to the United States. 192 The vice presidents of the British society mainly were hard-right, anti-communist appeasers, among them Lord D'Abernon*, Philip Snowden, H. A. L. Fisher*, and General Sir Ian Hamilton. 193 The latter might well have been a relative of the Duke of Hamilton whom Rudolf Hess tried to reach in May 1941. Sir Ian actually was among those Hess was interested in meeting after parachuting into Britain. Carroll Quigley was very familiar with at least two vice presidents of the Anglo-German Association and recognized their hard-right leanings: "The "anti-Bolsheviks," who were also anti-French, were extremely important from 1919 to 1926, but then decreased to little more than a lunatic fringe, rising again in numbers and influence after 1934 to dominate the real policy of the government in 1939. In the earlier period the chief figures in this group were Lord Curzon*, Lord D'Abernon, and General Smuts*. They did what they could to destroy reparations, permit German rearmament, and tear down what they called "French militarism."... The anti-Bolsheviks, including D'Abernon, Smuts, Sir John Simon, and H. A. L. Fisher (Warden of All Souls College), were willing to go to any extreme to tear down France and build up Germany. ... D'Abernon advocated a secret alliance of Britain "with the German military leaders in cooperating against the Soviets."" 194
* attended one or more Pilgrims Society meetings. |
Imperial Policy Group 1934 |
The Imperial Policy Group was organized by a number of Conservative members of Parliament, among them Lord Scone, Alfred Wise and Victor Raikes. 195 The group was "seriously alarmed as to the drift of public opinion to the left" and preferred to return to an "Imperial policy". Among the things they were interested in seeing was a "strengthening of the Constitution." 196 The group would soon become great supporters of Chamberlain's appeasement policy. After the extremely treacherous and immoral Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Czechoslovakia was handed over to the Nazis, Victor Raikes even stated that Chamberlain "will go down in history as the greatest European statesman of this or any other time." 197 The most interesting person that was involved with the Imperial Policy Group was Kenneth de Courcy, who had been among the founders, acted as secretary, and wrote the group's reviews on international affairs. 198 De Courcy was an agent and informant of Major General Stewart Menzies 199, the deputy head of the SIS (MI6), a strong advocate of appeasement, and a life-long anti-communist crusader and propagandist. De Courcy was also in close contact with Neville Chamberlain, whom he briefed after meeting with Mussolini in Italy and Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia, 200 and the Pilgrim and notoriously pro-Nazi Duke of Windsor (King Edward VII Jan.-Dec. 1936) 201, who was at the center of the anti-communist British-Nazi cooperation. Interestingly, on July 17, 1941, the News Review wrote about de Courcy: "Outspokenly hostile was the Upper Crust Imperial Policy Group, whose secretary is Kenneth de Courcy. Year ago Mr. de Courcy was saying that Petain should negotiate peace rather than have a Communist Government set up in Paris. He once defended the Cagoulards ("Hooded Ones"), Fascist terrorist organization which attempted to seize power in France just before the war." 202
De Courcy and his associates sued the News Review for libel and won. Whatever the details of the case, this is exactly the kind of ideas one would expect from a person like de Courcy. His associates were on the same page as the bankers and industrialists behind both the Cagoule and the Synarchy in France. After World War II de Courcy continued to write his Intelligence Digest, a small anti-communist propaganda magazine which was also distributed in the United States. He became involved with the British Israel World Federation, which promotes the idea that "the descendants of the so-called "Lost Ten Tribes" of the Northern House of Israel are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic and kindred peoples of today." 203 In 1989 de Courcy's name turned up again when Lyndon LaRouche claimed that he had been approached by de Courcy as a dealmaker on behalf of the people behind the Larouche persecution. 204 |
Anglo-German Fellowship 1935 |
The Anglo-German Fellowship, alternately known as the Anglo-German Friendship Society, was set up in 1935 with the help of City banker Ernest Tennant, who for several years by then had been a friend of Joachim von Ribbentrop, an unofficial and later official diplomat of Hitler in London. 205 Like the Anglo-German Association, the Anglo-German Fellowship had branches in both Germany and England. In a short amount of time the fellowship gathered about 50 members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, three directors of the Bank of England and many generals, admirals, bishops and bankers. Pilgrims co-founder and chairman Sir Harry Brittain and the Pilgrim Lord McGowan, the Imperial Chemical Industries chairman from 1930 to 1950 and General Motors director who was close to the Chamberlain family, were among the Council members. The fellowship would organize dinners in London that would be attended by both British and German citizens. Among the German aristocrats visiting meetings in London were the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, head of the German fellowship; Prince Otto von Bismark, a business associate of Hjalmar Schacht; Prince Ludwig of Hesse, who married the daughter of a British ambassador to the U.S. (a Pilgrim) who also was a long-time chairman of Rio Tinto; Graf Durckheim-Montmartin, one of Ribbentrop's diplomats who at the same time was an occultist in contact with fascist occultists as Karl Haushofer and Julius Evola; Baron Steengracht, the Reich Foreign Office State Secretary; SS-Gruppenführer Graf von Pückler; Kurt Von Stutterheim, London correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt; and Baroness Schroder, apparently the wife or a close relative of Baron Bruno Schroder or maybe the notorious Baron Kurt von Schroder. 206 British visitors of Anglo-German Fellowship evenings have included a number of well known aristocratic appeasers, among them the Duke of Hamilton, the Lord Steward of the Royal Household whom Rudolf Hess tried to reach in 1941; Lord Londonderry, leader of the House of Lords and member of the Imperial Policy Group; the Duke of Wellington, a landowner who was a member of the secret fascist group the Right Club; Sir Ernest Bennett, another member of the Right Club; Frank Cyril Tiarks and his son Henry Frederick Tiarks (a Pilgrim), leading lights in the Bank of England and the Schroder Bank; Lord Lothian, a Pilgrim who was seen by Quigley as one of the leaders of the Round Table; and Lord Halifax, one of Chamberlain's missionaries and a post-war Pilgrims president who was a great supporter of National Socialism. 207 Lord Walter Runciman of the Pilgrims was among the members of the central council, along with earlier-mentioned Pilgrims Sir Harry Brittain and Lord McGowan. 208 The purpose of the Anglo-German Fellowship was to "bring about enduring friendship between the German and British peoples." 209 The German attitude, which often corresponded with those of British aristocrats, was represented by a conversation Tennant had with Ribbentrop in mid 1939, about which Tennant recorded: "Hitler had always hoped and expected to come to a firm understanding with Britain by which Germany, after having guaranteed the present frontiers of France, Holland and Belgium forever, would look after Britain's interests on the Continent in exchange for Britain looking after Germany's interests overseas. This would have meant peace and prosperity for 1000 years. Hitler used to have tremendous ideas of what could be done with the two countries marching in step side by side... Ribbentrop's last words to me as we parted on the platform in Berlin were 'Good-bye, and let us remember your English proverb - "It is never too late to mend"'. 210
Interestingly, Tennant was a (very) close relative of the younger Sir Peter Tennant 211, who after World War II would chair some of the meetings of the hard-right, anti-communist and super-secretive Pinay Cercle. Certain French members of this Cercle used to have close ties to the Banque Worms and the Synarchy clique. The son of Sir Ernest Bennett (a fellowship member), Sir Frederic M. Bennett, was another post-war anti-communist crusader closely associated with the British Pinay Cercle leadership. One interesting name that stands out among the visitors of the Anglo-German Fellowship is the Princess de Chimay. 212 Her husband, the Prince of Chimay, had died in 1937. This family name is of particular interest to ISGP, because the family castle has been named in the Dutroux X-Dossiers as a place where members of a fascist underground were raping and hunting on children in the 1970s and 1980s. |
Right Club 1939 |
The Right Club was an anti-semitic, fascist group set up in May 1939 by Captain Archibald Ramsay, MP. In contrast to the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, the Right Club was exclusive and secret. It was only in the late 1990s that a good number of names and details of this club became available to the public. A summary of the history of the legendary "Red Book", which contained the members and donors of the Right Club, was given by The Independent in 2000: "The existence of the Red Book first emerged in 1943 during a heated debate in Parliament. By then, it had already been seized by MI5. For 40 years, the ledger was believed to have been lost and its whereabouts was much speculated upon... What happened to the Red Book? According to Professor Richard Griffiths, the police had it until October 1944. But it seems likely that it was returned to Ramsay after his release. Nothing was seen of it until the late 1980s, when it was discovered at the bottom of an old safe in a solicitor's office. Luckily, the finder was familiar with Professor Griffiths's work and passed it to him. Professor Griffiths used it as a primary source for his book, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, The Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-40 [published in 1998], then deposited the book at the Wiener Library. Last week it was, for the first time, opened to the public." 213
Although the Independent claimed to be the first to review the Red Book after Professor Griffiths, it actually was the Daily Mail who already in December 1998 went to visit Professor Griffiths and reviewed a copy of the book. The Daily Mail wrote: "Among Right-wingers, from Edward VIII downwards, there was a widespread view that only a powerful Germany could hold back the threat of Bolshevism, and that Britain should be supporting Hitler, not preparing to attack him. Most people who shared this belief were not demonstrably anti-Semitic: but a minority were, and a number of them appear in the pages of the Red Book [of the Right Club]...
"Civilian life never really suited him [Archibald Ramsay] and he saw the spectre of what he called Organised Jewry behind every 'subversive' movement, ranging from Oliver Cromwell and the French Revolution to the spread of Communism. There was a host of well-connected men and women who shared Ramsay's views. They joined the Right Club, whose main object was to avert war, in Ramsay's words, by working 'to oppose and expose the activities of organised Jewry'... It forged connections with other pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic groups, such as The Link, with more than 4,000 members, founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, a former Director of Naval Intelligence [another group it strongly overlapped with was the Nordic League, which believed in the Aryan master race theory]... These were people whose bibles were Hitler's Mein Kampf and something called the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion..." 214 Even though it was considerable more extreme, and therefore dangerous to be affiliated with, still a number of influential aristocrats were members of the Right Club. The Duke of Wellington, a frequent chair of the club's meetings, and Sir Ernest Bennett 215 have already been mentioned as they were also visitors of the Anglo-German Fellowship. Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, founder of the fascist Link group, was a member of the Right Club. 216 Domvile was immediately picked up after war with Germany broke out. During his internment he claimed to fellow-inmates that Hitler "would soon be in this country, but that there was no reason to worry about it, because he would bring the Duke of Windsor over as King and conditions generally would be much improved." 217 Major-General John Fuller, a good friend of the fascist press baron Lord Rothermere, was a member. 218 Fuller was a respected military figure on one hand; an occultist formerly close to Aleister Crowley on the other. Other members of the Right Club were the 2nd Duke of Westminster, the 2nd Baron Redesdale, who was the father of the Mitford Sisters; William Joyce, who fled Britain when World War II broke out and became a Nazi propagandist; the Marquess of Graham, the later 7th Duke of Montrose and Minister of Defence in Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front government; Commander E. H. Cole, an anti-communist crusader since day one who had been appointed Chancellor of the White Knights, a British version of the Ku Klux Klan; Sir James Edmondson, a Conservative MP who was vice-chamberlain of the [Royal] Household from 1939 to 1942; the 1st Baron Teviot, a great-grandson of the 6th Marquess of Lothian, a Conservative MP, a comptroller of the Household from 1939 to 1940 and chairman of the Liberal National Party/National Liberal Party from 1940 to 1956; and many others. 219 Ramsay actually ran the Right Club with former Russian White Army fascist Anna Wolkoff, who had developed a good relationship with the Duchess of Windsor. 220 In early 1940, Ramsay and Wolkoff were contacted by a cypher clerk at the United States Embassy in London who had been given highest level security clearances. This cypher clerk, Tyler Kent, was copying top secret communications between Roosevelt and Churchill and was particularly looking for evidence that Roosevelt wanted to bring the United States into World War II, something which was opposed by approximately 90 percent of U.S. citizens. Kent, Wolkoff and Ramsay provided their copied information to Italy and Germany, and tried to reach anti-Roosevelt isolationist forces in the United States. They were soon found out about and arrested in May 1940. A copy of the Red Book was found in Tyler's possession, which aided in the arrest of several hundred other fascists in the same period. [198] 221 |
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. 222 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:
"[Salter] offered his arguments to support appeasement. He quoted Smuts's speech of 1934 with approval and pointed out the great need for living space and raw materials for Japan, Italy, and Germany. The only solution, he felt, was for Britain to yield to these needs... The liquidation of countries between Germany and Russia could proceed as soon as the Rhineland was fortified, without fear on Germany's part that France would be able to attack her in the west while she was occupied in the east." 223
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:
"If the Germans, Italians, Turks, or other nations had no liking for parliaments, and preferred to be controlled by individual leaders whom they admired and trusted, surely that was their affair, not ours... leave other nations to govern themselves as they think fit." 224
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:
"Are we liberal enough to be willing for the Italian people to have the sort of government they apparently want?" 225
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 226, 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" 227, 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:
- Conquering England would be very difficult because of its military power, isolation from mainland Europe, and material support from the United States.
- An alliance with England would make a successful invasion of the USSR more likely and would neutralize any threat from France (or England for that matter).
- Conquering Great Britain would result in the collapse of its empire, something which Hitler assumed would mainly benefit the Americans and the Japanese, as Germany would not be able to maintain the empire.
- Hitler believed in Germany's Teutonic heritage, which lay in the East; not in the West.
- Hitler was very much interested in destroying Jews and communism, both of which could primarily be found to the East of Germany.
- Hitler considered Great Britain an equal in terms of cultural achievements and purity of the genes.
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. 228 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 229 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. 230 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:
"We have also to remember how oddly foreigners view our country and its way of doing things. When Rudolf Hess flew over here some months ago he firmly believed that he had only to gain access to certain circles in this country for what he described as "the Churchill clique" to be thrown out of power and for a Government to be set up with which Hitler could negotiate a magnanimous peace." 231
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:
- Businessmen who were only interested in making money.
- Members of the British establishment (and their allies) who wanted to build up Germany as a counterweight to France and the Soviet Union.
- Members of the British establishment (and their allies) who not only wanted to build up Germany, but also wanted it to attack Russia and cripple France.
- Bankers and industrialists from Allied countries who conspired with their colleagues in the fascist nations in an effort to destroy international communism, undermine labor unions and individual rights, and carve up the world markets in monopolies.
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 232, facts that may help explain why Neville encouraged investment in Nazi Germany. He also had no problem with agitating the Soviets. 233
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. 234 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."
~ 1990, Ron Chernow, 'The House of Morgan', p. 440.
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.
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. 235 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:
"Butler's eyes widened when he read that the treasurer of the American Liberty League was none other than MacGuire's own boss, Grayson M.-P. Murphy, and one of its financiers was Robert S. Clark. Heading and directing the organization were Du Pont and J.P. Morgan and Company men. Morgan attorney John W. Davis was a member of the National Executive Committee-the same Davis that Clark had identified as author of the gold-standard speech MacGuire had tried to get Butler to make to the American Legion convention in Chicago.
"Heavy contributors to the American Liberty League included the Pitcairn family (Pittsburgh Plate Glass), Andrew W. Mellon Associates, Rockefeller Associates, E.F. Hutton Associates, William S. Knudsen (General Motors), and the Pew family (Sun Oil Associates). J. Howard Pew, longtime friend and supporter of Robert Welch, who later founded the John Birch Society, was a generous patron, along with other members of the Pew family, of extremist right-wing causes. Other directors of the league included Al Smith and John J. Raskob.
"Two organizations affiliated with the league were openly Fascist and antilabor. One was the Sentinels of the Republic, financed chiefly by the Pitcairn family and J. Howard Pew. Its members labeled the New Deal "Jewish Communism" and insisted "the old line of Americans of $1,200.00 a year want a Hitler.
"The other was the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, which the conservative Baltimore Sun described as "a hybrid organization financed by northern money, but playing on the Ku Klux Klan prejudices of the south." Its sponsor, John H. Kirby, collaborated in anti-Semitic drives against the New Deal with the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, leader of the first Silver Shirt Squad of American storm troopers.
"The brood of anti-New Deal organizations spawned by the Liberty League," the New York Post subsequently charged, "are in turn spawning fascism."" 236
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:
"We need a fascist government in this country, he insisted, to save the nation from the Communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.
"During the conversation he told me he had been in Italy and Germany during the summer of 1934 and had made an intensive study of the background of the Nazi and Fascist movements and how the veterans had played a part in them. He said he had obtained enough information on the Fascist and Nazi movements and of the part played by the veterans, to properly set one up in this country...
"He [MacGuire] had a very brilliant solution of the unemployment situation. He said that Roosevelt had muffed it terrifically, but that he had the plan. He had seen it in Europe. It was a plan that Hitler had used in putting all of the unemployed in labor camps or barracks-enforced labor. That would solve it overnight, and he said that when they got into power, that is what they would do; that that was the ideal plan.
"He had another suggestion to register all persons all over the country, like they do in Europe. He said that would stop a lot of the Communist agitators who were running around the country." 237
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:
"There was no doubt that General Butler was telling the truth. We believed his testimony one hundred percent. He was a great, patriotic American in every respect.
"Millions were at stake when Clark and the others got the Legion to pass that resolution on the gold standard in 1933. When Roosevelt refused to be pressured by it, and went even further off the gold standard, those fellows got desperate and decided to look into European methods, with the idea of introducing them to America. They sent Macguire to Europe to study the Fascist organizations.
"The way I figure it, we did our job in the committee by exposing the plot, and then it was up to the Department of Justice to do their job-to take it from there. I have no knowledge why the Attorney General did not pursue this matter except that most likely it was deemed politically inadvisable." 238
In 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:
"I see that John D. Jr. [Rockefeller, a Pilgrim] has crawled back again upon the band wagon, which reminds me that Tuesday evening I took Mrs. Winthrop Aldrich [her husband was a Pilgrim] in to dinner here at the house, and after dinner Winthrop spent the better part of one-half hour in discussing how men of affairs should teach the President the lesson that the minority of 17 million who voted for Landon [anti-New Deal; claimed that FDR was subverting the Constitution] was a strenuous minority [big business] and would oppose any of his progressive, radical [read: "communist"] plans...
"Last night I took Lady Granard in to dinner. She is Ogden Mills' sister, as you probably know, and her husband is Master of the Horse at the British [Royal] Court. She was very abusive and extremely nasty in all of her many references to the Chief [FDR] and said that her brother and Mr. Mellon and others were formulating plans to tie his hands financially, very, very soon.
I thought these things might be of interest to the President before he went south and am sending them to you in the strictest confidence." 239
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:
"No small part of my duty as a "public ear" for FDR was to report to him opinions expressed in Newport and at the Fifth Avenue house by people who were my mother's guests, because these people often represented important forces or areas of influence...
"The 1940 election, breaking the third-term precedent, confirmed FDR as the people's choice to carry on through the war years... but many people were not pleased, especially those traditionalists who were outraged by the overthrow of the third-term precedent which they had counted on to rid them of "That Man." ...
"On the fringes of this group were the anti-New Dealers whose prejudices were already roused, certain wealthy and influential Southerners, certain Catholic admirers of Franco, certain sections of the press... These people were no less intense in their anti-Roosevelt feeling, and they could be depended on to spread or originate rumors and fan the flames of hate, although they lacked the power and unity of the hard core of financial and industrial opposition.
"In addition to these fellow travelers in the anti-Roosevelt movement, there were also a few who acted as liaison with the hard core of opposition that really meant business. And some of them, I was sorry to discover, were to be met at my mother's house--wealthy industrialists, internationalists of the royalist persuasion...
"For years my father had been too ill to see his old friends, and so he never knew that relatives of a wealthy Midwesterner, whom Mother never liked but who was kind to me in my childhood, were involved in what I now had to consider a real conspiracy.Finally, from one of my oldest friends and colleagues in Washington, to whom I was indebted for past favors, I got confirmation of what I had learned in New Port and New York.
"I use the word conspiracy; I really am talking of a plot--a serious, long-discussed plan to -shall I say- capture the President...
"One problem was whether to tell FDR. It was no time to add to his worries. At length, torn by this question, I talked to Mrs. Roosevelt about it--this was late in the day, months after the investigations began. She promised to tell FDR at Hyde Park, and she did, only to discover, as she told me later, that he had known all along...
"So what happened? Well, as you know, the President never was captured by the enemy. Neither was any conspiracy exposed, with public scandals and punishments. When the facts were known, I was permitted to call my friend, and another army man I knew well, and offer a tip that all the plans were known. Those in the cabal were not disgraced or downgraded, but they weren't promoted either." 240
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 III: Israel and the neocons
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 rather 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. 241
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. 242 At the same time, in the roughly 1,800 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 maybe for the Rothschilds, were only moderately Zionist at best. These Jews can hardly be compared to today's radical Zionist lobby.
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. 243 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 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. 244
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 who 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-World War II immigration laws while the British kept blocking the Jews from entering Palestine. In fact, Britain tried to put a full stop to Jewish immigration into Palestine by secretly encouraging the Arabs to invade the region. 245 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 guerrilla 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. 246 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 and friend of the Dulles brothers, was supported by all the big interests, which had grown very tired of FDR's pro-New Deal and anti-domestic-fascism 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. 247 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." 248
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 penchant for 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 his career comes with a couple of questions. A look at Loftus' biography provided with his books will probably satisfy most readers: consultant to CBS' 60 Minutes program and ABC's Prime Time and a former prosecutor with the Justice Department's Nazi hunting unit, who had access to top secret national security archives. Unfortunately, Loftus also is an ultra-radical neoconservative with ties to rather notorious individuals in the CIA, Army Intelligence, Special Forces, British Intelligence, Mossad and Donald Trump administration. 249 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' claim that James Forrestal, Allen Dulles and Nelson Rockefeller were working with the Nazis before and during World War II is accurate. And in light of this, Loftus has provided a very interesting account of the 1947 United Nations conference on the partitioning of Palestine, which led to the birth of Israel in 1948.
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. 250
According to Loftus' intelligence sources, Nelson was ultimately able to work out 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. 251
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. 252 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 an ambassador of Israel to the United States where he built contacts with the Jewish community and its increasingly influential Zionist Lobby. 253 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 negotiations 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." 254
Without a doubt Nelson would have been the person to talk to if anyone wanted anything from Latin American countries. But did the Zionists really blackmail Rockefeller? That question is 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.
State Department vs the CIA and Pentagon
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 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 objection of the CIA and Joint Chiefs. Also in this matter Kennedy had the support of a number of important Eastern Establishment cabinet officials and outside advisors, including Pilgrims as Robert McNamara and Averell Harriman. Weeks before the death of Kennedy, Vietnam ambassador and Pilgrims Society executive Henry Cabot Lodge played a role in leaking a report to the newspapers that everyone at the State Department and the military was worried that the power of the CIA was 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, as well as a close Nelson Rockefeller friend - soon began to micromanage the Vietnam War from the White House together with defense secretary Robert McNamara, refusing almost all input from the much more hawkish Joint Chiefs. In case of LBJ, his strategy may not have been particularly rational or effective, but at the very least least it can be argued that open conflict with China and Russia was prevented. Meanwhile, the CIA was feeling useful with its South-East Asia opium trafficking and project Phoenix death squads.
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 common U.S. citizens instead of elites. In case of the conservatives, they were never really content with a president until Ronald Reagan was elected. Archconservative Barry Goldwater never made it to the White House and Nixon "betrayed" the conservatives 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 (his administration was stacked with former CIA chiefs and Eastern Establishmentarians), 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 (as compared to the isolationist Old Right and modern Libertarians) 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 Nazis and neofascist 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 Pilgrims Society member Philip M. Kaiser:
"RICHARD PERLE is 35 years old and smart - or brilliant, or admirably effective, or an evil genius, depending on who is describing him. Whatever the proper adjectives, Richard Perle has power. He may be one of the dozen most important people in Washington in the area of strategic arms policy. Perle's line is hard. From his cramped office on Capitol Hill runs what one critical friend calls "a detente-wrecking operation."...
"AMONG specialists in the field, Perle is widely thought to have special access to one journalistic outlet, the [Rowland] Evans and [Robert] Novak column. "Jesus," said one member of Congress, "I can't tell you the number of things Perle has told me that a few days later showed up in Evans and Novak. That's happened half a dozen times in the last year."... Several sources in Congress and the executive branch who regard Perle as an opponent said that he and his allies make masterful use of the Evans and Novak column...
"Former colleagues of Henry Kissinger and several other Ford administration officials suggested that Evans and Novak were - whether wittingly or not - used by a "cabal" involving Perle and two others: John F. Lehman Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control agency during the Ford administration, and Lt. Gen. Edward Rowney, since 1972 the Joint Chief's representative on the SALT delegation. Lehman and Perle are close personal friends. Several sources spoke darkly of this trio and its purported influence in persistent efforts to undermine Kissinger's SALT initiatives... according to informed officials, Rumsfeld did intervene with Ford and blocked a Kissinger mission to Moscow that December." 255
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 and a Pilgrim after that, began a covert relationship with the Israelis. 256 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. 257 This attitude remained on or near the surface for decades to come and reports in the early 1990s describing both the State Department and James Baker's antagonist relationship with Israel and the Zionist movement should hardly come as a surprise. 258 As with many others in the Rockefeller-Bechtel-Bush clique, Baker maintained long-standing ties to Saudi Arabia and its oil industry.
As the following report summarizes, it is this Defense Department which increasingly grew to become a major competitor of the State Department.
"Throughout the first four years of the Bush administration, Powell and the State Department have been viewed with suspicion or outright hostility by right-wing neo-conservative elements entrenched in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney's office.
Neither Powell nor his chief deputy, Richard Armitage, opposed the Bush administration's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were regarded as too closely aligned to the traditional foreign policy methods of American imperialism favored by career State Department and CIA officials, based on utilizing alliance structures like NATO and international institutions like the UN... There were also reported clashes over US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Powell resisting the White House inclination to give a blank check to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in favor of preserving the illusion that Washington could act as a broker between the two sides...
The removal of Powell and Armitage, while Rumsfeld continues in the Pentagon together with his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, marks a clear victory for the most bellicose faction in the administration. Rice generally sided with Rumsfeld and Cheney in the internecine battles over policy, although she played no independent role and was regarded as hopelessly over her head, even by supporters of the war in Iraq. The New York Times observed Tuesday that what Rice actually thought on key issues was something of a mystery. "Ms. Rice has kept her foreign policy views largely to herself over the last four years," the newspaper's front-page article on the nomination said." 259
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 preferred to avoid. 260
Pilgrims ties to Christian conservatives and the birth of the neocon ultraright
Although not many, a number of unusually right-wing individuals have appeared in the ranks of the Pilgrims Society over the decades. A number of them are relatively obvious, because they are influential Catholics who belong to the Knights of Malta. Then there's the occasional Steve Forbes, an Episcopalian from a generational Pilgrims Society family who preaches more along the lines of a strict Catholic or Southern Baptist. As is almost the norm in establishment circles, Forbes is both a Christian conservative and a neocon. As a numbers of readers might be aware, the traditionally anti-Israel Christian conservatives formed an alliance with the pro-Israel neoconservatives back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There's a little friction in lower-level John Birch Society conspiracy corners, but that's about it. This alliance has held surprisingly well over the decades as personified by the Reagan and Bush 43 administrations, and really also the so-called "alt-right" but extremely pro-Israel Trump administration.
Let's explore these ultraright ties a little here, including the history attached to it. A good start would be John M. Olin, the founder of the John M. Olin Foundation, which, starting in the 1970s, along with the Bradley, Coors, Scaife and Smith Richardson foundations, played a key role in creating the modern neocon movement, including its virulent anti-communism, anti-détente (and thus anti-Kissinger), interventionist policies, alliance with the Christian conservatives, and promotion of laissez-faire economics, all of it leading to the highly irresponsible spending behavior of all Republican-conservative governments we've seen since then: Reagan, Bush 41, Bush 43 and Trump. Olin and the other foundations accomplished this through the financing of think tanks as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, and, eventually, the notorious Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
Olin actually was a member of the Pilgrims Society since the 1960s, a membership going back further than the major increase in financing of conservative think tanks that his foundation pioneered in the early 1970s. Apart from that, the president of the Olin Foundation from 1977 until the 1990s was William Simon, the extremely connected conservative Knight of Malta who was a member of the Pilgrims Society in the late 1970s and 1980s. Olin and Simon had become friends after Olin - an ammunition and chlorine manufacturer from Illinois who served as a trustee of Cornell and Johns Hopkins universities - came to live in the Hamptons, New York, where Simon was his neighbor. 261
The long-time secretary and treasurer of the Olin Foundation was George J. Gillespie, III, a member of what appears to be a Pilgrims Society-involved family who chaired the Pinkerton Foundation and served as a long-time partner in a the Pilgrims-linked law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He has also been a bridge tournament partner of the Pilgrim Malcolm Forbes, Bear Stearns chair Alan Greenberg, CBS president and CEO Laurance Tisch, and especially Warren Buffett, another liberal establishmentarian. 262 Gillespie III and Warren Buffett have known each other since at least the early 1970s when both were elected to the board of the Washington Post, a key liberal establishment newspaper with deep ties to the top of the CIA leadership.
Incredibly, Rockefeller family agent, Rockefeller Foundation chair, Ford Foundation chair, CFR chair and long-time Pilgrim John J. McCloy was a trustee of the Olin Foundation from the late 1970s until his death in 1989. Isn't it fascinating how this chairman of all things Eastern Establishment and "liberal CIA" shows up on the board of a foundation that financed the rise of the ultraright neocon movement and its alliance with the Christian conservatives? Unsurprisingly, his involvement in the Olin Foundation has been an incredibly low-profile affair.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s at the Olin Foundation, McCloy furthermore was flanked by a Pilgrim with the name John W. Hanes, a banker and Olin Industries director. There's more to Hanes, however. His son, John W. Hanes, Jr., served as an assistant to German high commissioner John McCloy and then, from 1953 to 1957, as secretary of state John Foster Dulles' special assistant. Hanes, Jr. also served as a CIA officer, a Nature Conservancy board member, a 1001 Club member, a member of a secret UFO investigative committee 263 and as a Lyndon LaRouche antagonist. 264 Fascinating, isn't it?
Speaking of Lyndon LaRouche, one interesting target of LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review publication, primarily in the 2005-2006 period, was Pilgrims executive and reorganizer John Train, also the 1987 founder of the Northcote Parkinson Fund (later known as the Train Foundation). Founding treasurer of the fund/foundation was prominent neocon superclass member Midge Decter 265, the wife of another leading neocon, Norman Podhoretz. Among the financiers of the foundation have been the Olin, Bradley and Templeton foundations.
According to EIR, the first project of the Train Foundation was the financing and otherwise supporting of the book Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies. 266 Certainly the fund is credited with support on page V of the book, which was written by Steven Powell and the all-too-well-known ultraright propagandist David Horowitz, with an unpublished manuscript of John Train on IPS-offshoot the Transnational Institute being listed as a source for the book on pages 414-415. A reviewer of the book at the time was leading neocon Joshua Muravchik. 267 The book accused the Institute for Policy Studies, due to its extensive praise for anti-American communist governments around the world, of being a Soviet front organization. This was an all too common accusation at the time by the ultraright, but what is particularly puzzling in this case is that the Institute for Policy Studies, which is discussed at length in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article, was created by two aides of John McCloy and McGeorge Bundy and that the institute has been financed with millions upon millions of dollars by foundations as Ford, Rockefeller, Open Society (Soros) and others. Guess this adds even more weight to ISGP's long-standing charges that the controlled left (such as IPS) has been played off against the controlled right (such as Alex Jones).
The anti-IPS book is also reminiscent of the charge by LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review that in 1983 a group of "new left", ultraright and Zionist journalists/propagandists, along with a number of wealthy men, organized a number of anti-LaRouche meetings at the home of John Train in Manhattan. 268 While LaRouche is far from a genuine, honest person (just by looking at the anti-global warming propaganda on its website), it does give us yet another indication that the left and the right are controlled and band together against any undesired outsider.
Train has not been the only prominent Pilgrim in the Northcote Parkinson Fund/Train Foundation. His successor as chairman in 2004 was 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. Pilgrims executive Anne B. Sloane used to be president of the Fund. The Fund's counsel, John Temple, has served as acting president of the CFR. Then there's Pilgrims executive John R. Drexel IV, who used to serve as director of sales and marketing at Train, Smith Counsel from 1991 to 1993.
For such an obscure individual and foundation, Train certainly maintained high level connections. In addition, during the 1960s and 1970s, according to Cercle chairman Brian Crozier in his biography Free Agent, Train was a financial advisor to "Rockefeller CIA" asset and Pilgrims Society vice president John Hay Whitney. According to EIR, Train was also close to James Angleton, a top CIA officer who later served as co-chairman of the ultraright American Security Council and also was extremely close to John Fisher, the founder of the ASC. One of these ties ran through Angleton's Security and Intelligence Fund, which EIR mentions as well as having a) ties to the American Security Council; and b) been involved in the get-LaRouche campaign. 269 As usual, LaRouche's EIR group is unusually well informed on conspiracy matters at the highest level. Despite their propaganda, they know their stuff.
Unfortunately, too little information is available on the Fund's activities and past trustees to draw any further conclusions, apart from the fact that Train appears to have maintained top-level CIA ties, which may explain his involvement in right vs. left bickering activities.
Getting back to the major foundations, the Olin Foundation hasn't been the only important conservative financier in existence with peculiar Eastern Establishment ties. One of its chief partners has been the Bradley Foundation, which in 1985 all of a sudden became very relevant when its assets jumped from $14 million to $290 million overnight. Apart from their very similar funding activities, the Olin and Bradley foundations were particularly closely linked through Michael Joyce, the executive director of the Olin Foundation from 1979 to 1985 and then the president of the Bradley Foundation from 1985 to 2001. Looking at his other NGO involvement, Joyce, a Knight of Malta, was particularly close to William Simon, a fellow Knight of Malta and premier Olin Foundation chief; CIA asset and neocon godfather Irving Kristol, also a close partner of William Simon; Irving's equally influential Jewish neocon son Bill Kristol; and the Bush 43 administration, for which, in 2001, Joyce set up the Americans for Community and Faith-Centered Enterprise. Joyce also was a signer of the PNAC statement of principles, along with scores of neocons. 270
True, in contrast to the closely-allied Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation really didn't have any Eastern Establishment-linked individuals on the board except, maybe, Michael Joyce. In fact, most names aren't particularly recognizable. About the most well-known name on the board of the Bradley Foundation was Chicago School economist George J. Stigler, also a co-founder and president of the Mont Pelerin Society. Ironically, Stigler was a mentor to key "new left", "liberal CIA" asset Greg Palast.
Then there was Richard Mellon Scaife, who used his Allegheny, Carthage, Sarah Scaife and Scaife Family foundations to provide conservative (often CIA-favorite national security) causes with roughly $500 million since the early 1970s. Through his mother, Scaife was part of the Mellon family, a well-known Eastern Establishment family who have been generational members of the Pilgrims Society, with Paul Mellon also appearing in the 1001 Club. The Mellon family was very close to the CIA, including CIA director Richard Helms, but its activities and foundations have mainly been associated with more liberal and non-national security causes. Scaife, however, has always financed the exact opposite causes and, per the Free Agent biography of MI6 propaganda asset and Cercle chairman Brian Crozier, actually was on a CIA referral list for individuals who were denied official CIA funding. As for the Sarah Scaife Foundation, it has always been tightly linked to leaders of the Council for National Policy, Heritage Foundation, and similar groups. However, one long-time trustee, Roger Robinson Jr., used to serve as an assistant to David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank. As already observed with Le Cercle, this could simply be a case of the Rockefeller clique preferring to keep an eye on their ultraright opposition and nothing more. Other than those just mentioned, the Scaife foundations do not have the same type of direct Eastern Establishment ties as some of the other (neo)conservative foundations.
The H. Smith Richardson Foundation hasn't been discussed yet. This foundation has been financing similar neocon and Christian conservative think tanks and movements as the Olin, Scaife and Bradley foundations, but in this case going back to even before World War II. H. Smith Richardson's young son-in-law Eugene W. Stetson, Jr. reportedly helped set up the foundation. Stetson, the son of a Morgan Guaranty Trust chairman, belonged to Skull & Bones and the Pilgrims Society. All information about the foundation until the late 1990s is either extremely obscure or non-existent. Reportedly the foundation has been involved in CIA psychological warfare, brainwashing and education programs since the 1950s, with Prescott Bush having played a role in setting up the foundation and its working relationship with the CIA. 271 Bush certainly was linked to and possibly financed by the foundation. 272 The foundation most definitely also had CIA officials overseeing grants and was involved in the training of senior CIA and DOD officials. 273 Trustees and governors until the mid 1990s are unknown, but at that point governors of the foundation included right-wing Pilgrims Society members Donald Rumsfeld and Zbigniew Brzezinski, in addition to Samuel Huntington and Fred Ikle. The chairman of the post-9/11 neocon movement, James Woolsey, who at one point held a speech for the Pilgrims Society, also joined the foundation's board of governors with these men. Governors and trustees since then reveal a relatively strong neocon leaning of H. Smith Richardson 274, as does the early position of Frank Barnett as director of research and vice president of the foundation in the 1955-1962 period. Today Barnett is a veteran of the Center for Security Policy and countless other neocon groups. Then again, he also was a Rhodes scholar who held Rockefeller and Ford fellowships. In that sense, he, similar to the Smith Richardson Foundation and Olin Foundation, holds the middle between the neocons and the right-wing of the Eastern Establishment.
One more minor foundation that shouldn't be overlooked in regard to the neocon movement, and certainly not the Pilgrims, is the Achelis and Bodman Foundation. The Achelis Foundation was founded in 1940; the Bodman Foundation in 1945. In 2015 the two officially merged, but in reality they were sharing trustees and coordinating grant making for decades at that point. Based on data from 2002 and earlier it was already possible to tell that the ties between the Pilgrims and the Achelis and Bodman Foundation were strong, but a full 2014 list, acquired while writing this chapter, demonstrated that this foundation might well be the closest of all neocon foundations to the Pilgrims Society, including its leadership. A list of ties between key officers and trustees of Achelis and Bodman 275 and the Pilgrims is quite overwhelming:
- Guy Rutherfurd, the lawyer of the Achelis and Bodman families who forged the tie between the two foundations and kept involved in it for over 50 years, including as chairman and later as honorary chairman, was a grandson of Pilgrims Society member Levi P. Morton.
- Long-time foundation president (to this day) and recent Pilgrim Russell Pennoyer is a grandson of Pilgrims Society member Paul G. Pennoyer and his wife Francis Morgan Pennoyer, the last surviving child of J.P. Morgan, Jr. Paul G. Pennoyer, Jr., Russell's uncle, has also been a long-time Pilgrims Society member. A 2014 Pilgrims Society membership list lists Russell, along with yet another, younger Paul G. Pennoyer, Jr.
- Key trustee and long-term executive chairman of the foundation, John Irwin III, is the son of former Pilgrims executive John Irwin II and a daughter of IBM founder Thomas Watson, Sr., who, along with at least three other members of his family, also belonged to the Pilgrims Society.
- Key, long-term trustee Walter Curley, Jr. was a Pilgrim, including an executive officer in the final years of his life. He married a granddaughter of the founder of the Mellon fortune (family involved in the Pilgrims) and was a long-term partner in the firm of John Hay Whitney, a long-time Pilgrims vice president, establishmentarian and CIA asset (similar to the Mellons).
- Key, long-term trustee Anthony Drexel Duke was a Pilgrim. The Drexels and Dukes having been some of the more famous Eastern Establishment families around.
- Long-term trustee and vice president Mary S. Phipps is the widow of Howard Phipps, Jr., a long-time Pilgrims Society member who - through foundations and social events - maintained particularly close ties to Brooke Astor and Laurance Rockefeller. Phipps is another well-known Eastern Establishment family name of the 20th century. Howard Phipps actually shows up in the 2014 executive officers list for the U.S. Pilgrims.
- A trustee from the 1980s until the early 2000s was Mary Braga, the window of Virginia sugar baron Ronny/Riondra Braga, whose brother, George, was a Pilgrim in the 1970s and 1980s and whose son, David, was a Pilgrim anno 2014. The sugar assets of the Braga brothers had been confiscated by Fidel Castro. One gets the impression they were made CIA assets as a result, a suspicion only heightened upon seeing that soon-to-be CIA director George H. W. Bush, as well as future Pilgrims executive John Drexel IV, attended the wedding of Ames Braga, another son of Riondra, in 1973. Bush, in fact, escorted the bride.
So here we have seven trustees with combined ties to the Morgan, Mellon, Drexel, Duke, Whitney, Phipps, Watson and Rockefeller families, all families already listed at the beginning of this article as key Eastern Establishment families. Thus, it should be clear: the Achelis and Bodman Foundation is as Eastern Establishment and Pilgrims-connected as the traditional Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford foundations. In due tradition, the foundation has made grants to groups as the English-Speaking Union, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, the Rockefeller University for Medical Research, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government, the food bank and more.
However, when it comes to "public policy", as in political and economic policy, annual grants of the Achelis and Bodman Foundation have been going to conservative economic and neocon foreign policy groups, including the Acton Institute, Atlas Network, Federalist Society, Philanthropy Roundtable, Hudson Institute (Pennoyer also was a trustee here), Manhattan Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Middle East Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, James Woolsey's Gatestone Institute and also John Train's earlier-mentioned Northcote Parkinson Fund. 276
Now, let's take a look at some of the more ultraright British Pilgrims. Probably the most notorious one is Lord Alun Chalfont. Since the mid 1960s this person has been coming to Pilgrims Society meetings, in 1975 he officially joined, and from 1979 until about the turn of the century he sat on the executive board. Chalfont is different from most Pilgrims. He has primarily made a name for himself as a hard-right, anti-communist crusader who, on the side apparently, also sat on the boards of Lazards and IBM UK and at one point also was a foreign officer. Among the credits he has listed are "various... intelligence appointments" - not a particularly satisfactory description of his career. We already met Chalfont in ISGP's Cercle article where he is described as a participant in Le Cercle and a close associate of the Cercle leadership, which, of course, revolved around Otto von Habsburg's Knights of Malta and Opus Dei network from mainland Europe, MI6 from England and the Heritage Foundation, the CIA's Ted Shackley clique and the "liberal CIA" Rockefeller group from America. A partial recap of Chalfont's Cercle bio reads:
"Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office 1964-1970; Privy Council since 1964; Pilgrims Society executive since 1979; Conservative Monday Club; pro-apartheid; director pro-junta British-Chilean Council; council member of FARI with Cercle members/presidents Brian Crozier, Julian Amery, and Robert Moss, just as the aristocrat Sir Frederic M. Bennett; chair Institute for the Study of Terrorism, a clone of Crozier's anti-communist Institute for the Study of Conflict; member Committee for a Free Britain, which spent more than Pounds 200,000 on press advertisements attacking Labour during the 1987 election; member Committee for a Free World, an American neo-conservative group; member Media Monitoring Unit, which attempted to "expose" left-wing bias in television news and current affairs programmes... deputy chairman of the Independent Broadcasting Authority."
In the early 1980s, at that point in his mid 60s, Chalfont chaired Zeus Security Consultants, with Major Peter Hamilton, a former Military Intelligence officer, as managing director. The two men used to run anti-communist operations in Malaya and Cyprus. At Zeus they received assignments from British Intelligence which, in turn, they 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 protesters 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 protesters by setting up dummy action groups which pretended to be friendly to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the protesters at the Sizewell nuclear power plant. 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 protesters. 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 was 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). 277
Add to all this Chalfont's association with the Cercle leadership, his directorship in the neocon Committee for a Free World, him chairing the second (U.S.-U.K.-Israel-coordinated neocon) Jonathan Institute, his involvement in the pro-Pinochet British-Chilean Council and later the neocon Atlantic Initiative, as well as his reported friendship with fellow Pilgrim, superclass member, 9/11 Commission chair, leading neocon and apparent top CIA asset John F. Lehman, and it becomes clear that Chalfont's reputation as a darkly figure is quite justified.
Among Chalfont's associates was 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 (Le Cercle), Julian Amery (Le Cercle) and Robert Moss (Le Cercle). CIA and DIA officers and associates like Richard Mellon Scaife, William Casey (Le Cercle), Ed Feulner (Le 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. Bennett'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 does not sound that strange at all.
Another rather darkly figure who was invited to the Pilgrims Society in 1995 is Lord William Rees-Mogg. As editor-in-chief of the Times of London from 1967 to 1981 he is an obvious choice for membership, despite his Catholicism. Rees-Mogg is a peculiar individual. Senator John DeCamp, who once investigated the Franklin child abuse affair, had among his friends former CIA director and Cercle member William Colby (whose son, Jonathan, and grandson, Elbridge, joined the Pilgrims). At one point Colby explained a few things about Rees-Mogg to DeCamp:
"At the time of his death, Bill [Colby] was working with Britain's Lord William Rees-Mogg... [Rees-Mogg] used to write that in the coming age of society, an elite of 5% of the total population would rule over the other 95% as virtual slaves. But Rees-Mogg is not just nasty-- he represents great power... On several occasions, when I saw Bill or spoke with him during the last year of his life, I'd ask him whether I should subscribe to his newsletter [Strategic Investment], or, whether he'd just give me a few copies to look over. He always told me not to waste my money. "Ask me about any situation your interested in, and I'll give you as thorough a briefing as I possibly can. But don't believe a word you read in that newsletter I'm writing for." Strange... Maybe his involvement with Rees-Mogg was more complicated than I ever speculated... And I recall another incident... Together with Rees-Mogg, the most savage press hound attacking Clinton was one Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a Briton... [he] once called me, urgently demanding a meeting. I had never heard of him before, and so I asked Bill if he had ever heard of this fellow... Bill answered, rather ominously, as I now look back, "His name is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. And," he said, "be very careful."" 278
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 Pilgrims vice president Margaret Thatcher). 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) 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. 279 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. 280
An equally peculiar character as Rees-Mogg who joined the British branch of the Pilgrims Society in 1995 is Lord Conrad Black, whom ISGP already compiled a biography on due to his membership in the 1001 Club since at least 1987, along with the Bechtels, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Prince Bernhard and other European royal houses. He is best known as the chairman and CEO of Hollinger Inc. from 1987 to 2003, a Toronto-based publishing firm that owned newspapers as Britain's Daily Telegraph, Toronto's National Post, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post. Directors and international advisors of Hollinger included Pilgrims Society president Lord Carrington and long-time Pilgrims Sir Henry Keswick, Paul Volcker, Margaret Thatcher, Lord Kenneth Thomson, Henry Kissinger, Raymond Seitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Other big names included neocon "prince of darkness" Richard Perle, Sir James Goldsmith, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, Bilderberg veteran Gianni Agnelli and former Israeli president Chaim Herzog.
Two months after 9/11, Black capitalized on the War on Terror by helping to set up a defense- and Homeland Security-oriented venture capital firm named Trireme Partners LLP. Partners in the firm included Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger and, as an intermediary, controversial Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. At the same time Black could be found on the advisory board of the CFR, the steering committee of Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the IISS, the Peterson Institute, the Americas Society, the New Atlantic Initiative, the Hudson Institute, the Center for the National Interest, and more. He was one of the ultimate insiders and maintained many neocon ties at the highest level. That is, until he went to prison over convictions of fraud and criminal obstruction related to his Hollinger empire, which he was accused of plundering for his own personal benefit. It's beyond rare to have a person of his standing go to prison, but apparently it does happen.
The board of Hollinger alone makes one wonder about the extent to which the "liberal establishment" really is liberal. Add to this earlier questions about the Olin, Scaife, Smith Richardson, Achelis and Bodman, Train and other foundations, as well as the "joint" membership of a number of key think tanks, and one has to conclude that at the very top liberal and conservative forces coalesce to an uncomfortable extent. This is perfectly represented by David Rockefeller's circle of friends, employees and close associates. Not only are some Democrat - such as Paul Volcker, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cyrus Vance - and others Republican - such as Henry Kissinger and George Shultz - but also many have defended Kissinger's policy of détente while other close friends of Kissinger and Rockefeller, most notably Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Shultz, have worked to put an end to it. For example, Kissinger and Alexander Haig devised and implemented détente in the late 1960s and 1970s. Then, in the late 1970s, the hawkish Brzezinski largely worked to undermine it by coaxing the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. Soon after, Shultz became Reagan's secretary of state, at which point détente was scrapped in its entirety. Within the Reagan administration the otherwise very hawkish Haig was complaining that he was "conspired" against because he worked with Kissinger on the détente policy. Needless, to say, all these individuals have been Pilgrims Society members, executives and vice presidents.
Similarly, Kissinger's policy of détente was harshly attacked by the neocons, most notably Richard Perle, but also individuals as Norman Podhoretz. Today, certainly since the War on Terror, he considers both good friends. 281 Leading neocon Donald Rumsfeld is another good example. In the mid 1970s as Ford's chief of staff and defense secretary, he and Cheney were undermining the détente and other policies of secretary of state Henry Kissinger and vice president Nelson Rockefeller. However, by the mid 1990s Kissinger, Shultz, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Lynn Forester de Rothschild were all involved in the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation of billionaire Ted Forstmann. 282 A few years later, Rumsfeld and Powell join the neocon Bush administration, which Shultz-protege Condi Rice helped put together and Henry Kissinger will help advise. Similarly, Rumsfeld has been involved in a number of think tanks with his former rival Henry Kissinger over the years.
All of it makes you wonder to what extent voting even matters, especially because Lynn Forester de Rothschild became best of friends with Hillary Clinton, with Kissinger also being close to Clinton. Of course, ISGP already established that Democrat and Republican administrations of the 20th and early 21st century "coincidentally" all involved key administration officials with very close Rockefeller ties. Thus seeing in this chapter that the neocon wing of the establishment does appear to have a degree of long-term Eastern Establishment backing, shouldn't come as a surprise either. But it remains very, very strange what is going on at the top layer of our western society. It appears we're dealing with different factions in one establishment that are sorting things out amongst themselves while at the same time employing mindbogglingly complex security operations to keep truly independent presidential candidates from being elected and to keep the public off-balance regarding certain major cross-party, cross-faction conspiracies.
Ultraright anti-Eastern Establishment propaganda
In various parts of this article it is discussed how the John Birch Society and Liberty Lobby - the largely low-level, conspiracy-oriented odd ducklings of the ultraright conservative movement - have largely been responsible for the fuss about the Eastern Establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations, the British "empire" and their supposed sympathies with "socialism" and even communism. Maybe we should dig a little deeper into that, especially now that we established that the Eastern Establishment itself can be quite right-wing and neocon.
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:
"There is an establishment in the United States. The word "establishment" is a general term for the power elite in international finance, business, the professions largely from the Northeast, who wield most of the power regardless of who is in the White House.
"Most people are unaware of the existence of this "legitimate Mafia." Yet the power of the establishment makes itself felt from the professor who seeks a foundation grant, to the candidate for a cabinet post or State Department job. It affects the nation\'s policies in almost every area.
"For example, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, subsidized by Rockefeller interests since 1927 boasts a membership of at least 90 per cent establishment figures." 283
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 a major adversary 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:
"What is the establishment's viewpoint? Through the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations its ideology is constant: That the best way to fight communism is by a One World socialist state governed by "experts" like themselves. The result has been policies which favor the growth of the superstate, gradual surrender of U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations and a steady retreat in the face of Communist aggression."
Half of Edith's family members were high-level CIA officers, the most well-known being Kermit Roosevelt II, a key 1953 coup plotter against Mohammed Mossadeq, the Iranian president who made the mistake of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Even her brother, Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., was a top-level CIA officer who went to work for David Rockefeller. In other words, the Roosevelt family of Edith was as CIA and Eastern Establishment as they came - and these are only a fraction of the ties. A full timeline and more details on Edith's family can be found in ISGP's article on Alex Jones, an ultraright,CIA-tied propagandist along John Birch Society and Barry Goldwater lines.
Probably the most interesting aspect of John Birch Society-type propaganda that Edith is describing unusually clear above is 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 for the most part continue to be so until this day.
This analysis of the Pilgrims Society has demonstrated 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, etc., etc. The absolute core of the globalist movement largely consists of Pilgrims. Examples are the memberships of Lord Roll, Lord Carrington, Lord Kerr, Andrew Carnegie, the Morgans, Warburgs, Rothschilds, Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, John McCloy, Henry Heinz, Henry Kissinger, George Ball, George Shultz, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance, Paul Volcker, John Whitehead and many others.
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. In fact, his books do not list any sources, greatly undermining their credibility. On the Round Table groups, Quigley wrote:
"At the risk of some repetition, the story will be summarized here, because the American branch of this organization (sometimes called the "Eastern Establishment") has played a very significant role in the history of the United States in the last generation. "The Round Table Groups were semi-secret discussion and lobbying groups... The original purpose of these groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and William T. Stead, (1840-1912), and the money for the organizational work came originally from the Rhodes Trust... "Since 1925 there have been substantial contributions from wealthy individuals and from foundations and firms associated with the international banking fraternity, especially the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and other organizations associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and the associates of Lazard Brothers and of Morgan, Grenfell, and Company. "The chief backbone of this organization grew up along the already existing financial cooperation running from the Morgan Bank in New York to a group of international financiers in London led by Lazard Brothers. "This group wielded great influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table (founded in 1910 with money supplied by Sir Abe Bailey and the Rhodes Trust, and with Lothian as editor), and it dominated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called "Chatham House" (of which Sir Abe Bailey and the Astors were the chief financial supporters, while Lionel Curtis was the actual founder), the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford. ... "[The aim of these 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, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences." 284 |
This analysis of the Pilgrims Society has confirmed the existence of a network as described by Quigley. The Rockefeller, 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 / Milner Group members described by Quigley have at least visited the Pilgrims Society on one or more occasions, not all were full-fledged members. However, some of the alleged organizers and leaders of the Round Table certainly were members. They include Lord Lothian (d. 1940), the 2nd Viscount Astor (d. 1952), Lord Brand of Lazard (d. 1963), Adam D. Marris of Lazard (d. 1983) and a number of others all listed in appendix A of this article. Lord Alfred Milner is known to have visited the Pilgrims in 1906.
Furthermore, among the Pilgrims can be found a good number of All Souls fellows and Rhodes Scholars, which Quigley attached great value to. A number of officers of the Rhodes Trust have appeared among the membership or the visitors 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 U.S. Federal Reserve System in 1913 is always portrayed as a major banker's conspiracy by John Birch Society corners, or conspiracy circles in general. Countless books and documentaries have been produced on the creation of the Federal Reserve, the most impressive effort probably being the three-and-a-half hour Money Masters documentary from 1995. Fact is, the creation of the Federal Reserve System can also be traced back to members of the Pilgrims Society, for which ISGP created appendix F.
The conspiracy partly centered around a secret meeting at Jekyll Island in November 1910 in which leading bankers or their representatives worked out the details of setting up a privately-owned central bank in the United States. Three of six participants of the Jekyll Island meeting were (decades-long) Pilgrims: Rockefeller agent Frank Vanderlip, Morgan partner Henry Davison and Paul Warburg.
Furthermore, Abby, the daughter of key Jekyll Island organizer and participant Senator Nelson Aldrich, married Pilgrim John D. Rockefeller, Jr., while Nelson's son, Winthrop W. Aldrich, became a key figure in the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, as well as a Pilgrims executive and vice president. Three other Aldriches have been involved in the Pilgrims Society, but it is very hard to tell to what extent they were relatives of Nelson and Winthrop. Senator Aldrich's financial advisor, Alfred L. Aiken, also was a member of the Pilgrims. If Senator Aldrich hadn't been operating from Washington, he almost certainly would have been a member of the Pilgrims Society too.
Then there is congressman Edward B. Vreeland, who is "credited" with having assisted Nelson Aldrich and the bankers in establishing the Federal Reserve. A quick check reveals that Vreeland, who, like Senator Aldrich, was operating from Washington, never was a member of the New York City-based Pilgrims Society. However, his brother, Herbert, who was living and working in New York City, most certainly was. Herbert Harold Vreeland is listed in Pilgrims Society membership lists from at least 1907 until his death in 1945. In other words, like Senator Nelson Aldrich, congressman Edward Vreeland couldn't be any closer to the Pilgrims Society without actually becoming a listed member.
The Morgan and Rockefeller families, of course, were leading and generational members of the Pilgrims Society. Jacob H. Schiff, often said to have played a role in the creation of the Federal Reserve as an agent of the Rothschilds, was a founding member of the Pilgrims Society. His son, Mortimer L. Schiff, joined the Pilgrims a few years later. Both remained members until their respective deaths in 1920 and 1933. Mortimer Schiff's son, John M. Schiff, ended up becoming a treasurer and executive member of the Pilgrims. He also remained a Pilgrim until his death in 1989. In the early 1990s, John's son David T. Schiff joined the Pilgrims Society. Eventually he was made life member and executive officer. To summarize, the Schiff family is about the only one which can compete with the Rockefellers in terms of longest stretch membership in the Pilgrims. The Rothschilds, of course, also have had various members among the Pilgrims over the course of the 20th century, though nothing as consistent as the Rockefellers or Schiffs.
As already established early on in this article, countless chairmen, presidents and governors of the Federal Reserve System have been members of the Pilgrims Society, with the Federal Reserve of New York in particular having been dominated by Pilgrims. Thus, it is safe to say the Federal Reserve falls under the umbrella of the Pilgrims Society, much like Carroll Quigley's Round Table Network and more tangible groups as Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.
The propaganda is true? Fabians, Wells' communist "New World Order", George Orwell and... the Astor clique?
In right-wing circles, including John Birch Society ones, often reference is made to Fabian socialists or Fabians. Today European-style socialism generally means little more than finding the middle ground between employees and employers, this in contrast to communism, which stands for the violent overthrow of the ruling class and instating an utopian society for the working class in which everybody is allotted the same amount of land, money and goods. Fabian socialism is essentially how British socialism, the Labour Party and the so-called "welfare state" began, making it an immediate and obvious target of any right-wing publication. However, Fabian socialism didn't always stand for negotiations between the classes. It most definitely contained leaders who expressed a deep interest in Soviet-style communism.
An additional reason that the Fabian Society has been a prominent target in John Birch Society circles is due to the fact that David Rockefeller was introduced to their teachings at the London School of Economics and Political Science, an elite university founded by leading Fabian socialists George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Though, it has to be said, at the same time, and at the same university, Rockefeller was mentored by economist Friedrich von Hayek, with his neoliberal antithesis to communism, whom Rockefeller took just as much of a liking to. 285
Another important factor for the interest in the Fabian Society is because one of its members was famous author H.G. Wells, who used to write about his favorite version of a socialist "new world order" or "world socialist democracy". These writings are a major reason why the link between socialism, the "new world order", global government, and even communism is often made.
However... how accurate is this notion of Fabians looking to introduce a form of global communism? And how closely is the history of the Fabian Society tied to members of the Pilgrims Society? Wells actually is known to have visited a dinner of the Pilgrims of Great Britain on November 7, 1913 while David Rockefeller was a decades-long member of the U.S. branch. But maybe there are more ties. Let's figure it out here.
Readers may have come across the following shortened quote from H.G. Wells, which comes from his 1940 pamphlet The New World Order. It has been used by countless right-wing authors.
"Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting against it."
Let's look for the full context of this quote:
"Even when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people, from maharajas to millionaires [multi-billionares in today's money] and from pukkha sahibs to pretty ladies, will hate the new world order, be rendered unhappy by frustration of their passions and ambitions through its advent and will die protesting against it." 286
While the full quote, in which the upper classes instead of the common people clearly become the target, appears to sound a lot less sinister, in the end Wells' statement can easily be interpreted as a call for a communist dictatorship. Is this what Wells had in mind? His pamphlets The Open Conspiracy: Blueprint for a World Revolution (1928) and The New World Order (1940) come down to the following points:
- All governments and their policies are temporary. They frequently abuse their power. This should be countered. They are not to interfere with the establishing of a "world economic system".
- All private, local and national ownership of such things as credit, transport, and staple production should be transferred to a "responsible world directorate" serving the common ends of the human race.
- The world directorate controls a world armed force, tries to eradicate disease and looks after population control.
- There should be a "minimum standard of individual freedom and welfare in the world."
- The personal career should be subordinate to the creation of the world directorate and the general advancement of human knowledge.
- People should be educated that immortality does not lie in our individual selves, but in our race as a whole.
While many of the above points do not sound too bad to the average liberal Democrat, especially not when looking at the time frame, the abolition of private ownership essentially is a call for communism. And with the globalist aspect in mind, it appears Wells and allies most definitely would have loved to use the United Nations as their primary vehicle to implement some kind of heavy-duty global socialist or even communist society.
Wells actually was less radical than some of the other leading Fabian socialists, explaining why he was involved in the group for only such a short period, from 1903 to 1908. Key leaders as the Webb couple and George Bernhard Shaw (1856-1950) were much more outspokenly communist (and fascist). As for a basic history, Shaw became friends with Sidney Webb in 1880, joined the Fabian Society think tank in 1884, wrote the society's first manifesto that same year, and joined the executive committee in 1885. He brought Sidney Webb, who would marry Beatrice in 1892, to the Fabian Society that same year. For the next few decades, Shaw, Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice would dominate the society, always scheming to find ways on how to bring the teachings of Karl Marx into mainstream politics and society as a whole. Shaw and Wells first met in 1895.
In 1913 the Webb couple and Shaw founded The New Statesman, a combined political and literary magazine that remains in existence to this day. Due to its strong focus on domestic British politics, globalist-oriented leftism, and apparent lack of unique content, I haven't really run into any of its articles over the years, with one notable exception: entitled Meet the No Planers: They believe there weren't any planes on 9/11, just missiles wrapped in holograms, it's not hard to figure out what this article was about: slandering the 9/11 "truth" movement with controlled opposition assets.
It reminds one of Bertrand Russell, a Fabian Society member and contributor to the New Statesman, who called for civil disobedience in 1961 over America's nuclear ICBM program and helped set up the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). A few years later, Russell became Britain's leading skeptic of the Kennedy assassination, parroting the work of CIA asset Mark Lane. Russell and others, including the retired 30-year editor of the New Statesman (1930-1960) and fellow CND and Fabian Society member Kingsley Martin, also became members of the Who Killed Kennedy Committee, founded in June 1964. Fellow committee member Hugh Trevor-Roper had been a co-founder of the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom while a name as Julian Huxley could also be found at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. None of it sounds particularly independent.
Despite being one of the many opposing the Webbs-Shaw "old gang" and having ridiculed the Webbs in his 1911 satirical book The New Machiavelli, Wells did regularly contribute to The New Statesman. In 1934, right after the Great Depression, he famously interviewed Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin for the magazine. Shaw heavily criticized Wells for the skeptical approach he took during the interview with Stalin. While Wells was equally skeptical of the capitalist system as Stalin, in contrast to Stalin he did not look at human society in terms of rigid "have" and "have nots" class warfare and did believe in the general goodness of humanity. The Webbs and Shaw were far more enthusiastic supporters of Stalinist communism. Shaw in particular grew to be a major supporter of both communist and even fascist dictatorships 287, breaking with everything socialism is supposed to stand for. Even Beatrice Webb, still a close friend, was puzzled by Shaw's transformation by 1935. However, according to Bertrand Russell, Beatrice Webb herself also was quite the autocrat and explained that "the essence of Fabianism [is] worship of the State":
"I liked [Beatrice Webb] but I disagreed with her about religion, about imperialism, and about the worship of the State. This last was of the essence of Fabianism. It led both the Webbs and also Shaw into what I thought an undue tolerance of Mussolini and Hitler, and ultimately into a rather absurd adulation of [Stalin's] Soviet Government. ...
"Both [Webbs] were fundamentally undemocratic, and regarded it as the function of a statesman to bamboozle or terrorise the populace. ...
"There were people whom the Webbs hated. They hated Wells, both because he offended Mrs Webb's rigid Victorian morality and because he tried to dethrone Webb from his reign over the Fabian Society." 288
In contrast to the Webbs and Shaw, Wells was an anti-fascist who also never became an apologist for communist dictatorships. He remained prominent in Labour politics over the years and in 1932 - alongside Aldous Huxley (one year after writing Brave New World), 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, almost two years after the Great Depression set in. In their magazine 'Plan' the FPSI claimed the recent depression had been engineered by the big bankers. Alongside allied groups as the Council for Civil Liberties and the Socialist League, the FPSI also crusaded against what its executives saw was the increased "fascisation" of Britain, sponsored by the big banks, the Rothermere Press and the British Union of Fascists. [266] 289 Among the material they wrote was the following text. Published in 1934, by now should contain some very recognizable Round Table-linked claims of professor Carroll Quigley:
"Then came 1931, and there was an operation planned to bring Germany into the dictatorship-world empire scheme. The British monarchy was behind it; others were behind it; people in New York were behind it. Initially, the understanding of the Anglo-American supporters of this fascist project - which was largely based in France, actually, around firms like Lazard Freres and so forth. But the intent of the project was to have the Germans re-arm, and [have them] destroy the Soviet Union. While Germany was embedded in Russia, in the process of trying to […] the Soviet Union, then, the allies - France and Britain - intended to jump on Germany's rear, and crush Germany, and be rid of the Soviet Union at the same time, and set up world dictatorship." 290
Fabian support and opposition to communism and certainly fascism can get a little confusing, because not all Fabians exactly agreed with the positions of the Webbs or Shaw, the Fabian Society's most prominent leaders. In addition, the Webbs and Shaw maintained a number of curious, elite ties. Starting in 1926, for example, George Bernard Shaw became a life-long close friend of Nancy Astor and her husband Vincent, also known as the 2nd Viscount Astor. Vincent Astor was a Pilgrims Society member, as were countless of his British and American family members.
Nancy Astor is sometimes described as "anti-fascist", because she changed her tune at the very last moment, when World War II had already started and she and her "Cliveden Set" was mired in controversy. 291 That's not a particularly satisfying interpretation, certainly not with so many Pilgrims around her - or in general - who were interested in building up fascism as a bulwark against communism and socialism. In addition, from correspondences with ambassador Joseph Kennedy (Pilgrims Society) it can be determined that Nancy was staunchly anti-communist, staunchly anti-Catholic and absolutely hated Jews. Because of all that, she also was pro-Nazi. About the only thing she criticized the Nazis' on were their views on the position of women in society. 292
The "Cliveden Set" was mentioned a minute ago. This network needs a little additional explanation. Vincent and Nancy Astor owned the large Cliveden estate, located several miles west of London, on the Thames river. It was home to the so-called "Cliveden Set", a group of influential friends that was pursuing a pro-Nazi appeasement policy through conspiracy 293 which was largely implemented by prime minister Neville Chamberlain. We already discussed Chamberlain's deep ties to Imperial Chemical Industries in Britain and the Du Pont-General Motors empire in the United States, much of it dominated by Pilgrims Society members. Robert Brand of Lazard, Lord Halifax, and Philip Kerr, the 11th Marquess of Lothian, were key members of Nancy Astor's Cliveden Set. All three were leading Pilgrims and important pursuers of the appeasement policy with Nazi Germany, alongside Neville Chamberlain. Their idea was to have Hitler crush all forms of socialism and communism, including the Soviet Union itself. Geoffrey Dawson, the long-time editor of The Times was a member of the Cliveden Set. Dawson's father-in-law, Sir Arthur Lawley, also known as the 6th Lord Wenlock in the final years of his life, was a Pilgrim.
The Cliveden Set and many of its members - including Nancy Astor, Kerr, Brand, Dawson, Lawley and Lionel Curtis - grew out of "Milner's Kindergarten" 294, which in turn grew out of the Rhodes secret society, established to form an Anglo-Saxon-dominated world order. Hence, the title of professor Carroll Quigley's 1981 book The Anglo-American Establishment - From Rhodes to Cliveden.
Needless to say, the "close friendship" between the anti-communist, pro-Nazi establishmentarian Nancy Astor and the Fabian, Stalinist hardliner George Bernard Shaw has been prefixed with the word "unlikely". Nancy Astor is the one who began making overtures to Shaw in 1926. Initially it was Shaw's wealthy wife, Charlotte, who was particularly interested in meeting the Astors, this because she, according to Beatrice Webb, possessed an "inveterate love of all that accompanies wealth and social prestige and [a] dislike of "little people"". 295 Reportedly Nancy Astor was attracted to Shaw's unmaterialistic, stubborn and intellectual nature. Over the course of his life, Shaw often literally had to fight the two decades younger Nancy Astor off his back to prevent her from walking in all the time, dragging him to meetings, and, after the death of his wife, from taking care of him. Similar to his wife Charlotte, Astor generally was extremely pushy and domineering. 296
We find aspects of "Milner's Kindergarten" in another clique linked to the Fabians: the Coefficients, a 14-member dining club that existed in the first decade of the 20th century. Members were a mix of Fabians and establishmentarians who endorsed an imperialistic policy and, according to some, a socially progressive agenda at home. Looking at the Stalinist and pro-Hitler inclinations of some of the members, one begins to wonder about that last aspect. Among the members were:
- Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leaders of the Fabian Society, together with George Bernard Shaw;
- H.G. Wells, the moderate Fabian member who was invited to the club by the Webbs;
- Bertrand Russell, another moderate Fabian Society member;
- Lord 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.
It appears that H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, both brought in by the Webbs, were the only moderate members and Fabians in the Coefficients Club. Wells, of course, soon ridiculed the Webbs as Machiavellian manipulators, referring to the Coefficients Club as "the Pentagram Circle". Wells' long-time friend Bertrand Russell, who regarded the Webbs and Shaw as "fundamentally undemocratic" whose Fabianism came down to "worship of the State", described his experiences in "the Pentagram Circle" as follows:
"[Despite having been turned] into a Pacifist ... I became a member of a small dining club called 'The Coefficients', got up by Sidney Webb for the purpose of considering political questions from a more or less Imperialist point of view. It was in this club that I first became acquainted with H.G. Wells, of whom I had never heard until then. His point of view was more sympathetic to me than that of any other member. Most of the members, in fact, shocked me profoundly. I remember Amery's eyes gleaming with blood-lust at the thought of a war with America... One evening Sir Edward Grey (not then in office) made a speech advocating the policy of [Triple] Entente [the 1907 alliance of Britain, France and Russia against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire], which had not yet been adopted by the Government. I stated my objections to the policy very forcibly, and pointed out the likelihood of its leading to war, but no one agreed with me, so I resigned from the club. It will be seen that I began my opposition to the first [world] war at the earliest possible moment." 297
Interestingly, the overlapping Round Table network, the Coefficients Club and Cliveden Set apparently played not unimportant roles in what resulted in World War I and World War II. To top it off, this network was hanging out with three Fabian Society leaders who were unabashed supporters of Stalinist communism and basically any other dictatorial regime.
We know that the Round Table and certainly the Cliveden Set were rather tightly linked to the Pilgrims. But what about the Fabians and the Coefficients Club? Bertrand Russell doesn't appear to have been involved in the Pilgrims, at least based on the information available at this point, but Lord Grey and Lord Milner most certainly did visit various Pilgrims Society meetings. H.G. Wells visited at least one Pilgrims Society meeting. The Cecils were deeply involved in the Pilgrims over several generations and Lord Leopold Amery was involved in various Pilgrims Society meetings since the 1920s until eventually, in 1947, becoming an official member. The tie might not be super-strong, but it is there.
We also shouldn't overlook a certain Professor George Catlin, an executive officer of the Fabian Society from 1935 to 1937 who in 1929 helped H.G. Wells set up the short-lived Realist magazine. Aldous Huxley and Julian Huxley were contributors to the magazine. From 1941 until his death in 1979, Catlin, a champion of Anglo-American relations, was a member of the Pilgrims Society. He appears to be among only a tiny handful of Pilgrims Society members with ties to the Fabian Society.
Strange, in some ways the Fabian Society represented an establishment of some sort. It had its own prominent intellectuals, a major magazine, a major university and key connections to the British establishment. Yet, they were anti-establishment socialists and Stalinists.
The story doesn't fully end here either. An important contributor to the Fabian Society's The New Statesman magazine and especially the Astor-owned Observer newspaper was George Orwell, author of the world-famous dystopian novel 1984 and coincidentally a French student of Aldous Huxley at one point at Eton College. Wonder where today very common "conspiracy" terms as "Big Brother", "thoughtcrime", "thought police" and "doublethink" stem from? Look no further than Orwell's 1984 novel. Orwell not only was employed by The Observer, he was best friends with David Astor, a son of Nancy Astor, a protege of Cliveden Set members Robert Brand and Lord Lothian, and the editor and effective owner of The Observer from 1950 to 1977. Along with his father, brother Michael, other siblings and Cliveden Set mentors, David was a member of the Pilgrims Society. The relationship between David Astor and George Orwell was so close that in 1949 David was the best man at Orwell's wedding. 298 And then we wonder why even today the whole world has heard of men as George Orwell, H.G. Wells, or Aldous Huxley for that matter. With all their establishment ties, they can hardly be considered true pioneers or rebels. As this site as written in increasing frequency, grassroots activism simply doesn't exist. It's hardly surprising either to find that Kim Philby was employed by David Astor as Middle East correspondent before his infamous defection to the Soviet Union in 1963.
Believe it or not, David Astor himself actually was anti-big government, very critical of corrupt politicians, and pro-black. Even after his family lost control of The Observer, the newspaper was bought by David Rockefeller friend, Atlantic Richfield oil chief, and 1001 Club member Robert O. Anderson. To this day The Observer and The Guardian, which are owned by the same interests, are listed by ISGP as the top two "liberal CIA" assets in Great Britain.
Speaking of "liberal CIA", earlier in this article we mentioned the involvement of Alice Astor in the early combined psychedelics-new age disinformation network of the United States, along with Aldous Huxley. Laurance Rockefeller in particular would come to play a leading role in this conspiracy and new age disinformation network, seemingly on behalf of friendly CIA directors as Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Laurance Rockefeller was best friends with Pilgrims Society member Brooke Astor, as was David Rockefeller. Brooke Astor's husband was Pilgrims Society member Vincent Astor, the head of the U.S. branch of the Astor family who was of roughly the same age as Waldorf and Nancy Astor. While the latter operated the Cliveden Set network and were courting U.S. communist leaders as George Bernard Shaw, Vincent Astor in the United States, who had the ear of President Roosevelt, was setting up an Eastern Establishment intelligence network through "The Room" and the Walrus Club in New York City. This private network liaised with the British and leading Pilgrims as Nelson Rockefeller, Winthrop Aldrich and David Bruce. It's basically from here, in the years running up to World War II that we can say with certainty that both the Astor and Rockefeller families maintained top level CIA and probably MI6 ties. It is very clear that this cooperation between establishment families with their wealth and the security services stands at the core of today's controlled opposition network surrounding conspiracies and the new age.
Despite the fact that H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell did not see eye-to-eye with Fabian Society leaders George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, maybe we shouldn't be naive and assume both individuals operated without the support of the establishment. After all, we already discussed Russell's involvement in anti-ICBM and Kennedy assassination activism. If he was operating as a totally honest and independent individual in these capacities, he might well be the first and only prominent individual to have do so. Both remind me a lot of today's "liberal CIA" network.
Wells's idea of world social democracy today is largely continued by organizations as the Socialist International, if not the United Nations. I would love to say today's Socialist International is separate from the Bilderberg or "New World Order" establishment, but it isn't. I personally became aware of this while putting together ISGP's 2017 article on the "liberal CIA" pro-Third World immigration network which has been organizing protest after protest in country after country against Donald Trump. Apart from a large number of feminist and pro-immigration groups being financed by key foundations as Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and Open Society (Soros), and members of Europe's political parties, the Socialist International network has been very deeply involved in anti-Trump protests and pro-Third World immigration propaganda. I've not been able to find any major cash flows moving towards the Socialist International, so it is quite possible that the undermining of this network is the result of large-scale security state infiltration.
Wells-type global socialism has the most in common with today's "new left" "liberal CIA" movement, which also happens to be super-pro-United Nations, super-pro-human rights, super-pro-Third World immigration, super-"sustainable development"-oriented, and really is totally and completely acting as a controlled opposition network for individuals who have grown tired of the more right-wing traditional neocon and supposedly liberal Eastern Establishment. If the Fabian socialists, that aspect that actually was "socialist", has been acting in a similar manner is hard to say, but similar to "liberal CIA" kingpins, the Fabian socialists never were part of the core of the Pilgrims Society. That core has been reserved for big bankers, corporate CEO and top politicians. As usual, the only exception to this rule has been the Rockefeller family and some of its closest allies, such as some of the Astors or Rothschilds, most notably Edmund de Rothschild. This clique always had its hands in everything, from pro-big business CIA coups to "new left" globalism involving the United Nations and sustainable development.
By the way, speaking of the term "new world order": after H.G. Wells' use of the term in 1940, it was primarily used during the latter stages of the Cold War by a number of politicians to denote a possible future in which the Soviet Union either collapsed or when it would begin to cooperate with the West. President George H. W. Bush, for example, famously used to term on several occasions in this period. Especially in case of Russia permanently aligning itself with the West, this most certainly would mean the birth of a "new world order"-type situation and a major step to global domination, and possibly even global government, by the West. However, if China continues to increase in power, we might well one day see a whole different type of "new world order".
In other words, the term "new world order" is not necessarily synonymous with global government, as the right always makes it out to be. It's simply a term used to describe a major shift or major increase in the balance of power on planet Earth. A "new world order" can take all kinds of forms. Yes, with H.G Wells, the term "new world order" most definitely represented global government with communist inclinations, but it is unclear to what extent the core group of the Pilgrims Society is committed to the goal of global government. More on that in the next section.
The propaganda is true? "The globalists"
The most obvious target of the John Birchers and the right have been "the globalists" centering around the Rockefeller family.
World War II was the major turning point in history that 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, known today 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 these men were 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. 299
Monnet's credentials as an "agent" 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, a Pilgrim; John Tuthill, the head of the Atlantic Institute in the 1960s, an institute mainly founded by Pilgrims; the U.S. State Department under Pilgrim John Foster Dulles, and the CIA under Pilgrims executive Allen Dulles. He also worked closely with the Dutch globalist Max Kohnstamm, a private secretary to Queen Wilhelmina of Orange, a frequent Bilderberg visitor, and the initial 1973 European chairman of the Trilateral Commission.
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 (Pilgrim; 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 (Pilgrim; chair Chase Manhattan Bank), Allen Sproul (Pilgrim; 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 (Pilgrim; Chase; World Bank; Fed; Brookings; Bilderberg) and Marcus Wallenberg (Bilderberg) were among the chairmen of the foundation. Looking at all these names it's hard to doubt Monnet's loyalties.
In 1970, 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 published a book titled Between to Ages. 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 which Pilgrim and former David Rockefeller roommate George S., Franklin, Jr. also was involved. In his book Brzezinski gave a good description of the new, emerging globalist elite:
"Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites, but now they are composed of international businessmen, scholars, professional men, and public officials. The ties of these new elites cut across national boundaries, their perspectives are not confined by national traditions, and their interests are more functional than national. These global communities are gaining in strength and as was true in the Middle Ages, it is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook. The creation of the global information grid, facilitating almost continuous intellectual interaction and the pooling of knowledge, will further enhance the present trend toward international professional elites and toward the emergence of a common scientific language (in effect, the functional equivalent of Latin). This, however, could create a dangerous gap between them and the politically activated masses, whose "nativism"— exploited by more nationalist political leaders—could work against the "cosmopolitan" elites." 300
Eventually Brzezinski became a member of the Pilgrims Society too, albeit only for a limited number years. 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 General Richard Stilwell, as well as the upcoming pro-Zionist neoconservatives around Senator Henry Jackson. Without the support of Carter's secretary of state Cyrus Vance, a Pilgrim who had come from the Rockefeller Foundation, Brzezinski compromised with Team B. Next to his Trilateral "interdependence" approach, he also followed a hardline anti-communist policy in the Middle East, supported the Shah in Iran and lured the Soviet Union into Afghanistan. 301 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 largely behind the scenes Brzezinski continued as one of the most important Eastern Establishment anti-communist crusaders for years, if not decades, to come. 302
The main point here is that the globalization process is run by the Anglo-American Establishment - the core of the Pilgrims Society if you will - and many allied liberal-oriented businessmen in North America and Europe. Sometimes one wonders, however, how much members these days are interested in political integration. Political integration of the European Union, for example, has progressed mighty slow, with citizens in many countries still not being able to properly speak English and Third World immigration destroying the integrity of the continent. It appears the primary obsession simply seems to be deregulation, so it becomes easier for banks and multinationals to expand their business, and also to increase the economy of the West as a whole. At the core, throughout the 20th century and early 21st century, there has always been the Rockefeller family, which has been globalist, CIA, anti-communist, and also very much pro-human rights, pro-United Nations, pro-green and "new leftist". The Pilgrims, as a whole, however, they're globalist but maybe not a ideologically motivated in creating "world government" and a "new world order" as the right makes them out to be.
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:
- The Pilgrims Society predates the founding of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs - two closely-linked think tanks - by almost 20 years, and therefore easily connects J. P. Morgan, Sr. (d. 1913), Andrew Carnegie (d. 1919), and Jacob Schiff (d. 1920) to the same Anglo-American network. Daniel Coit Gilman (d. 1908), who incorporated Skull & Bones into the Russell Trust and founded the Carnegie Institution of Washington with Andrew Carnegie in 1902, is another interesting example.
- This discussion of the Pilgrims Society confirms statements that have been heard since at least the early part of the 20th century that the international bankers in New York have been "in league" with the British aristocracy. The connections between members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs have been there, just as the connections between some of the leading New York families and the British royal family, but the Pilgrims Society makes the whole picture much easier to see. In other words, it will convince more people in a shorter amount of time that there has been such a thing as an Anglo-American aristocracy.
- An analysis of the Pilgrims Society makes it possible to better describe the elitist Anglo-American social network, consisting of the Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches, Templar and Masonic organizations, and a whole range of recreational groups. The Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (which is changing its elitist image) have only drawn in persons that are influential in foreign policy or benefit in some other way from attending meetings. The majority of U.S. Pilgrims have not been members of the CFR, but their biographies still tell an interesting story. Among the important Pilgrims who have not been CFR members are Hulbert S. Aldrich, the Drexels, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, William Vanderbilt Cecil, William S. Farish III, Walter Cronkite, Donald Elliman (Time) and Thomas A. Murphy (General Electric).
- Even today there are no historical membership lists of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the public domain. This Pilgrims Society article has circumvented this problem and still makes it possible to identify and link together many historical members of the British establishment.
Astor, 2nd Viscount 1879-1952 Listed member |
According to Quigley, he became part of the Rhodes Secret Society (1891-1902) and Milner Group (1902-1925) around 1920 and grew increasingly influential during this period. Astor's "Cliveden Set" was close to the "Round Table Group". MP 1910-1919. Parliamentary secretary to the prime minister 1918. Co-founder in 1920 and chairman Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) 1935-1949. Involvement in the League of Nations. |
Balfour, Arthur 1848-1930 Listed member |
MP 1874-1922. Private secretary to foreign affairs secretary Lord Robert Cecil (Marquess of Salisbury) 1878-1880. Chief secretary for Ireland 1887-1891. 1st lord of treasury and leader of the House of Commons 1891-1906. Prime minister 1902–1905. Foreign secretary 1916-1919. Head of the British Mission to America in 1917. Founding president British branch of the English Speaking Union in 1918. Head of the British Mission to Washington Conference 1921–1922. |
Brand, Lord Robert 1878-1963 Frequent visitor |
All Souls, Oxford. Part of the Rhodes Secret Society (1891-1902) and Milner Group (1902-1925) in South Africa. Became a dominant figure in this group after the death of Lord Lothian in 1940. Financial adviser to Lord Robert Cecil, chair of Supreme Deputy chair British war mission in Washington, D.C. 1917-1918. Economic Council at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. At the Lazard bank 1909-1960, including as managing director. Frequent visitor of Pilgrims gatherings in the 1950s with Lord Kindersley of Lazard. Advisory board BBC 1951-1956. Director of The Times 1925-1959. Director Lloyds Bank. |
Brand, Adm. Sir Hubert 1870-1955 Known visitor |
Brother of Lord Robert Brand. Naval admiral. Extra equerry to the king in 1922. Visitor of the Bohemian Grove in 1929. Principal naval aide to the king 1931-1932. |
D'Abernon, Lord Visitor |
According to Quigley, Lord D'Abernon was part of the pro-Nazi Germany "anti-Bolsheviks", along with Lord Curzon and General Jan Smuts: "D'Abernon advocated a secret alliance of Britain "with the German military leaders in cooperating against the Soviets." As ambassador of Great Britain in Berlin in 1920-1926, D'Abernon carried on this policy and blocked all efforts by the Disarmament Commission to disarm, or even inspect, Germany..." The anti-Bolsheviks were partly aligned with the Round Table group members. Both pushed the Dawes Plan and Locarno pact. Vice president of the largely pro-Nazi Anglo-German Association, along with H.A.L. Fisher. |
Esher, 2nd Viscount 1852-1930 Visitor 1906-1911 period |
Also known as Reginald Baliol Brett. Rumors his mother was an illegitimate daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte. Protege of Oxford's William Johnson Cory, with whom he shared an apparent love for young boys (cult of Victorian pederasty). Private secretary to the 8th Duke of Devonshire 1878-1885. MP 1880-1885. Deputy governor of Windsor Castle 1901-1928, governor 1928 until his death in 1930. Very close to the royal family. |
Fisher, H.A.L. 1865–1940 Visitor 1922 dinner |
Protege of Sir Edward Grey. MP. President of the Board of Education under prime minister David Lloyd George. Delegate to the first League of Nations Assembly 1920-1922. Governor BBC. Member Oxford Preservation Trust. Warden of Oxford's All Souls college. Trustee and chair Rhodes Trust. Member RIIA. Nazi Germany appeaser, but disagreed with the treatment of Jews. |
Grey, Sir Edward 1862-1933 Listed member |
Whig liberal. Member of the pro-empire Coefficients dining club, together with Leopold Amery, Alfred Milner and H. G. Wells, 1902-1908 period. Foreign secretary 1905-1916 and thus played a key role during the first half of WWI. Liberal leader House of Lords 1923-1924. Chancellor of Oxford University since 1928. |
Halifax, 1st Earl of 1881-1959 President |
Supported by the Milner Group until March 1939 when they began asking him to support the campaign against Hitler. Conservative MP 1910-1925. Secretary of war 1935. Lord privy seal and leader of the House of Lords 1935-1937. Visited Nazi Germany for a first time in 1936 and loved it, especially its anti-communist outlook. |
Harcourt, 2nd Viscount 1908-1979 Exec. committee |
Great-grandson of Junius S. Morgan and great-nephew of J. P. Morgan, Sr. Traineeships at J. P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Stanley. Managing director Morgan Grenfell 1931-1968, chair, 1968–1973. Executive director IMF and the World Bank 1954-1957. Chair Rhodes Trust 1975-. Sponsor/director of the elite Per Jacobsson Foundation. |
Kindersley, 1st Baron 1871–1954 Listed member |
Chairman Lazard, chairman Hudson's Bay Company, director of the Bank of England, and an associate of "Europe's founder", Jean Monnet. Involved in the 1924 Dawes Committee. Died in 1954. |
Kindersley, 2nd Baron 1899–1976 Exec. committee |
Managing director Lazard (under his father) 1927-1964. Chairman Rolls Royce 1956-1968. Director Bank of England 1947-1967. Died in 1976. His son, the 3rd Baron Kindersley (b. 1929), became vice chairman of Lazard in 1981. |
Lothian, 11th Marquess of 1882-1940 Listed member |
By Quigley Lord Lothian was considered the leader of the Rhodes Secret Society (1891-1902) and Milner Group (1902-1925) in the period 1925-1940. Grandson of the 14th Duke of Norfolk through his mother. The Dukes of Norfolk are Englands oldest and most aristocratic Catholic family with extensive ties to the Knights of Malta. They have been representatives to the Vatican for many centuries. Lord Lothian and his close friend, Nancy Astor, converted to Christian Scientists, however. Part of Lord Milner's "Kindergarten" in 1905-1910. Co-founder and editor of The Round Table 1910-1916. David Lloyd George's private secretary 1916-1921 during the course of WWI. Active at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Leading RIIA member. In 1923 he published The Prevention of War with Lionel Curtis of Rhodes Secret Society fame. Secretary Rhodes Trust 1925-1939. Good friend of top Morgan man Thomas Lamont. U.K. ambassdor to the U.S. 1939-1940. Important appeaser of Nazi Germany until 1939 when he realized Hitler couldn't be controlled. |
Lothian, 12th Marquess of 1922-2004 Exec. committee |
Member Knights of Malta. Held government positions under foreign secretary and prime minister Lord Home in the early 1960s, and in 1970-1972. Member European Parliament 1973-1977. His elder son, the Conservative politician Michael Ancram, today the 13th Marquess of Lothian, is head of the secretive Cercle group, set up in the early 1950s by Otto von Habsburg's Opus Dei clique and a liaison group with the CIA and MI6. The group is closely tied to the Cold War's Strategy of Tension. |
Lyttelton, Alfred 1857-1913 Regular visitor 1906-1912 |
Member of a politically very influential family. His older brother, Neville, was commander-in-chief of South Africa 1902-1904 and of Ireland 1908-1912.
Arthur Balfour's closest friend and married Edith Balfour, who worked for RIIA and the League of Nations. Part of the Rhodes Secret Society and later Milner Group, according to Quigley. MP 1895-1906. Chairman of a mission to the Transvaal (South Africa) in 1900. Colonial secretary 1903-1906. His son, Oliver, became Churchill's minister of state in the Middle East and minister of Production 1942-1945. Ran into trouble in June 1944 when he stated that FDR had baited Japan into WWII. |
Makins, Lord 1904-1996 Exec. committee |
Also known as the 1st Lord Sherfield. All Souls fellow at Oxford. Part of the Milner Group, according to Quigley. Foreign service officer involved in the League of Nations, WWII and United Nations. Founding chair of the Ditchley Foundation in 1958. His son, Christopher Makins, also the 2nd Lord Sherfield: Foreign service officer in London, Paris and Washington. Deputy director Trilateral Commission 1975-1976. Deputy director Carnegie Endowment 1977-1979. Division manager and assistant vice president SAIC 1979-1989. Governor Atlantic Institute anno 1987. Vice president and then executive vice president Aspen Institute 1989-1997. Senior advisor German Marshall Fund 1997-1999. President Atlantic Council of the U.S. since 1999. |
Marris, Adam D. 1906-1983 Listed member |
At Lazard in 1929-1939, then headed by Pilgrims Lord Brand and Lord Kindersley. Considered a ladder-day addition of The Round Table Group / Milner Group by Professor Carroll Quigley. Ministry of Economic Warfare in 1939. First secretary in Washington 1941-1945. Deputy leader British delegation to the Marshall Plan conference in 1947 and later that year involved in an EEC conference in Washington. Managing director Lazard 1947-1971, director until 1973. Became editor of RIIA's magazine International Affairs in 1949. Director Barclays Bank 1953-1977. Director Scottish and Australian Bank 1951-1971. Director P&O 1952-1972. Director Tobacco Securities Trust since 1965. Director Australia and New Zealand Banking Group 1969-1976. Founder Industrial Mining Development Bank of Iran under the Shah of Iran, to which he was a frequent visitor. |
Milner, Lord Alfred 1854-1925 Visitor in 1906 |
Assistant editor Pall Mall Gazette under William T. Stead, considered by Quigley to have become one of the original members of the Rhodes Secret Society in 1891, along with Reginald Brett (2nd Viscount Esher). Alfred Milner reportedly was the first additional member brought into their "Society of the Elect". Rhodes was the leader; Stead, Brett and Milner formed his "junta of three". From 1902 to 1925 Milner was leader of the Rhodes Secret Society, which became known as the Milner Group. During this latter period Lord Lothian and Lionel Curtis were considered his most influential associates. Governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner for Southern Africa 1897-1901. The Anglo-Boer War was fought 1899-1902. Also remembered for managing a group of proteges here known as "Milner's Kindergarten" in this period. Administrator of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony 1901-1902, 1st governor 1902-1905. Secretary of war at the conclusion of WWI 1918-1919. Secretary of state for the colonies 1919-1921. |
Ormsby-Gore, Sir David 1918-1985 President |
Grandson of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury (Cecil) through his mother. His father, the 4th Baron Harlech, was involved in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, high commissioner of South Africa during WWII and chair of the Midland Bank 1952-1957. He was considered part of the Milner Group by Quigley. 5th Baron Harlech: British ambassador to the U.S. 1961-1965. Extremely close to John F. Kennedy, a distant relative, and played an important advisory role during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Also grew very close to Robert McNamara, Robert Kennedy, McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger. Went from conservative to very centrist, even left-wing, during his Kennedy years. At home, he resigned as deputy leader of the Conservatives. Chair European Movement 1969-1975, financed by the CIA's American Committee for a United Europe, as well as the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. Chair RIIA 1978-1984. Died in a car crash in 1985. Many family members died in bizarre deaths, just as the Kennedys. |
Rothschild, Lord Nathan M. 1840-1915 Visitor in 1911 |
Son of Lionel de Rothschild (1808-1879), whom he followed up as head of N. M. Rothschild & Sons in 1879. Funded the building of the Suez Channel. Also funded Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company and De Beers diamond conglomerate. Administered Rhodes's estate after his death in 1902 and helped to set up the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. |
Salter, Lord Arthur 1881–1975 Listed member |
Close to "Europe's founder" Jean Monnet since 1914 and himself a supporter of an integrated Europe. Secretary Supreme Economic Council at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Worked for the League of Nations, the Reparations Committee for Germany and the U.N. |
Smuts, Gen. Jan 1870-1950 Visitor U.S. and U.K. branches in 1946 |
Powerhouse of South African politics. Hired by Cecil Rhodes as his personal legal advisor in 1895. State attorney South Africa 1898. Commander in the Boer War 1898. Colonial secretary Transvaal 1907. Commanded troops in British East Africa 1916–17 during WWI. Minister of the interior and minister of mines of South Africa 1910-1912, minister of defence, 1910-1920, minister of finance 1912-1913, prime minister and minister for native affairs 1919-1924, minister of justice 1933–39, prime minister and minister of external affairs and defence 1939-1948. Close to Lord Milner and Lord Brand. |
Appendix B: Pilgrims involved with the Drayton Group and Lonrho
Drayton was also known as the 117 Old Broad Street Group or 117 Group.
Adeane, Sir Robert 1905-1979 Listed member |
Accompanied Prince Philip to India and Nepal in 1961 where they shot tigers together. Member of the WWF's secretive and elite 1001 Club. Chair of the powerful 117 Group, the later Drayton Group, 1966-1972. Director Steenbok Investment Trust, which reportedly managed the Queen's vast investments in South Africa. |
Adeane, Lord Michael 1910-1984 Listed member |
Page of honour to King George V. Assistant to King George VI 1937-1952. Private secretary to Queen Elizabeth 1953-1972. Michael's son Edward became treasurer and private secretary to Prince Charles. Director Banque Belge and the Royal Bank of Canada 1972-1980. |
Airlie, 13th Earl of b. 1926 Exec. committee |
Pilgrims executive also known as David Ogilvy. Married a granddaughter of Pilgrims Society financier Otto Kahn. J. Henry Schroder banker 1953-1984, including chairman. Lord Chamberlain to the queen 1984-1997, following in the footsteps of his father. His younger brother, Angus Ogilvy: Married Princess Alexandria of Kent, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. Director Midland Bank and Samuel Montagu. Joined the powerful 117 Group / Drayton Group in 1950. Recruited the later controversial Tiny Rowland of Lonrho in 1960 for his 117 Group and lived next-door to him for many years, with the families sharing breakfast. Vice chairman and chair in 1966 under Sir Robert Adeane. Director of Lonrho until controversy erupted in the 1970s. Rowland was a major patron of the anti-communist UNITA rebels in Africa. |
Ball, Sir Joseph 1885-1961 Listed member |
Notorious MI5 security chief who undermined the Labour Party and helped Chamberlain promote his pro-fascist "appeasement" policy in the run-up to WWII. A security chief during WWII. Director of numerous South African mining companies since then. Since at least 1945 a director of Lonrho and, together with Angus Ogilvy (see above), hired Tiny Rowland in 1960 to run the soon-to-be controversial African mining enterprise. His son, Alan Ball, Joined Lonrho in 1947 and was one of its key managers from the 1960s to the 1980s, along with Duncan Duncan-Sandys and Tiny Rowland. |
Duncan-Sandys, Lady Marie-Claire b. 1929 Regular visitor 2007-2009 |
Her husband, Duncan Duncan-Sandys (1908-1987): Son-in-law of Churchil. Founding chair European Movement 1947-1950. Director Ashanti Goldfields 1947-1951, 1966-1972. Involved with Lonrho since 1968. Chair Lonrho 1972-1984, president 1984. Supporter of its controversial CEO Tiny Rowland and put in place to control him. |
Elibank, 2nd Viscount 1877-1951 Listed member |
Until 1950 chairman of the London and Rhodesian Mining and Land Company, best known as Tiny Rowland's Lonrho. Lonrho was part of the elite 117 Group / Drayton Group. Also resigned as chair African Investment Trust , chair Malaysian Tin, deputy chair Mineral Holdings Limited and other companies. |
Shelbourne, Sir Philip 1924-1993 Listed member |
Partner N. M. Rothschild & Sons 1962–1970. Director Jersey International Bank of Commerce since 1970. CEO of the 117 Group / Drayton Corp 1971–1972, chair 1973–1974. Chair and SEO Samuel Montagu & Co. 1974-1980. Chair and CEO British National Oil Corporation, 1980–1982. Chair Britoil 1982–88. |
Appendix C: Astor family members in the Pilgrims
Astor, 2nd Viscount 1879-1952 Listed member |
Son of William Waldorf Astor I, 1st Viscount Astor (1848–1919), who, in turn, was the son of John Jacob Astor III (1822-1890). Astor III was the founder of the British branch of the family. According to Quigley, he became part of the Rhodes Secret Society (1891-1902) and Milner Group (1902-1925) around 1920 and grew increasingly influential during this period. Astor's "Cliveden Set" was close to the "Round Table Group". MP 1910-1919. Parliamentary secretary to the prime minister 1918. Co-founder in 1920 and chairman RIIA 1935-1949. Involvement in the League of Nations. Owner of The Observer. |
Astor, John Jacob, 4th 1864-1912 Listed member |
Inventor and real estate manager. In 1907 he built the Astoria Hotel in New York, which adjoined the Waldorf Hotel, built by his cousin William Waldorf Astor. The complex became known as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Died on the Titanic in 1912. |
Astor, Vincent 1891-1959 Listed member |
Involved in New York City real estate. Chairman and major shareholder in Newsweek. Director of the Rockefeller-controlled Chase National Bank in the 1920s and 1930s. Trustee New York Public Library and the New York Zoological Society. Private sector (banking and business) intelligence chief for his friend and neighbor FDR in the run up to World War II until 1941. In the 1930s a key founder of "the Room" and the Walrus Club private sector intelligence network with persons as OSS/CIA founder Bill Donovan, OSS chief David Bruce, future CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, Nelson Rockefeller, Rockefeller family member Winthrop Aldrich, and other elites, many of them Pilgrims. In 1938 he sent his yacht Nourmahal to the Pacific to gather intelligence on Japanese-controlled islands. In the early 1950s, his sister, Alice Astor, was involved in the bizarre Round Table Foundation of Andrija Puharich. She even was present at the December 31, 1952 supposed channelling of "The Nine" Ennead Gods of Egypt, together with Arthur M. Young and his wife Ruth Forbes Young, the latter a friend of an establishment lover of Allen Dulles (CIA director and Pilgrims executive) whose son and daughter-in-law were close friends/aides of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina. Young and his wife set up the Foundation for the Study of Consciousness, which, like the Round Table Foundation and overlapping groups as the Laurance Rockefeller-influenced Esalen Institute and Bechtel-influence SRI International have been described by ISGP as a major conspiracy, UFO, history and spiritual disinformation network ran by "liberal CIA" elements. Alice associate Puharich is primarily known for brining Uri Geller over from Israel, where he was friends with prime ministers and Mossad chiefs, to SRI. Alice also introduced magic mushroom pioneer Gordon Wasson to Puharich, who most likely was involved in some kind of CIA MKULTRA program. |
Astor, Brooke 1902-2007 Listed member |
Married Vincent Astor in 1953 and inherited virtually his entire fortune after his death in 1959. Life trustee Rockefeller University. Executive committee New York Public Library, New York City. Life trustee, member conservation committee, New York Zoological Society. Trustee emeritus, member council of fellows, Pierpont Morgan Library. Executive committee ex officio Metropolitan Museum Art. Died at the age of 105. Extremely close friend of the Rockefellers, Laurance Rockefeller in particular, but later in life also David Rockefeller. |
Astor, John Jacob "Jakey", 6th 1902-2007 Listed member |
Survived the sinking of the Titanic in the womb of his mother. Primarily a New York City socialite. His daughter, Jacqueline Astor, married in New York to John R. Drexel 4th of the Pilgrims Society banking family. |
Astor, David 1912-2001 Listed member |
Son of the 2nd Viscount Astor and younger brother of apparent non-Pilgrim the 3rd Viscount Astor (1907-1966). In 1931 at Oxford he met Adam von Trott, later executed for a failed for a plot against Hitler. Astor himself was wounded in France during WWII. Owner and editor of The Observer 1950-1977, when it was sold to close David Rockefeller friend and 1001 Club member Robert O. Anderson. Friend of George Orwell who warned people against big government and a police state. |
Astor, Michael 1916-1980 Listed member |
Son of the 2nd Viscount Astor and younger brother of apparent non-Pilgrim the 3rd Viscount Astor (1907-1966). Served in WWII 1939-1945. MP 1945-1951. Chair London Library. Executive director Nature Trust 1978-. |
Astor, 4th Viscount b. 1951 Listed member |
Also known as William Waldorf Astor. His stepdaughter is married to the Conservative prime minister David Cameron. Director Chorion Plc since 1996 and Urbium Plc since 2002. |
Astor, 1st Baron 1886-1971 Listed member |
Also known as John Jacob Astor V. Son of the 1st Viscount Astor. Aide de camp to the Viceroy of India 1911-1914. Commander in WWI 1914-1918. MP 1922-1945. Chief proprietor The Times 1922-1966. Sold the newspaper to Lord Thomson of Fleet in 1966. Director Hambros 1934-1960, Barclays 1942-1952. Governor BBC in 1937. President Press Club, Commonwealth Press Union and Newspapers Press Fund. |
Astor, 2nd Baron 1918-1984 Chairman and president |
Also known as Gavin Astor. Director of The Times 1952-1959, chair 1959-1966, The Times Holding 1966-1984. Director Reuters 1955-1961. Chair and president Commonwealth Press Union 1959-1981. |
Astor, Hugh 1920-1999 Listed member |
Younger brother of the 2nd Baron Astor. Vice chair and co-owner of The Times, but eventually went into book publishing. |
Astor, John 1923-1987 Listed member |
Youngest son of Pilgrim the 1st Baron of Hever and younger brother of fellow-Pilgrims Gavin and Hugh. MP 1964-1974. John Astor (b. 1953) and George Astor (b. 1958) were his sons. |
Astor, 3rd Baron b. 1946 Exec. committee |
Also known as John Jacob Aster, 8th. Managing director Astor France. Various government duties over the years. Trustee Astor Foundation, the Astor of Hever Trust, and the Canterbury Cathedral Trust. Chair Rochester Cathedral Trust. |
Baring, Hugo 1876-1949 Exec. committee (U.S.) |
Along with the Rothschilds, a member of one of the most influential banking families in British history. Joined Barings & Co. in New York, which was dissolved in 1908 when Hugo and a nephew decided they'd prefer to stay in London. Director National Bank of Egypt and National Westminster Bank. Son killed at Dunkirk during WWII. |
Baring, Sir Evelyn 1918-1991 Exec. committee |
Also known as the 3rd Earl of Cromer. Godson of George V. Traineeship at J. P. Morgan in New York in 1947. Partner in Barings Bank since 1947. Left the bank in 1970 to become ambassador to Washington. Director of the Daily Mail and General Trust, the business of his father-in-law, Lord Rothermere. Governor Bank of England 1961-1966. Chair IBM UK and director of Union Carbide UK, P&O, Shell T&T, and Compagnie Financière de Suez. |
Mrs. Susan Mary Baring Known visitor |
Wife of John Baring, the 7th Baron Ashburton: Grandson of the 1st Viscount Harcourt, closely tied to Cecil Rhodes' Secret Society and the Milner Group. Traineeship at J. P. Morgan in New York. Rose to prominence at Barings after Sir Evelyn Baring left in 1970. Chair Barings Bank 1974-1979. Director Bank of England 1983-1991. Chair BP 1992-1995. Trustee Rhodes Trust 1970-1999, chair 1987-1999. |
Bennett, Sir Frederick | Son of the pro-Nazi Sir Ernest Bennett, a founder of the Anglo-German Fellowship and a member of secretive RIght Club. Director Kleinwort Benson Europe (his mother was a Kleinwort). Influential ultraconservative MP 1950s-1980s, always warning people about the KGB threat. Pinochet supporter. Member Monday Club. Chair of the ultraright Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI), affiliated with MI6, the CIA and Le Cercle, 1978-early 1980s. Honorary director BCCI Hong Kong until 1986. Steering committee Bilderberg. Owned a Rolls Royce and four houses, including one in the Cayman Islands. Known to have visited a Pilgrims dinner in 1983. |
Brittan, Sir Harry 1873-1974 Founding chair, secretary |
Journalist and director of leading newspapers and magazines. Founder Commonwealth Press Union in 1909. MP 1918-1929. Played a role in fostering the Anglo-American alliance during WI and WWII. Appeaser of Nazi Germany and a supporter of Mussolini. Director pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship. Honorary president Friends of Italy 1936-1939. Director Anti-Socialist and Communist Union (Economic League during Cold War) |
Cecil: 4th Marquess of Salisbury 1861-1947 Visitor in 1919 |
Cousin of prime minister Arthur Balfour. MP 1885-1892, 1893-1903. House of Lords 1903-. Lord President of the Council 1922-1924. Leader House of Lords 1925-1929. Lord Privy Seal 1924-1929. In 1936, along with Churchill, a major advocate of rapid British rearmament in face of the Nazi threat. |
Cecil, Lord Robert 1864-1958 Regular visitor 1920s |
Son of the 3rd Marquess of Salibury and member of one of the oldest and influential families in England, starting with Sir William Cecil (1520-1598). Founder of the Carroll Quigley-described "Round Table Group" with Lionel Curtis in 1910. Conservative MP 1906-1923. Assistant foreign secretary 1915-1916, 1918-1919 (WWI). Minister of blockade 1916-1918. Chair Supreme Economic Council of the Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919. Founding president RIIA 1920-1958. Co-founder League of Nations, president of the British League of Nations Union 1923-1945. Present at the final meeting of the League of Nations in 1946 and ended his speech with the words: "The League is dead, long live the United Nations." Hon. life president UN Association. |
Cecil: 5th Marquess of Salisbury 1893-1972 Regular visitor 1940s-1950s |
Son of the 4th Marquess of Salibury and member of one of the oldest and influential families in England. Married to Elizabeth Vere Cavendish, a cousin of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. President Conservative Monday Club 1961-1972, which his son, the 6th Marquess, ran 1974-1981.. |
Cecil, Lord William 1854-1943 Regular visitor 1920s |
Member of another branch of the influential Cecil family, which also descends from Sir William Cecil (1520-1598). Groom-in-waiting to Queen Victoria 1892-1901. Extra gentleman usher under King George V 1924-1937. |
Chalfont, Lord Alun b. 1919 Exective since 1979 |
Director of IBM in the 1970s and Lazard Brothers in the 1980s. Ultraright intelligence asset. Member Conservative Monday Club. Pro-apartheid. Director pro-junta British-Chilean Council. Part of the group that tried to overthrow Labour Prime Minister Wilson in the 1970s, with the excuse that he was a communist agent. Council member of Foreign Affairs Research Institute (FARI). Chair Institute for the Study of Terrorism. Visitor Le Cercle. |
Churchill, Sir Winston | |
Derby, 17th Earl of | Edward George Villiers Stanley |
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan | |
De L'Isle, Viscount | |
Dukes of Devonshire | |
Drake, Sir Eric 1910-1996 |
Joined British Petroleum (BP) in 1935, then known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). As general manager of BP in 1951, played a role in organizing the MI6-CIA coup against Mossadeq. Director BP 1958-, vice chair 1963-1969, chair 1969-1975. Vice chair of P&O in the 1970s. Member 1001 Club. |
Drogheda, Earls of | |
Fellowes, Lord Robert | |
Fisher, Sir Anthony | |
Geddes, 1st Baron | |
Gore-Booth, Lord Paul 1909–1984 Executive committee |
|
Grenfell family | |
Hamilton, Sir Denis | Editor Sunday Times 1961-1967; editor-in-chief The Times 1967-1981,CEO 1967-1970, chair 1971-81. Chairman Reuters 1979-1985. |
Hambro, Sir Charles | |
Hambro, Rupert N. | |
Keswick, Sir William "Tony" | |
Keswick, Sir Henry | |
Kleinwort, Sir Cyril 1905-1980 |
Member of an old banking family. Director of Kleinwort, Benson, Lonsdale Ltd. Co-founder British Invisibles (IFSL). Involved in the London gold price fixing committee at N. M. Rothschild & Sons since 1966. Co-founder Population Concern in 1977 with Ernest Kleinwort and Prince Philip. Family involved in the 1001 Club. |
Londonderry, 7th Marquess of 1878-1949 |
Secretary of state for air 1931-1935. Council member of the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship / Anglo-German Friendship Society. Knight of the Garter. |
Marlborough, 9th Duke of 1871-1934 Visitor in 1911 |
Born Charles Spencer-Churchill. Married American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt in 1895. The wedding was officiated by Bishop Henry Codman Potter, one of the co-founders of the Pilgrims Society. |
McFadzean, Lord William 1903–1996 Executive committee |
Deputy chair Rio Tinto Zinc/BICC Aluminium Holdings 1967-1973. President of the Federation of British Industries 1959-1961. Involved in various other major trade groups. Director Midland Bank 1959-1981, deputy chair 1968-1977. President of the British Nuclear Forum 1964-1966. Deputy chair National Nuclear Corporation 1973-1980. Very pro-E.U. A close relative, Lord Francis McFadzean (1915-1992), was chair of Shell, British Airways and Roll-Royce. |
McGowan, 1st Baron 1874-1961 |
Founding president and deputy chairman Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1926, chair 1930-1950. Director of ICI partner General Motors in the U.S. since at least 1920, together with the du Ponts, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. and Arthur Chamberlain, a close first cousin to prime minister (and ICI shareholder) Neville Chamberlain. All were notorious pro-Nazi appeasers. Member pro-Nazi central council of the Anglo-German Fellowship. Governor Midland Bank. Director Economic League. |
Monckton, 1st Viscount 1891-1965 Visitor mid-1950s |
Advisor to the notoriously pro-Nazi King Edward VIII, also known as the Duke of Windsor. Minister of defence 1955-1956. Chair Midland Bank 1957-1964. Chair Iraq Petroleum Company in 1958. Chair Advisory Commission on Central Africa in 1960. Along with his son, a patron of SAS veteran and alleged government assassin Stephen Kock. |
Mowbray, Lord 1923-2006 |
One of the oldest Catholic families in Britain. Vice-president of the British Association of the Sovereign and Military Order of Malta (SMOM), and was also its longest-serving knight. Sole descendant in the male line (with no breaks) from one of the 25 barons who signed the Magna Carta. House of Lords leader 1960s-1970s. In business in the 1980s. Member of the elite Roxburghe Club, along with White's. |
Nixon, Sir Edwin 1925-2008 |
Managing editor IBM UK, 1965-, chair and CEO 1979-. Director National Westminster Bank 1975-. Campaigned against a European constitution. |
Norfolk, 16th Duke of 1908-1975 Visitor in the 1940s-1950s |
Member of Britain's oldest and most elite Catholic family, which have been liaisons to the Vatican for centuries. They're also leading Knights of Malta and Opus Dei representatives. |
Norfolk, 17th Duke of 1915-2002 |
Ibid. Knight of Malta. Director of Military Intelligence in the 1960s. Represented the queen at the installation of Pope John Paul I in August 1978 and Pope John Paul II in October 1978. |
Oppenheim, Sir Duncan 1904-2003 |
Director British American Tobacco (BAT) 1943-, deputy chair 1947-, chair 1953-1966. Director Lloyds Bank. Chair RIIA 1966-1971. Bilderberg in 1968. Chair Tobacco Securities Trust 1969-1974. Argued against smoking being hazardous. |
Palliser, Sir Michael b. 1922 |
Leading foreign service officer. Chair Samuel Montagu 1984-1993, vice chair 1993-1996. President China-Britain Trade Group. Deputy chair British Invisibles (IFSL). Director UK-Japan 2000 Group. Member CFR and Trilateral Commission. Governor Ditchley and Atlantic Institute. European advisory chair RAND Corp. |
Reading, 1st Marquess of 1860-1935 |
Founding director Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in 1926. President ICI 1931-1935. In 1929 a co-founder and president of the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Association, but obviously would have opposed persecution of the Jews. His wife Eva was chairman of the British section of the World Jewish Congress. |
Roll, Lord 1907-2005 |
Rockefeller fellowship in 1939. Deputy head British Food Mission to North America during WWII. Part of the Marshall Plan and Schumann Plan discussions on the rebuilding of Europe. Involved in the OECD and NATO. Deputy chair S.G. Warburg & Co. 1967-, co-chair 1974-1989, senior advisor 1989-. Director The Times 1967-80, and its holding 1980-1983. Member of the Court of the Bank of England. Director Kissinger Associates since 1984. Member CFR and Trilateral Commission. Governor Atlantic Institute and Ditchley. Bilderberg steering committee since the 1970s, chair 1985-1989. |
Rothschild, James A. de 1878–1957 |
Inherited Waddesdon Manor from Alice de Rothschild in 1922. MP 1929-1945. Director Palestine Electric Corporation. Helped finance Israel's Knesset building. |
Rothschild, Anthony G. de 1887-1961 |
Wounded during WWI. Managing partner N. M. Rothschild & Sons 1918-, retired in 1961. Father of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, chair and CEO of N. M. Rothschild & Sons 1976-2003. |
Rothschild, Edmund 1916-2009 |
Commander of a Jewish Palestinian Unit into Italy 1944-1945. Partner of N.M. Rothschild & Sons 1946-1960, senior partner 1960-1970, chair 1970-1975, followed up by cousin Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. God father to Prince Bernhard's illegitimate daughter Alexia Grinda. Build the sustainable development movement with David Rockefeller and Maurice Strong in the 1970s. |
Runciman, Lord Walter | Shareholder in the Vickers arms company during WWI, reaping huge profits from the war. Wrote the report that led to the Munich Agreement. Member of the central council of the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship. Outspoken supporter of fascist dictator Mussolini, but as a Jew opposed the Jewish prosection of the Nazis. Director Westminster Bank. |
Sassoon, Sir Philip | Son of Sir Albert Sassoon (1856-1912) and Aline de Rothschild, daughter of Baron Gustave de Rothschild. Sir Albert and his brother, Arthur Sassoon, were key members of an infamous Jewish family that dominated 19th century trade in Asia and northern Africa. They also controlled the Chinese opium trade with the Jardines. |
Shackleton, Baron | MP and diplomat. Minister of defence for the RAF 1964-1967. Chair Rio Tinto Zinc Development Enterprises 1973-1983. Deputy chair Rio Tinto Zinc 1975-1982. |
Shawcross, Lord Hartle | Britain's chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials for the Nazi leadership. Attorney general. Official biographer of the late Queen Mother Elizabeth. |
Sinclair, William MacDonald | Executive chair of the Pilgrims Society 1903-1913. Archdeacon of London. Descendent of the Sinclair family of Templar and Rosslyn fame. |
Spiro, Sidney 1914-1991 |
Key protege of Protege of Sir Ernest Oppenheimer in Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers mining companies in southern Africa, along with Harry Oppenheimer. Both Spiro and Harry were 1001 Club members. |
Tennant, Sir Peter 1910-1996 |
Son of a wealthy pre-WWII a member of the Right Club, a secret society of anti-semite pro-Nazis. Recruited into the SOE by Colonel Sir Charles Hambro in 1940. Deputy commander British sector in Berlin 1950-1952. Overseas director of the Federation of British Industry (FBI) 1952-1963. Focused on E.U. integration. Director of C. Tennant, Sons & Co. 1970s. Industrial Adviser, Barclays 1972-1981. Governor Atlantic Institute. In the 1970s chair of the super-secretive Cercle meetings, ran by the CIA, MI6 and Otto von Habsburg's Opus Dei clique. |
Tuke, Sir Anthony | Joined Barclays, a bank previously chaired by Tuke's father and grandfather. Director 1965-1990, chair 1973-1981. Chair Rio Tinto Zinc 1981-1985. |
Turner, Sir Mark | After WWII, Turner rebuilt Rio Tinto Zinc with Sir Val Duncan, an associate of Edmund Rothschild - both 1001 Club members. Council member RIIA 1949-1950. Executive Atlantic Institute. Vice chair Kleinwort Benson 1966-1971. Chair Rio Tinto 1975-1980, after Duncan had died. Director and chair of Brinco, earlier founded by Duncan and Rothschild. |
Villiers, Sir Charles 1912-1992 |
SOE officer in London and Italy 1943-45. Partner Helbert Wagg and Co. 1948-60. Managing director J. Henry Schroder Wagg 1960-68. Chair British Steel Corporation 1976-1989. Founder British-American Project in 1985. |
Warburg, Sir Siegmund 1902-1982 |
Member of the famous German-Anglo-American banking family. Fled Nazi Germany in 1934. Trained at the Rothschild bank. Founder S.G. Warburg in 1946. Partner of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Visited Bilderberg. |
Warburg, George | Son of Sir Siegmund Warburg. |
Wells, H.G. 1866-1946 Visitor in 1913 |
Visited the Pilgrims in 1913. Famous writer of such books as 'The War of the Worlds' (1898), 'The Shape of Things to Come' (1933) and 'The New World Order' (1940). Member socialist Fabian Society. Member Coefficients dining club with Lord Alfred Milner and Lord Leo Amery. Close to Aldous and Julian Huxley. |
Windsor family Patrons |
Numerous members have visited Pilgrims gatherings over the years: King Edward VIII, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Prince Charles, the Duke of Kent and various others. |
Carrington, Lord b. 1919 President |
Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Clitheroe, Lord b. 1929 Member |
Son of a chairman of the Conservative Party 1944-1946. BA and MA from Oxford. Executive director Rio Tinto Zinc, PLC 1968-1987, deputy CEO 1987-1989. RTZ has traditionally been associated with the Rothschild family. Director of Dick Cheney's Halliburton 1989-2001 (Anne L. Armstrong was another Pilgrims Society director of Halliburton in this period; Ray Hunt and Lawrence Eagleburger joined the board in 1998; Kenneth Derr joined in 2001). Chairman of the Yorkshire Bank 1990-1999. |
Guthrie, Lord b. 1938 Speaker |
SAS veteran who served in the Middle East, Malaysia and East Africa. Lengthy MoD career. Appointed aide-de-camp general to the queen in 1993. Chief of the Defence Staff 1997-2001. Gold stick to the queen in 1999. Visitor Munich Security Conference 1999 and 2000. Colonel commandant of the SAS 2000-2009. Director Colt Defense LLC. Director N.M. Rothschild & Sons since about 2002. Annual visitor Trilateral Commission since 2002. Member IISS. Steering committee member CSIS. Helped shore up support for the 2003 Iraq invasion. Special adviser to Aon Special Risks on counter-terrorism since 2004. Paid advisor to Oman and Libya in 2004. Vice president of Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM). Vice-president of the British Association of the Order of Malta. Patron of the Order of Malta's Care Trust. Patron of the pro-Opus Dei Cardinal Hume Centre. Knight commander in the Catholic Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George. Director Ben Gurion University in Israel. Visitor Herzliya Conference (IPS). Decades-long close friend of former Pakistani president Musharraf. Trustee Institute for Strategic Dialogue, Asia House, and the in 2009-founded Top Level Group of UK Parliamentarians for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation. Director of the in 2008-founded United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI). Director Lightbridge Corporation (founded as Thorium Power). Member BASIC Trident Commission (on the UK's nuclear weapons). Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Heseltine, Lady Michael Visitor in 2003 |
Husband: Long-time publisher. MP 1966-2001. Various political positions since the 1970s. Secretary of defence 1983-1986. First secretary of state and deputy prime minister 1995-1997. Chair Haymarket Publishing Group since 1999. Patron Tory Reform Group. Trustee Asia House. Governor Institute of Government. |
Inge, Lord Peter b. 1935 President 2002-2010 |
Army officer 1956-1997. Aide-de-camp general to the queen 1991-1994 and later various honorary positions related to the royal house. Chief of the Defence Staff 1994-1997. Director Hakluyt Foundation 1999–2004, which oversees the activities of the elite private intelligence firm Hakluyt. Consultant to arms manufacturers BAE Systems, Vickers plc. and OWR AG. Chair of the mercenary firm Aegis Defence Services, founded in 2002, headed by the controversial CEO Colonel Tim Spicer, and active in Iraq. Member of the Butler Inquiry team that determined the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction regarding Iraq was flawed to begin with. Visitor Munich Security Conference 2003, 2004, 2006. Director World Security Network. |
Grierson, Sir Ronald 1922-2014 Executive committee since 1970s |
Born in Bavaria. Educated at the Lycée Pasteur, Paris; and Balliol College, Oxford. Worked for the E.U. Staff member of The Economist 1947-1948. Executive director of S. G. Warburg & Co. 1948-1985. Vice chair General Electric UK 1968-1996. International advisory board RJR Nabisco 1974-1978, director 1978-. Director Chrysler 1983-1991. Director British Aircraft Corporation (now BAE Systems) 1970-1971. Director W. R. Grace & Co. 1987-1994. Director Blackstone Group Europe 1989-, chairman 2005-. Director Bank in Liechtenstein UK and Germany. Trustee of the Prince of Liechtenstein Foundation since 1991. Director Daily Mail & General Trust PLC 1994-2001. Co-chair Lightbridge Corporation (founded as Thorium Power). Visitor Bilderberg. Member Trilateral Commission. Visitor of the secretive Cercle group in 2003. Trustee of the elite Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Europaeum. Visitor Munich Security Conference in 2012. In ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Major, John b. 1943 Member |
MP 1979-2001. Conservative prime minister Great Britain 1990-1997. |
Rees-Mogg, Lord 1928-2012 Member |
Editor-in-chief The Times 1967-1981, executive board 1968-1981. Vice chair board of governors of the BBC 1981-1986. Chair Pickering & Chatto Publishers since 1983. Member of the elite Other Club and Roxburghe Club. In the 1980s and 1990s a co-editor Strategic Investments, partially funded by billionaire ultra-conservative and CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife. SI partially indulged in WACO, Oklahoma and Monica Lewinsky affair conspiracies. Former CIA director William Colby warned his friend Sen. John Decamp against getting mixed up with this group. Founding chair of the controversial Broadcasting Standards Council 1988-1993. Director of St. James Place Capital, co-founded by Lord Jacob Rothschild in 1990. Chair of the ultraconservative Newsmax since 2000, in which Scaife is again involved. Member European Reform Forum (ERF), founded in 2005. His son, Jacob Rees-Mogg (b. 1969), has been an MP since 2010 and is part pf the Euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party. |
Robertson, Lord George b. 1946 Executive committee |
MP since 1978. Chief spokesman on Europe in 1983. Tony Blair defence secretary 1997-1999. Secretary general of NATO after that. Bilderberg regular since 1998. Co-president RIIA. Member CFR. Chair Ditchley Foundation. Advisor BP and deputy chair TNK-BP. Chair Northrop Grumman Information Technology. Special advisor to George Soros' International Crisis Group. Trustee Soros' ECFR. Involved in CSIS. Co-chair UK-Russia Round Table. Co-president Atlantic Council. Advisor Centre for European Reform. Visitor Munich Security Conference. Involved in many more NGOs and near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Soames, Nicholas b. 1948 Guest in 2003 |
Grandson of Sir Winston Churchill. Equerry to Prince Charles 1970-1972. Assistant to the sinister Sir James Goldsmith in the mid-1970s. Publicly blamed Diana's accusations of Prince Charles' adultary on "the advanced stages of paranoia." MP since 1983. Very pro-E.U. Minister of state for the armed forces 1994–1997. Shadow defence secretary 2003–2005. Director mercenary firm Aegis Defence Services. |
Sutherland, Sir Peter b. 1946 Dinner in 1996 |
Founding head WTO 1993-1995. Chair Goldman Sachs International 1995-. Chair BP 1997-2009. Director Royal Bank of Scotland. Co-chair Trilateral Commission. Steering committee Bilderberg. Director European Institute, Centre for European Reform, Bretton Woods Committee. Member CFR, RIIA, LOTIS Committee, CMi, Foundation Board DAVOS, European Round Table, Hong Kong Chief Executive's Council of International Advisers, etc. Vatican advisor since 2007. Linked to Opus Dei. At the top of ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Thatcher, Margaret 1925-2013 Vice president |
Leader of the Conservative Party 1975-1990. Conservative prime minister of Great Britain 1979-1990. |
Weidenfeld, Lord b. 1919 Member |
Top leader of the Zionist community in Britain. Publisher. Political advisor and chief of cabinet to Chaim Weizmann in 1949. Friend of prime minister Harold Wilson. In 1996 a co-founder of the elite Institute for Strategic Dialogue, together with Lord Jacob Rothschild. Trustee of the equally elite Europaeum. Trustee Joint Distribution Committee, together with Henry Kissinger, the Bronfmans and Rothschilds. On the board of the Aspen Institute, EastWest Institute, New Atlantic Initiative, the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Mossad-linked Jerusalem Foundation. Chair E.U.-Israel Forum. Visitor Munich Security Conference in 2012. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Basic premise: In November 1910, six men – Nelson Aldrich, A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davison, Arthur Shelton, Frank Vanderlip and Paul Warburg - met at Jekyll Island as part of a Morgan-Rockefeller-Warburg plan to establish the Federal Reserve System, which would put the regulation of money in private hands. Jacob Schiff, as an agent of the Rothschild family and a brother-in-law of Paul Warburg, is also often mentioned as a key conspirator.
Aldrich family Family generational members. |
Played a key role in getting the Federal Reserve plan passed in congress. In 1901 his daughter, Abigail, had married John D. Rockefeller, Jr. His son, Winthrop, became a major Rockefeller bankers, vice president and executive of the Pilgrims Society, and also was a major player in the Morgan-Rockefeller founded International Chamber of Commerce. |
Davison, Henry P. Listed member |
Member of a Yale Skull & Bones family. Representative of the Astor interests since at least 1891. Partner of J.P. Morgan &. Co. since 1909. Present at the 1910 Jekyll Island meeting to establish the Federal Reserve System. |
Morgan, J.P., Sr. Listed member. Family generational members. |
World famous banker, the most dominant of his time in the late 19th and early 20th century. |
Rockefellers Family generational members |
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937) is not known to have been a member of the Pilgrims, but many of his younger relatives were, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller and David Rockefeller. |
Schiff, Jacob Listed member. Family generational members. |
Family often tied in with the Rothschilds. Head of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. 1885-1920, in which his brothers-in-law Paul and Felix Warburg were partners. Involved in the Jekyll Island meeting. Anno 1913 a director of the Rockefeller-controlled National City Bank, together with William Rockefeller Jr., various Rockefeller inlaws and business partners; J.P. Morgan Jr., Jacob Schiff and Robert Lovett. |
Strong, Benjamin Son on the exec. committee |
Son of the famous Morgan banker and Federal Reserve founder who attended the 1910 Jekyll Island meeting. Himself president and chair U.S. Trust Co. 1947-1962 and vice president J.P. Morgan Library. |
Vanderlip, Frank Decades-long listed member |
Anno 1913 president of the Rockefeller-controlled National City Bank, with William Rockefeller Jr., various Rockefeller inlaws and business partners; J.P. Morgan Jr., Jacob Schiff and Robert Lovett all on the board. Involved in the Jekyll Island meeting. February 9, 1935, Saturday Evening Post, p. 25: "Since it would have been fatal to Senator Aldrich's plan to have it known that he was calling on anybody from Wall Street to help him in preparing his [Federal Reserve] bill, precautions were taken that would have delighted the heart of James Stillman [of the Rockefeller's] National City Bank... I do not feel it is any exaggeration to speak of our secret expedition to Jekyll Island as the occasion of the actual conception of what eventually became the Federal Reserve System." |
Vreeland, Edward Decades-long listed member |
His brother helped establish the Federal Reserve with Rockefeller agent Nelson Aldrich. |
Warburg, Paul Listed member, along with his brother Felix. Family generational members. |
Involved in the Jekyll Island meeting. |
Acheson, Dean 1893-1973 Listed member |
Yale Scroll & Key 1915. His son became Skull & Bones. Executive of the elite Committee for the Marshall Plan to Aid European Recovery 1947-1949. Truman's secretary of state 1949-1953. Member CFR. Hated by Senator McCarthy and General MacArthur's clique for being "soft" on communism. |
Aldrich, Herbert L. | A younger relative of Nelson W. Aldrich, whose daughter married John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1901, and conspired/helped create the Federal Reserve System. |
Aldrich, Winthrop W. | Vice president and executive of the Pilgrims. Son of Sen. Nelson Aldrich, who aided in the founding of the Federal Reserve, and brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Advisor to the Rockefeller's Equitable Trust from 1919 on and later a president and chair of Chase National Bank. Member CFR and a key player in the International Chamber of Commerce. |
Aldrich, Malcolm P. | Yale Skull & Bones 1922. Trustee of the Rockefeller's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). |
Aldrich, Hulbert S. 1907-1995 Exec. committee |
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Baker family | Key Morgan representatives. |
Ball, George W. | |
Belmont, August, Jr. | |
Blum, Robert E. | |
Brandi, Frederic H. | |
Bronk, Detlev | |
Butler, Nicholas Murray | |
Carnegie, Andrew | Famous steel industrialist and philanthropy pioneer. |
Choate, Joseph | |
Cousins, Norman | |
Cronkite, Walter | |
Davis, John W. | President of the Pilgrims. Chief attorney for J.P. Morgan. Present at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Founding president CFR 1921-1933. Co-founder and executive of the pro-fascist/anti-labor union American Liberty League in 1934. Later a member of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. Trustee Rockefeller Foundation. Director CFR 1933 until his death in 1955. |
Dawes, Charles G. | |
Depew, Chauncey | Co-founder and executive of the Pilgrims in 1903. Son and nephew also Pilgrims. Yale Skull & Bones 1856. Vanderbilt lawyer and railway executive. Senator from New York 1899-1911. Member of J.P. Morgan's elite Corsair Club, together with William Rockefeller. |
C. Douglas Dillon 1909-2003 |
Schoolmates had included Nelson, Laurance and John Rockefeller III. Director and later chair of Dillon, Read & Co. which financed the Nazis. Chairman Rockefeller Foundation. Board member Chase Manhattan Bank. Vice chair CFR. Associated with many other important people and institutions. |
Dillon family | Behind Dillon, Read & Co. |
Draper, William, Jr. | |
Drexel, John R., III 1919-2007 |
The Drexel banker firm historically were partners of J.P. Morgan. The Astors, Aldriches and Rockefellers were among John Drexel's friends. John's son, John R. Drexel, IV, also became a Pilgrims executive. |
Dulles, William | |
Dulles, Allen | |
Dulles, John Foster | |
Du Pont, Thomas C. | |
Eberstadt, Ferdinand | |
Eisenhower, Dwight | |
Fairbanks, Douglas | |
Farish, William S., III | Pilgrims once recent. |
Franklin, George, Jr. | |
Forbes family | |
Forrestal, Michael | Son of secretary of defense James Forrestal. |
Gates, Thomas S., Jr. | |
Gilbert, S. Parker | Godson of Harold Stanley of Morgan Stanley. |
Gilman, Daniel Coit | |
Gould, Edwin | |
Grace, J. Peter | |
Hanes, John W. | |
Harriman, Averell | |
Harriman, Joseph | |
Harriman, Oliver | |
Heinz, Henry J., II | |
Helms, Gates McGarrah | McGarrah. Younger brother of Richard Helms. |
Hewitt, William | |
Hoffman, Paul G. | |
Kaiser, Philip | father of Robert Kaiser. |
Kahn, Otto | |
Kennedy, Joseph | |
Kirk, Grayson | President CFR 1964-1971. Anti-Vietnam in 1968. |
Kern, Harry | |
Lamont family | |
Leffingwell, Russell | |
Lodge, Henry Cabot | |
Lodge, John Davis | |
Lovett, Edward | |
Luce, Henry | |
Luce, Henry, III | |
Macomber, John | |
Marburg, Theodore | |
McCain, John, Jr. | |
McCloy, John | |
McGarrah, Gates | |
Mellon, Andrew | |
Mellon, Paul | |
Meyer, John , Jr. 1906-1996 Exec. committee |
Chair and CEO of Morgan Guaranty Trust and its J. P. Morgan holding 1960s-1970s. Member CFR. Pilgrims executive 1970s-1993. |
Milbank family | Well-known banking family. Also stood at the basis of the law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy and in 1955 were founding financiers of the National Review. |
Moore, Maurice T. | |
Morgan, J.P., Sr. | |
Morgan, J.P., Jr. | |
Morgan, Junius S., Jr. | |
Morgan, Harry S. | |
Morgan, W. Fellowes | |
Morgenthau, Henry | Sr. |
Mosbacher, Emil, Jr. | |
Muir, Malcolm | |
Muir, Malcolm, Jr. | |
Murphy, Grayson | Smedley Butler. |
Olin, John M. | |
Osborn family | |
Paley, William | |
Peabody family | Marietta Peabody Tree |
Polk, Frank | |
Pyne, Eben W. | |
Rabb, Maxwell | |
Reed, Philip D. | |
Richardson, Elliot | |
Ripley, Sidney Dillon, II | |
Rockefeller, John D., Jr. | |
Rockefeller, Percy A. | |
Rockefeller, Nelson | |
Rockefeller, James S. | |
Rockefeller, Bill | |
Rogers, Gen. Bernard | |
Roosa, Robert V. | |
Roosevelt, Franklin D., Jr. | |
Roosevelt, John A. | |
Root, Elihu | |
Rusk, Dean | |
Setterlee, Herbert | Married a daughter of J.P. Morgan, Sr. in 1900. |
Schiff, Mortimer L. | |
Schiff, John M. | |
Schiff, David T. | |
Schroder, Baron Bruno | |
Schwab, Charles | |
Seaborg, Glenn | |
Sebag-Montefiore, Harold | |
Simon, William | |
Sloan, Alfred, Jr. | |
Smith, Walter Bedell | |
Speyer family | German-Jewish banking house that came to London and New York. |
Stetson, Eugene, Jr. | Son of the well-known Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. Married a daughter of H. Smith Richardson, of the famous CIA and conservative-affiliated foundation. |
Stetson, Basil | |
Stettinius, Edward, Jr. | |
Stimson, Henry L. | 1930 dinner. Skull & Bones. |
Sulzberger, Arthur | New York Times publisher. |
Taft, William H. | Visitor. Son of a Skull & Bones founder. Himself Skull & Bones. War secretary 1904-1908. U.S. president 1909-1913. Chief justice 1921-1930. His son, Senator Robert Taft, was a critic of the Rockefeller influence and isolanionist Old Right. |
Taft, Henry W. | Brother of William. Also Skull & Bones. President Japan Society 1920s. |
Taylor, Gen. Maxwell | |
Twain, Mark | Famous writer of the stories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Died in 1910. |
Vance, Cyrus | |
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, III | Well-known wealthy family of the 19th and early 20th century. |
Van Rensselaer, Charles | |
Van Rensselaer, William | |
Warburg, Felix | Member of major German-Jewish banking family that came to England and the United States. Involved in the founding of the Federal Reserve System. |
Warburg, Paul | Member of major German-Jewish banking family that came to England and the United States. Involved in the founding of the Federal Reserve System. |
Watson family | Generational Pilgrims family behind IBM. |
Wharton, Clifton, Jr. | First black Pilgrims member. Long-term Rockefeller representative. Member Presidential Mission to Vietnam in 1966. Chair Rockefeller Foundation 1982-1987. Trustee Carnegie Foundation. Director CFR. |
Armstrong, Anne L. b. 1927 Listed member |
From New Orleans high society. Vassar College. Married Tobin Armstrong, owner of the King Ranch in Texas, visited by international elites as Prince Charles and Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis. Ambassador to the U.K. 1976-1977. Director General Motors 1977-1999, Halliburton 1977-2000 (much longer than Cheney), American Express 1975-1976, 1981-2000 (with Henry Kissinger and Vernon Jordan). Trustee Smithsonian. Governor Ditchley 1977-1987. Chair PSAC 1982-1990. Trustee chair CSIS 1987-1999, executive chair 1999-2006. |
Black, Conrad b. 1944 Member |
Chairman and CEO of neocon international newspaper business Hollinger, Inc., the board of which, until 2003-2004, featured the elite of the elite served, including Henry Kissinger, Lord Jacob Rothschild and scores of leading Pilgrims. Eventually Black went to jail for fraudulent business practices and obstruction of justice. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for Canada, with involvement in more than a dozen key NGOs. |
Boucher, Richard b. 1951 Speaker |
State Department official and deputy secretary general OECD. |
Brzezinski, Zbigniew b. 1928 Listed member |
Carter's national security advisor. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 60 different important NGOs. |
Bush, Prescott S., Jr. 1922-2010 Member |
Older brother of President George H. W. Bush and uncle of President George W. Bush. |
Colby, Jonathan Member |
Son of former CIA director William Colby. National Security Council staffer to Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration. Major appointments at Coudert Brothers, Blackstone and Carlyle from the 1980s on. CFR and IISS member. |
Colby, Elbridge Member |
Grandson of former CIA director William Colby. has been involved in the IISS, Rand Corporation and received many intelligence-linked DOD study assignments. |
Haass, Richard b. 1951 Speaker |
MA and Ph.D. from Oxford. Legislative assistant to Pilgrim Senator Claiborne Pell in 1975. Research associate IISS 1977-1979. Special assistant to the DOD under secretary 1979-1980. Senior State Department envoy 1980-1985. Special assistant to President Bush for national security affairs 1989-1993. Senior director Near East and South Asia, National Security Council, 1989-1993. After this became involved in the Carnegie Endowment, Brookings Institution, CFR, Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission. President of the CFR since 2003. |
Haig, Alexander 1924-2010 Exec. committee and vice president |
Came from the extremist staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Korea. Involved in trying to overthrow Cuba with the CIA during the Kennedy administration. Senior military advisor to Henry Kissinger 1969-1973. Major hawk on Vietnam, but also coordinated Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Vice chief of staff of the army 1973. Nixon's chief of staff 1973-1974. Commander USEUCOM 1974-1979. Commander SHAPE of NATO 1974-1979. He, Kissinger and the CIA's TEd Shackley were directly linked to the P2 Lodge scandal. President and CEO of United Technologies 1979-1981 and remained a life-long advisor. Secretary of state 1981-1982, but too pushy for Reagan's liking. Founder of the secretive Worldwide Associates firm in 1984. Visitor Trilateral Commission in the 1980s. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in about 30 different important NGOs. |
Heuvel, William vanden b. 1930 Secretary and exec. committee |
Affiliated with the Sun Valley Meetings, Allen & Co. and "liberal CIA" outfit The Nation. |
Holbrooke, Richard 1941-2010 Speech |
Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 20 different important NGOs. |
Kean, Thomas b. 1935 Exec. committee |
Younger brother of Pilgrim Robert Winthrop Kean, Jr. Governor of New Jersey from 1982 to 1990. President Drew University in New Jersey 1990-2005. Major superclass member. Appointed 9/11 Commission chair after the position of Henry Kissinger had become untenable. |
Kissinger, Henry b. 1923 Vice president |
Former national security advisor and secretary of state. Founder Kissinger Associates. Long-time friend of first Nelson Rockefeller and then David Rockefeller. The no. 1 in ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 110 different important NGOs, including the CFR, Bilberberg, the Trilateral Commission. |
Lehman, John R. b. 1942 Member |
Reagan's secretary of the navy 1981-1987. Neocon. Chairman of J. F. Lehman and Company, which can be linked to the 2016 CIA coup in Turkey. Member of the 9/11 Commission. High up in ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement, along with his brother, in more than 30 different important NGOs. |
Mallinckrodt, George von b. 1930 Visitor in 2008 |
With Kleinwort Sons & Co. in London 1953-1954. Key banker for J. Henry Schroder Banking Corp. in the 1954-2008 period. Director of U.S., French, German, Swiss and British companies. British Invisibles 1995–1998. Council chair DAVOS 1995-1997. Circle of patrons INSEAD 1995-. Council JFK School of Government 2005-. |
McNamara, Robert 1916-2009 Member |
Ford Motor interests. Secretary of defense. Initiated the Pentagon Papers. Rockefeller guy. Washington Post. Advisory board Royal Dutch Shell 1981-1987. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in about 30 different important NGOs. |
Peterson, Peter b. 1926 Visitor in 2005 |
CFR chair 1985-present. In 1985 he founded the Blackstone Group, which has always maintained a strategic partnership with Kissinger Associates and Maurice Greenberg's AIG. Close friend of Kissinger and David Rockefeller. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 30 different important NGOs. |
Pell, Sen. Claiborne 1918-2009 Member |
Major new age and conspiracy disinformer, closely allied with Prince Hans Adam von Liechtenstein (1001 Club) in these type of affairs. |
Petraeus, Gen. David b. 1952 Speaker |
Army commander in Afghanistan and Iraq who became CIA director under Obama. |
Rockefeller, David 1915-2017 Member |
No. 1 superclass member. Ran Bilderberg for decades with Henry Kissinger. Founder of the Trilateral Commission. Much more. Decades-long Pilgrim, as were his father and brother Nelson. |
Rohatyn, Felix b. 1928 Guest |
Lazard banker. U.S. ambassador to France 1997-2000. |
Rumsfeld, Donald b. 1932 Member |
Ford's chief of staff 1974-1975. Secretary of defense 1975-1977 and 2001-2006. High up in ISGP's Superclass Index. |
Schiff, David T. Exec. committee |
Latest member of a century old prominent banking family that began in the United States as allies/agents of the Rothschild family. |
Seitz, Raymond b. 1940 Member |
Career Setate Department officer who used to work under Henry Kissinger. Trustee and executive member Rockefeller Foundation 1960s-1970s. |
Shultz, George b. 1920 Member |
Bechtel president. Secretary of state under Reagan. Subsequently returned to Bechtel as a director. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 70 different important NGOs. |
Train, John b. 1928 Exec. committee |
Intelligence and neocon-affiliated banker. |
Volcker, Paul b. 1927 Vice president |
David Rockefeller protege at Chase Manhattan Bank. President Federal Reserve Bank of New York 1975-1979. Chairman Federal Reserve System 1979-1987. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 50 different important NGOs. |
Weinberger, Caspar 1917-2006 Executive committee |
Bechtel vice president under George Shultz. Reagan secretary of defense 1981-1987. |
Whitehead, John 1922-2015 Vice president and exec. committee |
Co-chair Goldman Sachs 1976-1984. Reagan's Deputy secretary of state under George Shulz 1985-1989. Close friend of the David Rockefeller clique. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in about 50 different important NGOs. |
Wolfensohn, James b. 1933 Member, along with his wife |
President World Bank 1995-2005. Close friend of David Rockefeller. Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for Australia, where he hails from. |
Woolsey, James b. 1941 Speaker |
Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for his involvement in more than 80 different important NGOs. |
- January 3, 1962, Amarillo Globe-Times, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 'Finds Power Elite Has... Funnel Into Capital'.
- 2002, Anne Pimlott Baker, 'The Pilgrims of Great Britain - A Centennial History', p. 13.
- *) 2003, Anne Pimlott Baker, 'The Pilgrims of the United States - A Centennial History', p. 6.
*) About Grover Cleveland's friendship with the House of Morgan: 1990, Ron Chernow, 'The House of Morgan', pp. 542-543: "By January 1895, gold was fleeing New York at a frightening pace... The beleaguered president, Grover Cleveland, was a friend of the House of Morgan and a staunch advocate of the gold standard. During the four years he spent on Wall Street between his two presidential terms, Cleveland worked in the law offices of Bangs, Stetson, Tracy, and MacVeagh. This was the law firm of Pierpont's father-in-law, Charles Tracy, located next door to the Morgan bank, at 15 Broad Street. Cleveland had been good friends with the shrewd Francis Lynde Stetson, Pierpont's lawyer for the railroad reorganizations and known on Wall Street as Morgan's attorney general. He also befriended many Wall Street people and was one of the twelve pallbearers at the funeral of August Belmont, Sr., in 1890. Although Pierpont was a Republican, he wasn't antagonistic toward the Democratic Cleveland. In 1884, he cast his lone Democratic vote for Cleveland precisely because the candidate endorsed sound money... Cleveland still clung to the hope of a public bond issue, which would spare his congressional obloquy. Not until a clerk informed Carlsile that only $9 million in gold remained in government vaults on Wall Street did Pierpont pipe up, saying he knew of a $10 million draft about to be presented. "If that $10 million draft is presented, you can't meet it," Pierpont said. "It will be all over before 3 o'clock." "What suggestions have you to make, Mr. Morgan?" replied the president. Pierpont laid out an audacious scheme. The Morgan and Rothschild houses in New York and London would gather 3.5 million ounces of gold, at least half from Europe, in exchange for about $65 million worth of thirty year gold bonds. He also promised that gold obtained by the government wouldn't flow out again. This was the showstopper that mystified the financial world--a promise to rig, temporarily, the gold market." - 1991 version, (1979 original) Deborah Davis, 'Katherine the Great', pp. 175-176.
- There's little information available on the Georgetown Set. A few exceptions:
*) December 27, 1972, history.state.gov, Transcript of a Memorandum to the President's Assistant (Haldeman) Dictated by President Nixon: "The CIA, like the State Department, is basically a liberal establishment bureaucracy. I want the personnel there cut ... at least by 35 to 40 percent and I want a definite improvement in so far as attitudes of those in CIA with regard to our foreign policy. There are some very good men there, but the great majority are the old [unclear] Georgetown crowd."
*) The life and death of Mary Pinchot Meyer, the wife of high ranking CIA official Cord Meyer. They were friends with James Angleton and other CIA officers, many living in Georgetown. They were also very close to Washington Post officials as Phil Graham and Ben Bradlee.
*) 1995, Ben Bradlee, 'A Good Life', p. 267: "James Jesus Angleton was a lot of things, including an extremely controversial, high-ranking CIA official specializing in counterintelligence, but he was also a friend of ours, and the husband of Mary Meyer's close friend, Cicely Angleton. We asked him how he'd gotten into the house, and he shuffled his feet. (Later, we learned that one of Jim's nicknames inside the agency was "the Locksmith," and that he was known as a man who could pick his way into any house in town.)"
*) spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKgeorgetown.htm: "After the Second World War a small group of people began meeting on a regular basis. The group. living in Washington, became known as the Georgetown Set or the Wisner Gang. At the first the key members of the group were former members of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This included Frank Wisner, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Tom Braden, Stewart Alsop and Walt Rostow. Over the next few years others like George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Joseph Alsop, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Desmond FitzGerald, Tracy Barnes, Cord Meyer, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze joined their regular parties. Some like Bruce, Braden, Bohlen, McCloy, Meyer and Harriman spent a lot of their time working in other countries. However, they would always attend these parties when in Georgetown... The men shared similar political views. They tended to hold liberal views on domestic issues. These attitudes were developed while they were students in the 1930s. They were also passionate anti-communists. This was the result of the men's experiences during the was and the events in Europe that followed the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. The vast majority were members of the Democratic Party but John Sherman Cooper and Desmond FitzGerald were both left-wing Republicans. As Sally Reston pointed out: "We were liberal anti-Communist, intellectuals, precisely the class and breed that Joe McCarthy hated and whose careers he wanted to ruin. It was the same old battle: the Republican right versus the Democratic left.""
*) 1992, Burton Hersh, 'The Old Boys - The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA', p. 301: "[Walter Bedell] Smith made his opinion of Wisner and his cronies plain within a month or so of assuming office, when he dispatched an underling to tour the Washington party circuit, where he was well aware a number of operations people Frank lured to town were accustomed to congregate off-hours. Many had, after all, the senior management posts around the OPC because, as Polly Fritchey doesn't mind pointing our, "They had enough money of their own to be able to come down." By Smith's lights, this made them "dubious security risks and dilettantes." "I don't care whether they were blabbing secrets or not," Smith allegedly declared. "Just give me the names of the people at Georgetown cocktail parties." Approximately fifty left, probably the most inclusive slaughter of the operators until Admiral Stansfield Turner struck."
*) 2004, Anthony Sutton, 'Fleshing Out Skull & Bones', p. 93: "Averell Harrinman: Received $1 million gift from the Soviets about 1928. (I can provide the State Department file numbers if required.) State department was told, "hands off on Harriman. Key member of the Georgetown group that had major influence on policy and intelligence."" - October 20, 1977, Carl Bernstein for Rolling Stone, 'The CIA and the Media'.
- Ibid.
- 1991 version, (1979 original) Deborah Davis, 'Katharine the Great', p. 134: "[Richard] Helms's grandfather, Gates White McGarrah, an international financier, was a member of the board of directors of the Astor Foundation, which owned Newsweek...""
- 2003, Anne Pimlott Baker, 'The Pilgrims of the United States - A Centennial History', pp. 12-13: "Meanwhile, the founding of the English-Speaking Union (E.S.U.) in London in 1918 by Evelyn Wrench, with the intention of opening branches all round the world, with large club houses in London and New York, stimulated the Pilgrims to consider establishing chapters of the Society in different parts of the United States. At the end of 1918 a specially convened sub-committee suggested they should start with Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco... Nicholas Murray Butler, a future president of the Pilgrims, worried that to establish other branches would be to change the character of the Pilgrims and would involve great loss of prestige and dignity..."
- December 20, 1991, memorandum of the Task Force of Greater CIA openness to the Director of Central Intelligence. Document quoted in: April 23, 1992, Washington Post, 'CIA Report On Openness Classified Secret'.
- September 18, 1977, Washington Post, 'Hunt Claims Authorship of CIA Article': "In its October issue, More says Helms gave Hunt information about Soviet syping prepared by Howard J. Osborn, the CIA's chief of security, and asked him to write an article. "When the director called me up and says, '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,' I do it," Hunt told More. Osborn, now retired from the CIA, said the column "has the ring of truth to it. This would be the type of thing I would report to Helms on.""
- 2012, Pien van der Hoeven, 'Het succes van een kwaliteitskrant: history of the NRC Handelsblad' (Google books).
- 1995, Gerald James, 'In the Public Interest', p. 137.
- Ibid., pp. 137-138.
- 2014, Chic Londres, 'Sciences-Po [Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris] Alumni flock to Westminster!': "For its second charity gala, the Sciences-Po Alumni UK Trust organised a dinner at the British Parliament, hosted by MP and former Europe minister Denis MacShane, under the patronage of French ambassador Maurice Gourdault-Montagne and with baron David de Rothschild as guest speaker. ... The guest list read as a « Who's Who » of the French London financial world ... Described by The Economist in 2001 as "the grandest of the grandes écoles which, since Napoleon, have provided France with its political, administrative and business elite", Sciences Po (or "Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris", its official name) has long been considered as a national and global leaders' "factory". Established in Paris in 1872 to modernise the training of politicians, Sciences Po alumni include 28 past and present French Primes ministers and Presidents (François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac amongst them, as well as Nicolas Sarkozy who studied there) and 12 past or present foreign heads of State or government, as well as many prominent politicians ... While nearly every French high ranking politician or diplomat has attended Sciences Po since its inception, the institution's global reach is far wider, notably in International Relations, with former alumni including Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, current Director-General of the World Trade Organization Pascal Lamy, current President of the European Central Bank Jean-Claude Trichet and current head of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn... In business, the school can claim to have housed 14 of the current CEOs of France's 40 largest companies."
- December 11, 2010, Volkskrant, 'A student period at a fraternity has a lot of benefits' ('Een studententijd bij het corps heeft veel voordelen'): "Minerva, one of the foundations of our ruling elite. At least two-thirds of influential Holland has been a member of a fraternity... Ten percent [of Minerva], followed by Rotterdam fraternities (6%), the Utrecht fraternities (5%), and Groningen fraternities (4%)...."
- aaag.com/new-york-ny-58th-st.htm (America at a Glance):
122 East 58th Street Daughters of the Cincinnati New York, NY 10022 212-319-6915
122 East 58th Street Huguenot Society-America Libr New York, NY 10022 212-755-0592
122 East 58th Street Military Order of Foreign Wars New York, NY 10022 212-751-5168
122 East 58th Street Pilgrims of the US New York, NY 10022 212-753-7178
122 East 58th Street # 2 New England Society in NY New York, NY 10022 212-752-1938
122 East 58th Street # 2 St Nicholas Society New York, NY 10022 212-753-7175
122 East 58th Street # 204 Holland Society of NY New York, NY 10022 212-758-1675
122 East 58th Street # 3 NY Genealogical Society New York, NY 10022 212-755-8532
122 East 58th Street # 3 Society of Colonial Wars New York, NY 10022 212-755-7082
122 East 58th Street # 4 New York Gnlgcl & Biolgcl Libr New York, NY 10022 212-755-8532
122 East 58th Street # Mezz Society of Mayflower Dscndnts New York, NY 10022 212-759-1620 - Weidenfeld interviewed in the 2005 BBC documentary 'The Plot Against Harold Wilson'.
- 1959, Cornelius "Neil" Vanderbilt, Jr., 'Man of the World', p. 10.
- Ibid., p. 218.
- Ibid., p. 160: "Myron Taylor was a great friend of my parents'. Father had sat on many boards with him, and Mother and Mrs. Taylor were great social and personal friends. Although my parents were not in favor of my newspaper work, they thought it a great honor when the Myron Taylors asked me to dinner with Cardinal Pacelli and many other of his friends in New York, including the John D. Rockefeller, Jrs., Mr. Henry Frick, Mrs. Carnegie, the widow of Andrew Carnegie, the George F. Baker, Jrs., the Ogden Millses and others. After dinner I was singled out by Mrs. Taylor to talk with Cardinal Pacelli. She told him that I was very close to Mr. Roosevelt, and that Mr. Roosevelt probably felt more at home with me than with any other member of the White House staff..."
- Ibid., pp. 159-160.
- Martin Luther's seal was a cross inside an open rose.
- The Supreme Council, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, 'Masonry Beyond the Third Degree' (Produced by the Supreme Council, 33°)
scottishrite.org/pdfs/beyond3.pdf - Among the more prominent officials that have been invited into Druid groves are Winston Churchill (Prime Minister), David Lloyd George (Prime Minister), Queen Elizabeth II, George Noakes (Archbishop of Wales), Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury), and Daniel Mullins (Roman Catholic bishop of Menevia). See:
July 19, 2002, The Times, 'Why The Archbishop Is Embracing Pagan'.
August 6, 2002, The Scotsman, 'Archbishop hits back in row over druid honour'. - arthuriansocietyofknights.org/members.html: Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood, Admiral of the Fleet, The Rt. Honourable the Earl of Jellicoe of Scapa Flow, The Rt. Hon. W.L. Mackenzie King, Sir Henry Irving, David Garrick, Charles Dickens, Carl Rosa, The Marquis of Anglesey, The Lord Sempill, Major General the Earl of Athlone, KG. Sir Jack Scamp, The Lord Baden Powell of Gilwell, Sir Thomas Sopwith, The Earl of Dalhousie, The Viscount Tonypandy –one time Speaker of The House of Commons, Colonel David Stirling, Lt.. Commander Ian Fraser VC, Rear Admiral Anthony Miers VC, Admiral Sir Archibald Douglas, Commander Sir Hugh Trevor Dawson, The Lord Glenravel, The Lord Tennyson, The Lord Queenborough, The Viscount Finlay of Nairn, The Honourable Mr. Justice Lloyd Jacob, Colonel Sir Arthur Noble, Major General Sir Douglas Kendrew –one time Captain of England Rugby Football and Governor General New South Wales, Sir Percy Rugg, The Honourable Mr. Justice David Hunter, Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning, Lt. General Sir Reginald Denning, The Lord Denning, The Lord Marshal of Leeds, Lt. Colonel Sir Colin Cole - Garter King at Arms, Colonel Sir Stuart Mallinson, Vice Admiral Sir Ronald Brockman, Major General Michael Walsh – Chief Scout, The Lord Wetherill –former Speaker of The House of Commons, The Earl of Limerick, and most recently Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup – Chief of Defence Staff.
- Various (London) Times articles from the 1960s and 1970s show how the Society of Knights of the Round Table regularly organized meetings at the Army & Navy Club.
- 2000, Hazel J. Johnson, 'Banking Alliances', p. 50: "Two of Stillman's daughters married two of [William] Rockefeller's sons. One of the offspring of these matches, James Stillman Rockefeller, would later serve and the bank's president (1952-1959) and chairman (1959-1967)."
- *) 1978, David Kotz (UCLA publication), 'Bank Control of Large Corporations in the United States', pp. 37-39: "One major entrepreneur who succeeded in remaining completely independent of banker influence was John D. Rockefeller. ... The enormous profits of the Standard Oil Trust made this policy possible. In 1891 James Stillman [1850-1918] became president of the City Bank of New York (later renamed the National City Bank). Stillman was a close friend of William Rockefeller [1841-1922], the [younger] brother of John D. Rockefeller [Sr.]. Standard Oil money began to flow into the City Bank, and in two short years it became the largest bank in New York, having been half the size of others in 1891. [59]"
*) Feb. 28, 1913, U.S. Congress--House, 'Report of the Committee Appointed Pursuant to House Resolutions 429 and 504 to Investigates the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit', pp. 71-72: "National City Bank of New York: ... The directors are James Stillman ... Cleveland H. Dodge, Henry C. Frick, Joseph P. Grace, Cyrus H. McCormick, ... J. P. Morgan, Jr. ... William Rockefeller, James A. Stillman, Jacob H. Schiff, ... Frank A. Vanderlip, ... and R. S. Lovett." - *) Feb. 16, 1907, Congressional Record--House, p. 3130: "The Directors [of] National City Bank -- ... Cleveland H. Dodge, ... Henry C. Frick ... E. H. Harriman ... Cyrus H. McCormick ... William Rockefeller, Jacob H. Schiff, ... James Stillman, James A. Stillman..."
*) Feb. 28, 1913, U.S. Congress--House, 'Report of the Committee Appointed Pursuant to House Resolutions 429 and 504 to Investigates the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit', pp. 71-72: "National City Bank of New York: ... The directors are James Stillman ... Cleveland H. Dodge, Henry C. Frick, Joseph P. Grace, Cyrus H. McCormick, ... J. P. Morgan, Jr. ... William Rockefeller, James A. Stillman, Jacob H. Schiff, ... Frank A. Vanderlip, ... and R. S. Lovett." - Dec. 30, 1929, Time, 'Business & Finance: Banks': "Last week Lawyer Winthrop Williams Aldrich was elected [president]. ... He has been legal advisor ["senior legal executive"] to Equitable for ten years... After his election [as Equitable president, Mr. Aldrich frankly conceded he came to Equitable representing Rockefeller interests, confirming the long-held assumption that Equitable is controlled by the Rockefellers."
- 1978, U.S. Congress, Joint Economic Committee, 'The Federal Reserve System: A Study...', p. 103: "Prior to its merger with the Equitable Trust Co. of New York, Wiggin had been the controlling stockholder of Chase. After the merger with Equitable, however, control passed to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Chase became a Rockefeller bank. With Rockefeller control, Mr. Rockefeller, Jr.'s brother-in-law, Winthrop W. Aldrich ... then a leading practicing lawyer representing the Equitable Trust Co., became president of Chase."
- Ibid.
- Oct. 1901, McClure's Magazine, 'J. Pierpont Morgan'.
- December 18, 1912, UPI (founded in 1907 as United Press Associations), 'Investigation shows Morgan, 17 firms control $25.3 billion'.
- 1990, Ron Chernow, 'The House of Morgan', pp. 441-442: "[FDR] was determined to block any Morgan role... the government did not "intend to let Morgan and DuPont men run the war."... These anti-Morgan maneuvers, coming from several directions, prevented the bank from resuming its World War I role, as did earlier U.S. entry into the war. In the Second World War, Washington would take charge..."
- 2003, Anne Pimlott Baker, 'The Pilgrims of the United States - A centennial history', p. 37, quoting from a letter of former chairman Cunliffe-Owen to John Wilson Taylor, February 8, 1924.
- 1959, Cornelius "Neil" Vanderbilt, Jr., 'Man of the World', p. 259.
- 1990, Ron Chernow, 'The House of Morgan', pp. 441-442.
- A brief history of the Rockefeller-Exxon connection:
*) October 22, 1968, Sheboygan Journal (amongst others), Drew Pearson, 'Washington Merry-go-round, Pueblo Crew Release Foreseen': "Onassis himself has long been an Argentine resident and as such escaped paying personal taxes either in Greece or New York. Furthermore, dollars owed under the Panamanian flag are almost 100 per cent tax free and can be sent anywhere in the Allied world. In contrast, dollars earned by American flagships are subject to a 38 per cent corporation tax payable in the years earned. Of course Onassis is not alone in taking advantage of the Panamanian tax dodge. The worst offender in using foreign flagships is Standard Oil of New Jersey, a Rockefeller corporation which operates approximately 118 tankers under foreign flags. This is done through 17 foreign subsidiaries wholly owned or controlled by Standard Oil of New Jersey."
*) May 27, 1976, The Oakland Tribune, 'The Oil Giants': "The government over many years has spent millions investigating the oil giants' billions, beginning with Exxon, the $45 billion giant of the giants. Exxon began life as Standard Oil of New Jersey, the keystone of John D. Rockefeller's oil trust. The government in 1911 busted Rockefeller's American oil monopoly and the government files show that 17 years later Exxon was conspiring secretly with British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell to create a worldwide monopoly. The American oil trust became the international oil cartel and the government since 1911 never has laid a hand on the power and glory of the Rockefeller empire."
*) Governor Jay Rockefeller was a nephew of Nelson, David and the other Rockefeller brothers. In the late 1970s, Jay was in the possession of a significant amount of shares in Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (Exxon). October 12, 1977, Charleston Daily Mail, 'Grandfather's Trust Fund': "These stocks are included as part of the trust fund established Feb. 1, 1952 for Gov. [Jay] Rockefeller by his grandfather, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Standard Oil of New Jersey, the largest holding, and Standard Oil of California were started by John D. Rockefeller Sr. The New Jersey company was renamed Exxon. [---] No. of Shares Company Common Stock... 2,300 Standard Oil Company of California; 25,000 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey."
*) December 10, 1979, Atchison Daily Globe, Jack Anderson's Washington Merry-Go-Round, 'Kissinger Image Goodbye?': "Kissinger is now back as the foreign policy adviser to the Rockefeller financial empire, which owes the shah far more than a moral debt. In fact, the shah is still a client worth billions; my sources say he relies heavily on the investment counsel of David Rockefeller and Kissinger. Rockefeller is chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank which, together with the Rockefeller trust funds and private family holdings, controls EXXON. The president of EXXON, H.C. Kauffmann, also is a director of Chase Manhattan. There are other interlocking ties between the banking conglomerate and the oil colossus. Both have been under Rockefeller domination for decades... The dominant company in this new American-Iranian oil consortium was EXXON. The shah also made Chase Manhattan his favorite bank. He personally ordered subordinates to channel oil purchases and other transactions through the Rockefeller bank. And he shunted other lucrative deals to the Rockefeller crowd. This raises ugly questions about Kissinger's failure to stop the shah from quadrupling oil prices."
*) December 11, 1986, Syracuse Herald Journal, 'Japan group buys Exxon building for $610 million': "The 54-story Exxon Building, part of Rockefeller Center, has been sold to a subsidiary of the giant Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co. for $610 million, the owners of the 13-year-old skyscraper announced Wednesday. The Exxon Corp. and Rockefeller Group Inc. said the deal with Mitsui Fudosam (NY) Inc. would be completed before the end of this month to take advantage of current favorable tax rules on capital gains and depreciation."
*) October 27, 1989, Chronicle Telegram, 'Manhattan is too expensive - Exxon Corp. is moving headquarters to Dallas': "Exxon Corp is moving its world headquarters from midtown Manhattan to suburban Dallas, a dramatic sign that New York's high costs are driving business away from what had been the undisputed corporate capital of America... Exxon exemplifies Big Oil and Establishment New York. It has been based in Manhattan since John D. Rockefeller founded his Standard Oil Trust in 1882."
*) The influence of the Rockefellers on ExxonMobile is not likely to be very significant anymore, as in recent years this company has been funding global warming skeptics in direct opposition to the Rockefeller family. April 23, 2007, CNN Money, 'Exxon = oil, g*dammit!': "Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) sent Tillerson a long letter berating the company for funding groups dubious of global warming. (The irony of a Rockefeller attacking Exxon ensured extra attention for the story: Exxon is a descendant of Standard Oil, source of the Rockefeller family fortune.)" - Feb. 28, 1913, U.S. Congress--House, 'Report of the Committee Appointed Pursuant to House Resolutions 429 and 504 to Investigates the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit', p. 89-90.
- Ibid., p. 81: "Next to Mr. Baker, Morgan & Co. is the largest stockholder of the First National... Three of the Morgan partners - Mr. Morgan himself, Mr. Davison, and Mr. Lamont - are directors of the First National....The FIrst National has been associated with Morgan & Co. in the control of the Bankers Trust Co."
- Ibid., p. 59: "The Guaranty [Trust] and Bankers Trust Cos., thus controlled by Morgan & Co. through voting trusts, are, respectively, in point of resources and deposits, the first and second largest trust companies in the United States. ... Astor Trust ... has 14 directors in common with Bankers Trust Co. and 11 in common with the Guaranty."
- Ibid., pp. 71-72.
- Ibid.
- Dec. 19, 1912, New York Times, 'Hot Chase for Rockefeller'.
- Jan. 6, 1913, New York Times, 'Don't Expect Rockefeller; Pujo Committee Abandons Hope of Getting Financier to Testify'.
- Jan. 1, 1913, New York Times, 'Ask Writ to Smash Rockefeller Doors'.
- Jan. 5, 1913, New York Times, 'Needs Proof of Illness; Pujo Committee to be Satisfied Testifying Will Harm Rockefeller'.
- Jan. 14, 1913, New York Times, 'Off to Palm Beach to Await Doctor's Report to Pujo Committee'.
- Jan. 6, 1913, New York Times, 'Don't Expect Rockefeller; Pujo Committee Abandons Hope of Getting Financier to Testify'.
- Dec. 31, 1912, New York Times, '$30,000,000 Merger of Trust Companies': "[It's] known, like the National City Bank, as a Rockefeller institution.".
- Feb. 28, 1913, U.S. Congress--House, 'Report of the Committee Appointed Pursuant to House Resolutions 429 and 504 to Investigates the Concentration of Control of Money and Credit', pp. 77-79.
- state.gov/md12607.htm (accessed: April 17, 2016): "Speech: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State, Washington, DC. July 15, 2009. Thank you very much, Richard [Gelb], and I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to, I guess, the mother ship in New York City, but it's good to have an outpost of the council right here down in the street of the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the council, so this will mean I don't have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future."
- 1990, Ron Chernow, 'The House of Morgan', pp. 542-543: "[Thomas] Gates seemed a rare lateral entrant into the Morgan hierarchy but really had true-blue Morgan roots. His father was a Drexel and Company partner and president of the University of Pennsylvania. As a Drexel bond salesman in the 1930s, Tom, Jr., had apprenticed at J. P. Morgan and Company. Drawn to intrique, he served with Naval Air Intelligence in World War II... Rich and affable, a cowboy in well-tailored suits, Gates gave off an easy air of authority, an engaging conviviality. A macho hero to subordinates, he loved wine, women, and warplanes... As defense secretary, Gates loved covert activity. Through the National Security Council, he contributed to a four-point plan to topple Fidel Castro, an early blueprint for the Bay of Pigs disaster. He revered Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a frequent dinner guest at the Gates household... The day before his inauguration, John Kennedy was briefed by Gates, who painted an alarming picture of the imminent fall of Laos to the Communists and advocated limited American military involvement... Gates never fully recovered from Potomac fever. He was a good friend not only of Eisenhower, who volunteered to back him for a Senate seat, but of two later Republican presidents, as well, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. (His subordinates speculated as to whether the second phone on Gates's desk was a hot line to the White House.) His connections extended everywhere. He belonged to an exclusive group formed by Stephen Bechtel, Sr., of the secretive San Francisco-based construction firm and an active Morgan director after 1954. At the Carlyle Hotel, Bechtel regularly convened a study group that included Pan Am founder Juan Trippe, Texaco chairman Augustus Long, General Lucius Clay, and Gates. These brandy-and-cigar discussions might feature Bechtel on Saudi Arabia, long on oil-price trends, and Gates on NATO and the Russian threat. Gates would exploit his numerous contacts to spread Morgan influence around the globe."
- *) July 31, 1987, Iran Contra hearings, Weinberger Tells Sen. Sarbanes About "People With Their Own Agenda": "Mr. [SEN. PAUL] SARBANES: Are you familiar with the PROF notes between North and Poindexter that appear in the Tower Report? When North suggested to Poindexter before departing for Tehran with McFarlane that he and Poindexter have a quiet meeting with the President and McFarlane without papers and that Poindexter might want to include the Secretaries of State and Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, Poindexter responded negatively, "I don't want a meeting with Ronald Reagan, Shultz [Pilgrim], and Weinberger [Pilgrim]." Secretary WEINBERGER: I became aware of it when I read it in that report. ... I think that people with their own agenda as I have said in the Security Council were doing everything they can and maybe their motives were good, I don't know, but were doing everything they could to put this agenda into effect and one of the ways they tried to do that was to keep away from the President views that they suspected, quite correctly most of the time, differ with theirs. I think it was a very bad procedure. I think it has been completely corrected now because we have totally different kinds of people who have a totally different approach."
*) June 23, 1987, Iran Contra hearings, 'Shultz on Casey's Power Grab': "Secretary SHULTZ: I meant that the battle to get intelligence separated from policy and control over the policy was very much in play and the Director of Central Intelligence wanted to keep himself very heavily involved in this policy which he had been involved in apparently all along. ... Well, I felt that we were in the driver's seat [on Iran policy] all right. On the other hand, obviously Director Casey had managed to go, after having agreed to something, and not calling-he didn't call John Whitehead [Pilgrim] back and say John, you know we agreed on that, but I think we ought to change it. He went to basically to the President and got it changed, and used a rather, I think, deceptive way of letting us find out that it had been changed. ... Nobody had informed me of this so-called 9- point agenda. But as far as I was concerned, our policy was clear. No more arms sales under these circumstances." - More on Rockefeller lawyer Daniel Sheehan and his Christic Institute in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article under Sheehan's Romero Institute, which is financed by the Tides Foundation, and the Sheehan-Rockefeller-organized State of the World Forum. Also see ISGP's article on CIA drug trafficking.
- *) 1981, Gen. George A. Brownell, 'Origin and Development of the National Security Agency': "In June 1952 an ad hoc committee was appointed by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State to study the Communications Intelligence (COMINT) activities of the U.S. The committee's report, known as the Brownell Report, was classified TOP SECRET. The Report concerns virtually all U.S. COMINT activities up to 1952. As a result, the National Security Agency was formed in November 1952."
*) 2010, Nelson McAvoy, 'Coded Messages: How the CIA and NSA Hoodwink Congress and the People', p. 94: "On 28 December 1951, in response to Truman's request, Acheson and Lovett established the Brownell Committee to study the existing structure and make recommendations. George A. Brownell, an eminent attorney in New York City, headed the committee. Brownell served as chairman, assisted by Charles E. (Chip) Bohlen, counselor, State Department; William H. Jackson, special assistant to the DCI (Bedell-Smith); and Brig. Gen. John Magruder, USA (Ret), special assistant to the secretary of defense. The CIA and the Department of State provided the four staff members for the committe, all of whom had served previously in the special intelligence branches of the Army or Navy. The military organizations had no representation on the Brownell Committee or on its support staff, not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Logistically, during the period of the survey, the Brownell Committee and its support staff resided at the CIA (a civilian organization) and received administrative support from the CIA. This was very telling of where President Truman was coming from." - June 7, 2013, The Guardian, 'NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others': "The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian. ...
Disclosure of the Prism program follows a leak to the Guardian on Wednesday of a top-secret court order compelling telecoms provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers. ...
Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.
Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks. ...
Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program." - 1994, John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 'The Secret war against the Jews', pp. 75-78: "Several months before the United States declared war, Bill Donovan invited Allen Dulles to head up the New York branch of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI), President Roosevelt's new intelligence agency and the precursor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Its primary mission was to collect information against the Nazis and their collaborators. In other words, Dulles was asked to inform on his own clients in New York. FDR's wife, Eleanor, objected to the president that, as Dulles was allied with the Schroder Bank, he was himself likely to be connected with the very Nazis he was supposed to be hunting. What Eleanor could not have known was that hiring Dulles had been FDR's idea in the first place. The president knew that Allen Dulles's clients included most of the camouflaged financial entities for Nazi-American interests. Despite this, Roosevelt had approved his selection as head of the COI Manhattan branch because he wanted Dulles where the British wiretappers could keep an eye on him. Dulles was appointed in October 1941 and moved into the twenty-fifth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. One floor below Dulles was Stephenson's wiretap shop. Inside Dulles's operation was one of Roosevelt's spies, Arthur Goldberg, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Before his death, Justice Goldberg confirmed to one of the authors that Dulles's appointment was a setup [Nelson Rockefeller and Joseph Kennedy had been set up in similar ways]... According to several of the "old spies" we spoke to on this point, agreeing to Dulles's request for a posting to Switzerland was another setup. British code breakers targeted Allen Dulles's secret communications net between Switzerland and Germany. They wiretapped the American consulate and Gaevernitz's home but found nothing. Then they discovered how the clever Dulles stayed in contact with the Nazis. We have confirmed that one land line constantly linked German intelligence headquarters and Dulles's counterpart in Swiss intelligence. This and other telegraph lines to Switzerland were tapped by Allied code breakers. Their reports were forwarded to the U.S. Treasury Department's secret service, without the knowledge of Dulles's cronies in the other agencies. According to a senior U.S. counterintelligence agent, German intelligence also had mounted its own code-breaking operation against Dulles under the cover of the Luftfahrtforschungsamt, the radio and telegraph research institute of the Nazi air force. Published sources confirmed that such an organization did exist and that it did break Allen Dulles's OSS codes for communicating back to the United States. These German records were captured at the end of the war and were added to the Dulles files. They too have never been released to the public. Only a handful of people, including Justice Goldberg, knew that they once existed. A former officer of the NSA also remembered the tapes of the Swiss wiretaps and believes that they are still stored in the NSA vaults at Fort Meade. The wiretap evidence against Dulles originally was collected by a special section of Operation Safehaven, the U.S. Treasury Department's effort to trace the movement of stolen Nazi booty toward the end of the war. Roosevelt and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau had set up Dulles by giving him the one assignment—intelligence chief in Switzerland—where he would be most tempted to aid his German clients with their money laundering. Dulles was not the only target... All through the war, Roosevelt had reluctantly caved in to British demands that the Jewish issue be ignored, that the concentration camp victims must be expendable to the war effort. But the one issue upon which Roosevelt was unyielding was his insistence that after the war, the German bankers must stand in the dock at the Nuremberg war crimes trial. This is confirmed by the top-secret White House-Justice Department correspondence files. The plan was to wait until Abs, Krupp, Flick, and the rest of the industrialists were charged. Then Morgenthau would unleash the wiretap evidence showing that the Nazis had hidden their stolen assets in Switzerland, with the help of Allen Dulles. The whole scandal of Western aid to the Germany economy would unravel. All the slights of the Standard Oil blackmail would be avenged. The sudden release of the Safehaven intercepts would force a public outcry to bring treason charges against those British and American businessmen who aided the enemy in time of war. The targets included not only the Dulles brothers, but Forrestal and major industrialists, such as Henry Ford. From a prosecutor's point of view, indicting the German bankers first was a brilliant strategy. To save themselves, Herman Abs and Hjalmar Schacht would have to reveal the whole history of their sordid dealings with companies such as Ford Motor. Despite the shields of Swiss banking laws and the layers of corporations that Dulles had erected, he had never anticipated that the Swiss bank codes and cables would ever become public knowledge. Roosevelt and Morgenthau would have hanged him and all his colleagues, forever breaking the power of the pirates of international finance. It was a glorious dream. Yet the scheme completely fell apart because someone tipped off Dulles that he was under surveillance. Several historians have suggested that Roosevelt did not trust his own Justice Department and tried to isolate his own attorney general from the most sensitive communications. It is possible that through lawyers at the Justice Department Dulles found out about the wiretap scheme. Some of the "old spies" say that the most likely source of the leak, however, was Vice President Henry Wallace, who constantly shared information with his brother-in-law, the Swiss minister in Washington during the war. Wallace gave many details of his secret meetings with Roosevelt to the Swiss diplomat. Unfortunately, giving information to the Swiss was almost the same as handing it directly to the Nazis, who had recruited the head of the Swiss secret service. Up to January 1944, German intelligence continued to read the most sensitive war plans of the Roosevelt administration. Exactly what Wallace leaked to his Swiss brother-in-law is open to speculation. However, apparently Wallace was one of the few insiders who knew of Roosevelt's scheme to entrap Dulles and the American industrialists. As Washington journalist I. F. Stone recalled, Vice President Wallace acted as the front man for Roosevelt, fending off inquiries from liberal cabinet members and the press about the number of pro-Fascist businessmen Roosevelt had appointed to high positions. It is plausible that Wallace was fully briefed on the true purpose of Operation Safehaven and shared these tidbits with his Swiss brother-in-law as well. This, according to several of our sources in the intelligence community, was the real reason Roosevelt dropped Wallace, the second most popular man in the United States, and replaced him with Harry Truman in the 1944 presidential election. Many historians have recorded that it was Wallace's leftist leanings that cost him his job, together with the campaign run by Forrestal and other right-wing Democrats such as oil man Edwin Pauley, who later went into business with George Bush. The "old spies" are adamant that it really was the leak to his brother-in-law that cost Wallace the vice presidency. But it did have a side benefit for the pirates of Wall Street. It saved Allen Dulles's neck."
- November 28, 2007, Oral History of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Illinois.gov), director Mark DePue interview with Joan Talley, a daughter of CIA head Allen W. Dulles, pp. 1, 24-25: "[Talley:] My father was in the State Department. He was in the diplomatic service, and he was, I think, head of the Near East desk at the time when I was born. Having decided that you can't be a diplomat and get any higher position if you're not rich he had decided to leave the diplomatic service, so he was studying law at night. When I was four we left Washington, and he was, by that time, a lawyer, and planning to go to Sullivan and Cromwell in New York, where his brother was a partner. ... But I've left out the whole paranoid thing [Allen Macy Dulles, after his headshot in Korea], which started, already, in Washington. And that's a well-known thing for brain injury. You know? He starts off on the Jews, he said, "My father was a Nazi spy." He had actually been left-handed, and we changed his hands, and a whole litany of paranoid ideas. That paranoia lasted until he had been here in Santa Fe some while. So that would be like '77. These new—called atypical anti-psychotic –medicines were invented, and we tried them all on Allen, and the first one—oh, I'm going to forget the names right now – worked immediately, almost immediately, on his paranoia. His paranoia was reduced by eighty percent. Also that whole thing that he told you about the mistranslation of the Bible was one of his paranoid things."
- cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/allen-dulles-becomes-dci.html (accessed: June 8, 2016): "During World War II, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and served as the OSS chief in Bern, Switzerland. From that key neutral outpost, Dulles collected important intelligence from German sources and negotiated an early surrender of German forces in Italy. OSS Director William Donovan made sure these accomplishments made it into the American press, and Dulles became famous in America as a spymaster and wartime cloak-and-dagger hero.
After the war ended in 1945, Dulles returned to his law practice but was consulted about the creation of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1948, Dulles was asked to chair an early reform study of the organization. DCI Walter Bedell Smith brought Dulles in to oversee operations in 1951 and then made him his deputy director a few months later. When the newly inaugurated Eisenhower made Dulles DCI on February 26, 1953, it seemed to fulfill his destiny. ...
Dulles served longer than any DCI, from February 1953 to November 1961. His tenure is often said to be a "golden age" for CIA." - *) The CIA ties of Nelson and David Rockefeller will be discussed later in this article.
*) May 9, 2005, Counterpunch, '"More powerful than the U.S. Army": Straight to Bechtel': "[John] McCone soon introduced his new friend, Allen Dulles, the nation's top spy, to his old partner in the Bay Area, Stephen Bechtel. Dulles and Bechtel became fast friends and golfing buddies. While slicing drives at Congressional Country Club and shanking irons into the Pacific at Pebble Beach, the two men would discuss the clandestine opportunities for a privately-owned firm like Bechtel in Dulles's shadow world. It is from Dulles that the Bechtel family acquired its obsession with secrecy. Long before the advent of Hollywood stalkers and anarchist pie throwers, the Bechtel family and its top executives traveled with bodyguards. The family has even gone so far as to petition a California court to shield their voter registration cards from public inspection. More often than not, the talk between Dulles and Bechtel turned to oil and the Middle East. Under Dulles's guidance, Bechtel stepped up its operations in the Persian Gulf region, especially in Saudi Arabia. Bechtel engineered the oil infrastructure for the Standard Oil Company's burgeoning empire in Saudi Arabia, building pipelines, refineries, highways and ports. When Standard Oil's Aramco partnership in Saudi Arabia was nationalized, Bechtel didn't miss a beat. Instead, the company inaugurated a profitable new relationship with the Saudi royal family and went right to work building airports, military bases and an 850-mile long pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Jordan. Somewhere along the line, the Bechtels encountered Saudi Arabia's largest construction company, which is also a family-run empire, called Bin Laden Construction. Founded by Osama's father, Mohammed Bin Laden, the Bin Laden firm worked on dozens of joint projects with the Bechtel Corporation, which had already perfected the art of subcontracting out hard labor to low-paid workers in the Third World. Outsourcing is a strategy that Bechtel is using in Iraq today, where 92 percent of its work there is subcontracted out. The Bin Ladens and Bechtels remain close to this day. Indeed, the Bin Laden family owns a $10 million stake in the Fremont Group, the Bechtel Corporation's investment subsidiary. Moreover, the BinLaden Group is a doing work on Bechtel's biggest contract, the $20 billion deal with Saudi government to excavate two new ports, in what has been called the most expensive construction project in world history. Well, since the last big Bechtel project. ... When Iran antagonized US oil companies and the CIA by nationalizing their oil reserves, Allen Dulles and Kermit Roosevelt sought and received Bechtel's assistance in the CIA run coup that overthrew Mossadeq and installed the Shah. Bechtel provided a similar service in 1965 when the CIA instigated the bloody coup that toppled President Sukarno of oil-rich Indonesia and put into place the corrupt and iron-fisted regime of General Suharto. After Dulles was eased out of the CIA, John F. Kennedy picked Bechtel's old hand, John McCone, to replace him as the nation's top intelligence spook and Stephen Bechtel himself became the CIA's emissary to the Business Council. The Agency and the company have rarely pursued separate interests since then." - August 19, 2013, The Guardian, 'CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup; Declassified documents describe in detail how US – with British help – engineered coup against Mohammad Mosaddeq': "The CIA has publicly admitted for the first time that it was behind the notorious 1953 coup against Iran's democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, in documents that also show how the British government tried to block the release of information about its own involvement in his overthrow.
On the 60th anniversary of an event often invoked by Iranians as evidence of western meddling, the US national security archive at George Washington University published a series of declassified CIA documents.
"The military coup that overthrew Mosaddeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government," reads a previously excised section of an internal CIA history titled The Battle for Iran.
The documents, published on the archive's website under freedom of information laws, describe in detail how the US – with British help – engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain's MI6.
Britain, and in particular Sir Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, regarded Mosaddeq as a serious threat to its strategic and economic interests after the Iranian leader nationalised the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, latterly known as BP. But the UK needed US support. The Eisenhower administration in Washington was easily persuaded.
British documents show how senior officials in the 1970s tried to stop Washington from releasing documents that would be "very embarrassing" to the UK. ...
The Iranian-Armenian historian Ervand Abrahamian, author of The Coup: 1953, the CIA and the Roots of Modern US-Iranian Relations, said in a recent interview that the coup was designed "to get rid of a nationalist figure who insisted that oil should be nationalised". ... Some analysts argue that Mosaddeq failed to compromise with the west and the coup took place against the backdrop of communism fears in Iran. "My study of the documents proves to me that there was never really a fair compromise offered to Mosaddeq, what they wanted Mosaddeq to do is to give up oil nationalisation and if he'd given that of course then the national movement would have been meaningless," he told the Iranian online publication, Tableau magazine." - *) May 27, 1985, The Times, 'When Britain brought off a coup': "[Drake's words to Parliament in 1951:] we should not allow the biggest foreign in Britain to go without doing something about it."
*) November 4, 1996, The Times, Drake's obituary: "Partly thanks to [Drake's] efforts, BP survived the Mossadeq episode and it was, no doubt, in recognition of this that in January 1952 he was appointed CBE at the relatively early age of 41." - *) 1982, Rarihokwats, 'Guatemala!: The Horror and the Hope, Part 1', p. 10: "Arbenz said, all the achievements of United Fruit "were made at the expense of the impoverishment of the country..." ... United Fruit began its campaign when Harry Truman was President of the U.S. A United Fruit plan was worked out with Walter Bedell Smith, then director of the newly- established CIA. Truman gave his go-ahead. Weapons were purchased and loaded on United Fruit ships. But when Secretary of State Dean Acheson heard of the plan, he persuaded Truman to abort it. Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua's dictator, had offered to help the U.S. "Just give me the arms," he had offered, "and I'll clean up Guatemala for you in no time.""
*) 2010, 'The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention', pp. 125-126: "[Propaganda pioneer Edward] Bernays stepped up United Fruit's press campaign to coincide with the change of administrations. To again use the New York Times as an example, its journalists portrayed the Arbanz government as being in full partnership with the communists. The [alleged] objective of the revolutionary programs was to squeeze UFCO, IRCA, Empresa Electrica, and other United States interests. ... In Herbert Matthews' opinion, Bernays' campaign was on target: the press "saw and wrote exactly what the State Department wanted to see." Company representatives like Spruille Braden took UFCO's case directly to the United States public. "
*) April 1999, Jose Luis Valdes-Ugalde (Department of International Relations, The London School of Economics and Political Science), 'Intervening in Revolution: The US Exercise of Power in Guatemala, 1954', pp. 219-229: "An alternative explanation is that, in the light of anti-Americanism in Latin America, the economic argument behind US involvement could not be produced easily or often. One of the reasons being that it was too obvious to the eyes of foreign and domestic observers that the open defence of US economic private interest in the region placed the US, within the Central American context, in an outrageous position given the unrestrained Capitalism represented by most US investors, particularly UFCO [United Fruit Company]. Thus, the need to disguise the national security policy by making use of both an anti-Soviet and an anti-Communist discourse. Since the latter was a legitimate political weapon, it did not result difficult to impose the argument of the defence of the "continental integrity" against Communism. ...
The Dulles's brothers and the US ambassador to the United Nations, Henry Cabot Lodge were accused by both the media and the Guatemalan government of representing, as corporate lawyers with S&C (the law firm representing UFCO), the interests of the company. ... Against the calculations of the State Department the allegations presented against the US officials in charge of designing the policy in Guatemala were a matter of concern in Washington after the story was published by the Mexican and the Guatemalan press under the headline, "Dulles is one of the main shareholders of UFCO." In these press reports Alfonso Bauer Paiz, former Minister of Economy and Labour, and former President of the National Agrarian Bank, stated that "during my time as Minister of Economy and Labour I received a confidential document of June 20, 1950 ... where it can be proved th at... Mr. Foster Dulles belongs to the financial circuits of the United Fruit Company ... In one of the parts of the document the following is stated: 'both IRCA and UFCO had as corporate lawyers two of the most prestigious firms in the United States: ... Davis, Polk, Wardwell & Kendal and Sullivan and Cromwell'. To the latter belongs the influential Republican politician, until now special advisor of the State Department, John Foster Dulles." Dulles was, thus, at the centre of the conflict of interests controversy. ...
UFCO's connections within the Eisenhower White House cannot be ignored in the context of this thesis. Moreover, as Dulles's case showed, they serve as examples of both the direct finks and ideological affinities that existed between (and among) many government and company officials. At the time, there was no reason to think that there should be a divorce between multinational corporation business' and state interest. Rather the contrary, this was a natural outcome of the way capitalist development ought to occur. In fact, Dulles's highly spirited speeches indicated that a link between freedom, Christianity, free market, and democracy as he understood them, was permissible: these were, of course, governmental aims which might be (and were) achieved in association with private entrepreneurial groups. Consequently, post-war capitalism was not conceived without the tactical support of central government. ...
Although in a more specific sphere of attention, there was the link between the economic and the political interests within UFCO. Together with Foster Dulles, who joined S&C in 1911 through the intervention of his grandfather, former Secretary of state, William Foster, other members of the family were also part of the board of directors of UFCO. For instance, John Foster's brother and Director of Eisenhower's and Kennedy's CIA, Allen Dulles, John Cabot, Henry's brother, who became assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs in 1953 and had served earlier as Ambassador to Guatemala, held a substantial amount of stock in United Fruit.
The list of officials with UFCO connections goes on. Other members of the government with substantial interests in UFCO included Sinclair Weeks, the Secretary of Commerce, while General Robert Cutler, first special assistant to the President for national security affairs and thus head of its planning board, had been chairman of the company's transfer bank, Old Colony Trust, which also made him chairman of United Fruit. Former High Commissioner of Germany John J. McCloy, Eisenhower's close friend who as president of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development had ordered the study of Guatemala's agrarian difficulties, was a United Fruit director. Robert Hill Ambassador to Costa Rica, was a member of the diplomatic team that participated in Pbsuccess. Hill was a former vice-president of W.R. Grace&Company, a US food and agribusiness multinational with large interests in Guatemala, and later became director of UFCO. Ann Whitman, Eisenhower's personal secretary, was the former wife of UFCO's director and then vice-president for public relations, Edward Whitman. On the Council on Foreign Relations, Whitney H. Shephardson was an IRCA officer, and Robert Lehman served on the UFCO board. Lehman, who was a high-ranking investment banker, was related by marriage to Frank Altschul, the Council's secretary, who was responsible for the influential National Planning Association report that contended that the Communists were in complete control of Guatemala. And finally General Walter Bedell Smith became a director in 1955, immediately after resigning from the government where he had been undersecretary of State, and briefly Director of the CIA. ...
Within the general Cold War consensus, there were, however, certain differences over foreign policy in the Eisenhower administration, "with Dulles, Nixon, and the military men on the more aggressive side." Perlo quotes the well known New York Times columnist James Reston, who in August 1955, described how Dulles's "control of foreign policy [had] been almost complete. But at critical points, usually when he seemed to be veering close to war with the Communists, the President [has] intervened and imposed a more moderate line."66 If Dulles was the hard-liner in the foreign policy making process, there also was President Eisenhower whose more moderate rhetoric allowed him to command foreign policy decisions. This feature obliterates the myth of Eisenhower as "an ineffectual leader who left the conduct of foreign policy to his militantly anti-Communist secretary of State.""
*) 2013, Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, 'The Untold History of the United States', p. 263: "The Truman administration decided to overthrow Arbenz in September 1952 but reversed course when U.S. involvement was exposed.
Eisenhower had no such compunctions He appointed Jack Peurifoy as his ambassador to Guatemala. Peurifoy, who spoke no Spanish, had been serving in Greece, where his role in helping restore the monarchy to power had earned him the sobriquet "the butcher of Athens." A photo of the Greek royal family still adorned his desk. ... Before Greece, he had helped purge the State Department of liberals and leftists. Arbenz invited the new U.S. ambassador and his wife to dinner. They clashed for six hours over Communist influence in the Guatemalan government, land reform, and treatment of United Fruit. Peurifoy sent Secretary of State Dulles a long cable detailing their discussion thar concluded, "I am definitely convinced that if the President is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along."
In Peurifoy's mind, that equated to being a tool of Moscow: "Communism is directed by the Kremlin all over the world, and anyone who thinks differently doesn't know what he is talking about." In reality, Guatemalan communism was indigenous and the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo was independent of the Soviet Union. The Communists held only four of the fifty-six seats in Congress and no Cabinet posts. The part had approximately 4,000 members in a population of 3.5 million.
To suggest that United Fruit had friends among the high and mighty in the Eisenhower administration would be an understatement. The Dulles brothers' law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, had written United Fruit's 1930 and 1936 agreements with Guatemala. Allen Dulles's predecessor at the CIA, Undersecretary of State, Walter Bedell Smith, would become a vice president of the company in 1955. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs John Moors Cabot was a major shareholder. His brother Thomas Dudley Cabot, the director of international security affairs in the State Department, had been president of United Fruit. NSC head General Robert Cutler had been chairman of the board. John J. McCloy was a former board member. And U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica Robert Hill would later join the board.
Concerns about United Fruit interests reinforced the Eisenhower administration's deep-seated anticommunism. In August 1953, administration officials decided to take Árbenz down through covert action. One U.S. official cautioned, "Were it to become known that the United States had tried a Czechoslovakia in Guatemala, the effect on our relations in this hemisphere, and probably in the world ... could be ... disastrous." Undeterred, Allen Dulles asked Iran coup instigator Kim Roosevelt to lead "Operation Success," but Roosevelt declined, not trusting that the operation's title reflected the prospects on the ground. Dulles then chose Colonel Albert Haney, a former South Korea station chief, as field commander with Tracy Barnes as chief of political warfare. Barnes had the classic CIA resume of that era. Raised on Long Island's Whitney estate, replete with its own private golf course, he matriculated at Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law. Serving with the OSS in World War II, he captured a German garrison, earning him a Silver Star. But because Barnes had a reputation as a bumbler, former CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, a Dulles protege, was tasked with overseeing the operation.
In late January 1954, word leaked out that the United States was collaborating with Colonel Castillo Armas to train the invading force. The Guatemalan government then turned to Czechoslovakia for a shipload of arms. The United States loudly decried Soviet penetration of the hemisphere [as a result]. ... In a surprising reversal, New York Times correspondent Sydney Gruson began providing coverage of the unfolding Guatemalan crisis that accurately captured that nation's outrage over U.S. bullying and accusations. ... On May 21, he wrote that U.S. pressure had "boomeranged," inspiring "a greater degree of national unity than [Guatemala] has experienced in a long time." Even Guatemalan newspapers "that normally are in constant opposition," he reported, "have rallied to defend the Government's action." "Both newspapers," he noted, had "assailed what they termed the United States willingness to provide arms to right-wing dictators in the hemisphere while refusing to fulfill Guatemala's legitimate needs." In another front-page article the following day, Gruson recounted the Guatemalan foreign minister's charge that the U.S. State Department had pressured Guatemala to raise its compensation to United Fruit to $16 million.... Gruson's days as a [New York] Times reporter in Guatemala were numbered. Over dinner, Allen Dulles spoke to his friend Times business manager Julius Adler, who conveyed the administration's complaints to [New York Times] publisher Sulzberger [a Pilgrim, like Allen Dulles]. Gruson was sent packing to Mexico City.
Meanwhile, Peurifoy and other U.S. officials waged a vigorous propaganda and disinformation campaign both inside Guatemala and in neighboring states to discredit the ARbenz government and weaken its hold on power. In June 1954, CIA-trained mercenaries attacked from bases in Honduras and Nicaragua, backed by U.S. air support. When the initial attack stalled, Eisenhower provided Castillo Armas with additional planes. Even British and French officials balked at the thought of supporting such naked aggression. Henry Cabot Lodge [Pilgrims], U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, confronted his British and French counterparts and threatened to withdraw U.S. support to Great Britain on Egypt and Cyprus and to France on Tunesia and Morocco if they failed to back the United States on Guatemala.
On June 27, Arbenz, assuming that resistance was futile, handed power to a military junta headed by the army chief of staff. That night, he delivered a final radio address in which he charged, "The United Fruit Company, in collaboration with the governing circles of the United States, is responsible for what is happening to us." He warned about "twenty years of fascist bloody tyranny [which would happen, only longer]." ... Dulles addressed the American public on June 30 and applauded the victory of "democracy" over "Soviet communism." ... One British official, gagging on Dulles's mendacity, observed of the speech that "in places it might almost be Molotov speaking about ... Czechoslovakia - or Hitler about Austria."
Shortly thereafter, Castillo Armas visited Washington and assured Nixon of his fealty. "Tell me what you want me to do and I will do it," he promised the vice president. He received $90 million in U.S. aid in the next two years, 150 times as much as the reform government had received in a decade. He set up a brutal military dictatorship and was assassinated three years later. United Fruit got its land back." - *) August 10, 2000, The Guardian, 'President 'ordered murder' of Congo leader'.
*) January-February 1999 issue, Probe Magazine, Jim DiEugenio, 'Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa': "In June of 1960, Belgium had made a deliberately abrupt withdrawal from the Congo. The idea was that the harder the shock of colonial disengagement, the easier it would be to establish an informal yet de facto control afterward. ...
As hoped for, the heady rush of freedom proved too much for the new Congolese army. They attacked the Europeans left behind and pillaged their property. The Belgians used this as a pretext to drop paratroops into the country. In response, the democratically elected premier, Patrice Lumumba and President Joseph Kasavubu asked United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold for help. At his request, the United Nations asked Belgium to leave and voted to send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo.
At this point, the Belgians made a crucial and insidious move. Realizing Hammarskjold would back the newly elected government against the foreign invaders, Belgium began to financially and militarily abet the secession of the Congo’s richest province, Katanga, in the southeast corner of the state. There was a primitive tribal rivalry that served as a figleaf for this split. But the real reason the Belgians promoted the break was the immense mineral wealth in Katanga. They found a native leader who would support them and they decided to pay Moise Tshombe a multimillion dollar monthly bounty to head the secessionist rebellion. As Jonathan Kwitny has noted, some of the major media e.g. Time and the New York Times actually backed the Belgians in this act. ...
In spite of the Belgian plotting and Tshombe’s opportunistic betrayal, Allen Dulles blamed Lumumba for the impending chaos. His familiar plaint to the National Security Council was that Lumumba had now enlisted in the Communist cause. This, even though the American embassy in Leopoldville cabled Washington that the Belgian troops were the real root of the problem. The embassy further stated that if the UN did not get the Belgians out, the Congo would turn to someone who would: the Russians. Further, as Kwitny and others have noted, Lumumba was not a Communist...
At this inopportune moment, July of 1960, Lumumba visited Washington for three days. Eisenhower deliberately avoided him by escaping to Rhode Island. Lumumba asked both Secretary of State Christian Herter and his assistant Douglas Dillon for help in kicking out the Belgians. The response was purposefully noncommittal. Meanwhile, the Soviets helped Lumumba by flying in food and medical supplies. Rebuffed by Washington, Lumumba then asked the Russians for planes, pilots, and technicians to use against Katanga. This was a major step in sealing his fate in the eyes of Allen Dulles. Larry Devlin, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville (then the capital of the Congo), wired CIA headquarters that the Congo was now experiencing "a classic Communist effort" to subjugate the government. Within 24 hours, Dulles, apparently with Eisenhower’s approval, set in motion a series of assassination plots that would eventually result in Lumumba’s death." - *) nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB118/index.htm#docs (accessed: June 8, 2016): "In this 5:08 minute White House tape obtained from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, President Johnson is recorded speaking on the phone from his Texas ranch with Undersecretary of State George Ball and Assistant Secretary for Latin America, Thomas Mann. Ball briefs Johnson on that status of military moves in Brazil to overthrow the government of Joao Goulart who U.S. officials view as a leftist closely associated with the Brazilian Communist Party. Johnson gives Ball the green light to actively support the coup if U.S. backing is needed. "I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to do everything that we need to do" he orders. In an apparent reference to Goulart, Johnson states "we just can't take this one." "I'd get right on top of it and stick my neck out a little," he instructs Ball.
2) State Department, Top Secret Cable from Rio De Janiero, March 27, 1964: Ambassador Lincoln Gordon wrote this lengthy, five part, cable to the highest national security officers of the U.S. government, including CIA director John McCone and the Secretaries of Defense and State, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk. He provides an assessment that President Goulart is working with the Brazilian Communist Party to "seize dictatorial power" and urges the U.S. to support the forces of General Castello Branco. Gordon recommends "a clandestine delivery of arms" for Branco's supporters as well as a shipment of gas and oil to help the coup forces succeed and suggests such support will be supplemented by CIA covert operations. He also urges the administration to "prepare without delay against the contingency of needed overt intervention at a second stage." ...
4) CIA, Intelligence Information Cable on "Plans of Revolutionary Plotters in Minas Gerias," March 30, 1964: The CIA station in Brazil transmitted this field report from intelligence sources in Belo Horizonte that bluntly stated "a revolution by anti-Goulart forces will definitely get under way this week, probably in the next few days. The cable transmits intelligence on military plans to "march toward Rio." The "revolution," the intelligence source predicted, "will not be resolved quickly and will be bloody."
5) State Department, Secret Cable to Amb. Lincoln Gordon in Rio, March 31, 1964: Secretary of State Dean Rusk sends Gordon a list of the White House decisions "taken in order [to] be in a position to render assistance at appropriate time to anti-Goulart forces if it is decided this should be done." The decisions include sending US naval tankers loaded with petroleum, oil and lubricants from Aruba to Santos, Brazil; assembling 110 tons of ammunition and other equipment for pro-coup forces; and dispatching a naval brigade including an aircraft carrier, several destroyers and escorts to conduct be positioned off the coast of Brazil. Several hours later, a second cable is sent amending the number of ships, and dates they will be arriving off the coast.
6) CIA, Secret Memorandum of Conversation on "Meeting at the White House 1 April 1964 Subject-Brazil," April 1, 1964 This memorandum of conversation records a high level meeting, held in the White House, between President Johnson and his top national security aides on Brazil. CIA deputy chief of Western Hemisphere operations, Desmond Fitzgerald recorded the briefing given to Johnson and the discussion on the progress of the coup. Defense Secretary reported on the movements of the naval task force sailing towad Brazil, and the arms and ammunition being assembled in New Jersey to resupply the coup plotters if necessary."
*) 2005, Stansfield Turner, 'Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret' (digital): "The CIA regarded Brazil's president, Joao Goulart, to be a Communist in the making, based on his record of favoring state ownership of important utilities. It looked as though Goulart's government was going to take over a phone company that was a subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). Harold Geneen, ITT's president, appealed to his friend John McCone. McCone involved the CIA in waging what resembled a psychological warfare campaign. It included press releases that smeared Goulart, a joint effort by CIA and the Agency for International Development (AID) to persuade the AFL-CIO to establish training center to teach Brazilian labor leaders alternatives to communism, funneling money to the Brazilian Institute for Democratic Action in an attempt to influence regional elections, and encouraging contributions from American businesses to Brazilian opposition parties. These activities--tapping U.S. business for intelligence and providing them assistance with operations overseas--are highly controversial. Some years after he left office, McCone claimed that when he was DCI it was CIA policy to refuse all offers of help from corporations and to adamantly tell U.S> corporations to stay out of local politics. That seems to be stretching the facts a bit, but with McCone's having gone to work for ITT after leaving the government, he may have been overly sensitive on this issue. Early in my days as DCI, I had not even thought about turning to American businesses to obtain intelligence. Then, on my first trip overseas, I called on the chief of British intelligence, MI-6. To my surprise, the first question this "spymaster of spymasters" put to me was whether we were tapping the resources of the U.S. business community. His point was that it was a shame to use secret sources, often at a considerable risk or expense, to obtain data that was available for the asking. Actually, back in 1977, American business were shying away from any contact with the CIA. Congressional investigations had revealed some questionable contacts in the past between businesses and the Agency, such as with ITT in Brazil." - For Paulo Ayres Filho's involvement in SRI, look at ISGP's "liberal CIA" article.
- May-June 1996, Lisa Pease for Probe Magazine, 'Indonesia, President Kennedy & Freeport Sulphur'. While "alternative", this is a lengthy and very well-sourced article. (PDF)
- *) December 24, 1976, New York Times, 'U.S. Documents Show a Secret Offer by Anaconda To Give Money to a 1970 Foe of Allende in Chile': "The Anaconda Company and other concerns active in Latin America secretly offered to funnel at least $500,000 through the State Department to a conservative candidate in the 1970 Chilean elections, State Department documents showed yesterday.
The documents, provided to The New York Times by Edward M. Korry, former Ambassador to Chile, and independently verified by The Times, show that C. Jay Parkinson, former chairman of the board of Anaconda, who is also the president of the prestigious Council for Latin America, met on April 10, 1970, with high State Department officials to urge that the United States Government actively intervene to prevent the election of Salvador Allende Gossens.
Mr. Parkinson, reached at his home in Glen Cove, L. I., said he had "no recollection" of any offers of financial aid. ...
The Council for Latin America, now known as the Council of the Americas [David Rockefeller-founded; synonymous with the Americas Society], was organized in 1963 at the request of President John F. Kennedy, who was then seeking more support for his Latin American policies. Its member companies control 85 percent of United States private investments in Latin America and have wide influence in Washington.
The 1970 offer of financial aid in Chile, made to Charles A. Meyer, a former assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, was rejected at the time, the documents show. There is no evidence that the offer involved anything illegal.
The documents provide the first published evidence that the council has ever been secretly active on behalf of politicians in Latin America. Such political activity has repeatedly been denied by council members.
The documents also raise additional questions about the testimony by officials of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company during the 1973 hearings into I. T. T.'s involvement in Chile. The hearings were by the multinational corporations subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ...
Other witnesses testified, however, that I.T.T. officials, including Mr. Geneen, had discussed the $1 million in terms of covert contribution to the presidential campaign of Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez, the 1970 candidate of Chile's right-wing political parties.
It could not be learned yesterday whether the current grand jury investigation was also investigating the contradictory testimony about the I.T.T. offer of $1 million.
In a telephone interview from his office in Boise, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who is chairman of the multinational corporations subcommittee, said "it was evident that someone had lied" during the 1973 hearings. The transcripts of the testimony, he added, were turned over then to the Justice Department "because there was a prima facie case of perjury." "It was only a question of determining who was telling the truth and who was not," he added.
In an interview and in a sworn statement provided to the Justice Department earlier this year, Mr. Korry said that Mr. Geneen had been among a smail group of men who comprised the executive board of the council and, in effect, either made or approved of the council's decisions. Mr. Korry added that he had subsequently been told by other officials of the council that Mr. Geneen was aware of the April 1970 proposal by Anaconda, which had large copper investments in Chile, and the other council members to intervene politically in an effort to prevent Mr. Allende's election.
"Hence it is inconceivable," Mr. Korry said in his Justice Department statement, "that Mr. Geneen did not know the true purpose of the approach by I.T.T. representatives in 1970," which—he said—was for the same purpose as the earlier Anaconda proposal. "Mr. Geneen and other I.T.T. executives obviously lied in their testimony," Mr. Korry said in his statement.
Mr. Korry, who served as Ambassador to Chile from 1967 to 1971, further charged that all copies of the State Department correspondence dealing with the April 1970 Anaconda proposal had been removed—at the orders of the White House—from Government files. Among the missing documents, he said, is a cablegram he forwarded to Mr. Meyer at the State Department on April 28. 1970, urging that the Anaconda offer of financial assistance be rejected.
It became known through newspaper reports in late 1974 that the Central Intelligence Agency had been authorized by President Richard M. Nixon to mount major clandestine operation against Mr. Allende, aimed at preventing his election late in 1970 and, failing that, making impossible for him to govern. Mr. Allende was slain during a coup in September 1973.
During the multinational corporations subcommittee hearings in 1973, witnesses repeatedly expressed the view that United States multinational corprations operating abroad should not become involved in domestic politics.
John A. McCone, a former director of the C.I.A. and a member of the board of I.T.T., told the subcommittee at one point [and in complete contrast to his actions] that multinational companies "have to be very careful not to involve themselves in domestic politics of any of the countries and, indeed, they are very careful.""
*) December 1982 issue, Seymour Hersh for the Atlantic Monthly, 'The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile': "The United States' influence on the 1964 election was,"more extensive than has been publicly reported. At least $20 million in support of the Frei candidacy—about $8 per voter—was funneled by the United States into Chile in 1963 and 1964, much of it through the Agency for International Development (AID). Millions of dollars in AID and CIA funds were allocated, with the full knowledge of the Chilean and United States governments, to Roman Catholic organizations throughout the country whose objective was to oppose Protestantism and communism. Frei won handily, with 56 percent of the vote. Frei, who was fully aware of the source of his funding, also received covert help from a group of American corporations known as the Business Group for Latin America. The Group had been organized in 1963 by David Rockefeller, president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, at the express request of President Kennedy, who was directing his administration's fight against Castro and the spread of communism in Latin America. It included on its executive committee such prominent corporation executives as C. Jay Parkinson, board chairman of Anaconda; Harold S. Geneen, head of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, which owned and operated the telephone facilities in Chile; and Donald M. Kendall, chairman of PepsiCo, the softdrink company, which had extensive business activities in Latin America.
The principal contact in Chile for the CIA as well as for the American corporations was the organization of Agustín Edwards, a close friend of Kendall's, who was the owner of the conservative El Mercurio newspaper chain in Chile and a focal point for the opposition to Allende and the left. The CIA and the Business Group, which by 1970 had been reorganized into the Council of the Americas, relied heavily on Edwards to use his organization and his contacts to channel their moneys into the 1964 political campaign. Many of the ties between the Business Group and the CIA in 1964 remained in place long after the election. For example, Enno Hobbing, a CIA official who had initially been assigned as liaison to the Business Group, eventually left the CIA and became the principal operations officer for the Council.
During the Frei years, the CIA continued to operate at will throughout the country, primarily seeking to repress radical and left-leaning political activities. At least twenty operations were mounted inside Chile between 1964 and 1969, according to the published report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which conducted an extensive investigation in 1975 into the CIA. Most of them were designed to support the election of moderate and conservative candidates in Chilean congressional elections. By the late 1960s, serious strain began to emerge in the CIA's relationship with the Frei government. Most important, the chief of the CIA station in Santiago, Henry D. Hecksher, believed that Frei and his Christian Democratic Party had tilted dangerously to the left. Hecksher, a vigorous anti-communist, incessantly urged CIA headquarters to change American Policy and turn from Frei to Alessandri, who was planning to run again for president in the 1970 elections. Under Chilean law, Frei could not stay in office for consecutive terms. Hecksher and others feared—correctly, as it turned out—that the Christian Democrats, increasingly polarized by Frei's politics, would choose an even more liberal candidate in 1970. If the CIA needed further evidence of the party's leftward drift, Frei gave it: in 1969, he reestablished trade relations with Cuba. ...
The Frei government did little to increase its popularity with the White House. Early in 1969, Frei canceled a planned visit to Chile by Nelson Rockefeller. The visit, part of a highly publicized tour of Latin America that the New York governor took at the express wish (so the public was told) of President Nixon, was meant to be a public sign of amity of sorts between the Nixon and Rockefeller wings of the Republican Party. Frei's cancellation—which was preordained by Nixon's earlier aid cutback—was taken as further proof by the White House of his moving left. Even Korry had officially opposed the visit, however, since he was sure that Rockefeller's appearance would spark large-scale anti-American demonstrations. ...
Valdés recalls his impromptu talk as "the most difficult time in my life." He had come to the White House with the other Latin American officials knowing that the State Department had lobbied against his visit. At one point in his talk, Valdés says, he told Nixon that Latin America was sending back 3.8 dollars for every dollar in American aid. When Nixon interrupted to challenge the statistic, Valdés retorted that the number had come from a study prepared by a major American bank. "As I delivered my speech," Valdés says, "Kissinger was looking at me as if I were a strange animal." On the next afternoon, Kissinger asked for a private lunch with Valdés in the Chilean Embassy. The meeting was unpleasant. As Valdés describes it, Kissinger began by declaring: "Mr. Minister, you made a strange speech. You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You're wasting your time."
"I said," Valdés recalls, "Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South." "No," Kissinger answered, "and I don't care." At that point, Valdés, astonished and insulted, told Kissinger: "You are a German Wagnerian. You are a very arrogant man." Later, to his embarrassment, Valdés learned that Kissinger was a German Jew, and suspected that he had gravely insulted him. Although it would have been impossible for Valdés to fathom, one of Kissinger's motives in arranging the lunch was clearly to avenge Nixon's honor, to confront the foreign minister who had dared to tell the President something he did not wish to hear. Korry, still in Santiago, was informed that Nixon was "very angry" over Valdés's "arrogant and insulting" lecture. "Valdés went beyond the limits agreed to," Korry says. ...
Until 1970, Kissinger writes, when he became involved in the planning against Allende, "Latin America was an area in which I did not then have expertise of my own." That may be so, but from the first months of the administration, he was an expert disciple of basic American policy: Latin America was to be permitted little independence.
By the time Kissinger joined the Nixon administration, he was far from a newcomer to covert intelligence operations. He had served in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied West Germany after World War II, and was eventually assigned to a unit whose functions included the recruitment of ex-Nazi intelligence officers for anti-Soviet operations inside the Soviet bloc. He retained his ties, as a reserve officer, to military intelligence after entering Harvard in 1947 at age twenty-four as an undergraduate. By 1950, after his graduation, he was working part time for the Defense Department (he was one of the first at Harvard to begin regular shuttles to Washington) as a consultant to its Operations Research Office, a unit under the direct control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that conducted highly classified studies on such topics as the utilization in CIA activities of former German operatives and Nazi partisan supporters. In 1952, Kissinger was named a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board, an operating arm of the National Security Council for covert psychological and paramilitary operations. In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his special assistant in charge of Cold War planning, a position that involved monitoring and approval of covert CIA operations. These were the days of CIA successes in Iran, where the Shah was installed on the throne, and in Guatemala, where the government of Jacobo Arbenz, considered to be anti-American and anti-business, was overthrown. In 1955, Kissinger, already known to insiders for his closeness to Rockefeller and for Rockefeller's reliance on him, was named a consultant to the Operations Coordinating Board, the highest policy-making board for implementing clandestine activity against foreign governments.
Kissinger has written and said little about his high-level exposure to clandestine operations in the early 1950s. Former intelligence officials, in interviews, recall that the young Harvard scholar had come to the attention of Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's influential CIA director, even before the Rockefeller appointment. "He was highly regarded," one senior aide says. "Allen spoke of his meetings with him. He and Walt Rostow [Kissinger's predecessor as national security adviser, and then a professor at MIT] were considered to be kind of a team." One little-known fact is that Rockefeller was replaced as the presidential adviser on Cold War planning in late 1955 by Richard Nixon, then Vice President. There is no evidence that Nixon and Kissinger met in those days, although, many former intelligence aides say, it is highly likely that Nixon was aware of Kissinger's intelligence work. By 1956, Kissinger was at work as director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., in New York.
Kissinger was able to exert near-total control over the intelligence community shortly after joining the Nixon administration. His bureaucratic device was a high-level group known as the 40 Committee (named for the National Security Decision Memorandum establishing it), which he formally chaired. Its six members included Attorney General John Mitchell; Richard Helms, the director of central intelligence; Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; U. Alexis Johnson, representing the State Department; and David Packard, deputy to Melvin Laird, secretary of defense. The 40 Committee was responsible for approving—theoretically—all sensitive covert operations by the Central Intelligence Agency; it also supervised and monitored many intelligence-gathering activities by the armed forces. In practice, however, Kissinger and Nixon treated it as they did the whole bureaucracy—as another office to be utilized or ignored at will. The CIA, in what amounted to routine operating policy, was also circumspect. For example, the Agency's extensive contacts with ITT officials throughout Latin America, and especially in Chile, were carefully shielded from the 40 Committee, whose members presumably did not "need to know"—as the CIA would put it—about them, although ITT eventually played a major role in Chile before the 1970 elections.
Complicating any account of the situation is the fact that most sensitive intelligence decisions are made without a paper trail. In the case of Chile in 1970, many of the documents that did exist, even those in government files, were withheld after the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department initiated full-scale inquiries in 1975 and 1976. At one point Justice Department attorneys came to believe, according to files later made public under the Freedom of Information Act, that Kissinger had kept his own minutes of 40 Committee meetings, which presumably were more detailed than the official minutes that were routinely distributed to the CIA and other involved agencies. (Kissinger's attorney, William D. Rogers, subsequently denied on behalf of his client that such personal 40 Committee files were kept.) The files of the 40 Committee, at least those turned over by the CIA to the various investigating groups, show that the election in Chile was discussed on at least four occasions between April of 1969 and September of 1970. In April of 1969, the CIA warned that a major campaign to influence the 1970 election would not succeed unless the CIA station in Santiago could begin assembling operatives in various political parties. No direct action was taken, the records show, until a 40 Committee meeting on March 25, 1970, at which $135,000 for anti-Allende propaganda efforts was approved. On June 27, the 40 Committee approved an outlay of $300,000—recommended by Korry as well as by the CIA—for more anti-Allende electioneering. It was at this meeting that Kissinger signaled his support of the anti-Allende programs: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. "
In these early meetings, however, the State Department generally took a position against more direct interference in the Chilean presidential elections. On June 27, for example, approval was sought for an additional $500,000 in contingency funds, initially proposed by Korry, to use for buying votes in the Chilean Congress in the anticipation that the September 4 election would result in a runoff between Allende, running for the Popular Unity coalition, and Alessandri, the candidate favored by the CIA, the corporations, and the White House. When some State Department officials objected, approval was deferred, pending the election. One official who attended the early meetings as a senior aide to Alexis Johnson recalls that he considered the operations against Allende to be a "stupid" effort. "It assumed too much reliability from people over whom we had no control. We were doing something culpable and immoral. Why take these risks?" His views prevailed that summer, but as the White House became more concerned, he soon found himself disinvited to the 40 Committee meetings. ...
By that spring, Korry was emerging more and more as a wild card for the CIA and the American corporations. He was fiercely anti-communist and fiercely anti-Allende; his inflammatory cables warning of the dangers that Allende posed to American national-security interests were legendary throughout the State Department for their sense of drama. One State Department official recalls Korry's briefings on Chile as "really terrible. If you didn't believe in Korry's concept of free enterprise, you were a Commie." Nonetheless, Korry was adamant about maintaining control over the CIA in his embassy, and he had flatly ruled out any contact between the CIA and those members of the Chilean military who were known to be eager to stage a military coup d'état in the event of an Allende victory. Korry and Hecksher, who was bitterly opposed not only to Allende but also to the Frei regime, did not have a good working relationship—a fact that only Hecksher seemed to realize. One CIA operative who worked in Latin America at the time says that Korry "and the Agency were not on the same wavelength. He was a difficult ambassador." Although Korry had agreed enthusiastically with the CIA that a major propaganda program was needed to counter the growing drift to the left in Chile, he insisted that the propaganda be anti-communist in nature—and not pro-Alessandri, as Hecksher and his superiors in Washington wanted.
ITT and its president, Harold Geneen, were still determined to give money to Alessandri's campaign. But Geneen, obviously aware of Korry's rejection of the Council's proposal in April, avoided the American Embassy in Santiago and worked directly at the highest levels in Washington. Geneen's go-between was his good friend John A. McCone, a CIA director under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who in 1970 was a director of ITT; his wife was a major Anaconda stockholder. In May, June, and July, McCone repeatedly discussed the Chilean situation with Helms. At least two meetings took place at CIA headquarters (McCone was still a consultant to the Agency), and one was at McCone's home in San Marino, California. McCone, in 1973 testimony before the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said that he learned from Helms that the 40 Committee and the White House had decided that no CIA programs in support of Alessandri were to be carried out in Chile—a decision obviously based on anticipated opposition from Korry as well as on the optimistic polls. ...
Hecksher's main ITT contacts inside Chile were Harold V. Hendrix and Robert Berrellez, two senior company officials, who had a close and long-standing relationship with the Agency's station in Santiago. The ITT men were considered to be "assets" of the CIA, and were even described by special code names in coded Agency communications."
*) 1989, Mark Falcoff, 'Modern Chile: 1970 - 1989; a Critical History', pp. 205-216: "Allessandri, and as early as April 1970, a board of officers of various multinationals led by Chase Manhattan Board Chairman David Rockefeller began a series of representations in this sense to the State Department. Initially they offiered to raise a common fund of their own - $500,000 - to be dispersed by the CIA. When informed of this proposal, Ambassador Korry sent Washington what he has decribed as "a blistering cable of opposition." In addition, the ambassador found himself "subjected to the most inetense, incessant pressures from the CIA and its CHilean allies (including Chilean-based U.S. business concern) to have the United States commit its covert support to their candidate. I refused."
Having failed to exact a decisive commitment to Allesandri from the Nixon administration, the multinationals were nonetheless offered by way of consolidation the assistance of the CIA in locating channels through which funds could be covertly passed to his campaign. In effect, however, ITT was the sole recipient of these services. The CIA and officials of ITT in Chile worked together closely in this sense, and eventually "at least $350,000 was passed by ITT to [the Allessandri] campaign." A roughly equal sum was passed through Chilean channels by other American companies, but, according to the Church committee report, "the CIA learned of this funding but did not assist in it." ...
The Chilean elections were discussed at some length at the spring 1970 meeting of ITT's board of directors. At that meeting, there was a consensus that, as things then stood, Allende would win the popular election. In view of the company's large stake in Chile - which included a majority share in the national telephone company and two major hotels - this matter could not be viewed with equanimity. Hence board member John McCone, a former director of the CIA, was instructed to seek out the agency's chief, Richard Helms, to inquire what plans were under way to assist either Alessandri or Tomic. At their subsequent encounter, Helms informed McCone that the 40 Committee had already decided not to undertake a major covert effort; something would be done within the existing budget, he said - alluding, apparently, to the "spoiling" operation - but no additional funds were to be authorized for other covert purposes.
McCone then informed ITT chairman Harold Geneen of his conversation, but, to blunt its edge of disappointment, arranged with Helms for a meeting in Washington on July 16, 1970 between Geneen and William V. Broe, chief of clandestine services at the Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA. It was at this meeting, according to Broe's later testimony, that Geneen offered to raise an election fund of "substantial size" for Alessandri, to be channeled through the CIA. Broe turned aside the offer, which, he said, was inappropriate in view of U.S. policy— that is, not to support any particular candidate in the election.36 As noted, however, the CIA subsequently agreed to assist ITT in identifying channels whereby corporate funds could be covertly passed to Alessandri. A second conduit was opened for ITT to the National party through the good offices of the [CIA] station in Santiago, and representatioves of the company [ITT] and the Agency [CIA] in Chile met often to coordinate their work in the months before the elections.
In the period after September 4 and up to the congressional runoff on October 24, ITT continued to be extremely active in exploring ways to forestall an Allende presidency. At the September 9 IIT board meeting in New York, Geneen told McCone that the company was prepared to put $1 million "in support of any plan that [would bring] about a coalition of the opposition" -- presumably a series of bribes to Christian Democratic congressmen. McCone then met with Kissinger and Helms to transmit the offer, but since Kissinger's office did not get in touch with him subsequently, he assumed that the tender had been rejected. Meanwhile Jack Neal, director of international relations for ITT's Washington office, approached a member of Kissinger's staff...
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Apparently the Anaconda Corporation shared the notion that this was the best way to proceed against the new Chilean government. It quickly became clear, however, that other companies were moving to cut their losses, strike the best deal with Allende they could manage, or collect their insurance from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. ... Abandoned by three of the seven original members of the committee, ITT persisted in lobbying the Nixon administration on its own. In late September 1971 - now facing imminent expropriation - company representatives called upon Assistant Secretary Meyer and argued for an embargo of Chilean copper, combined with an immediate cut-off of all U.S economic assistance. These proposals were met with tepid response; Secretary Meyer reminded his vistors that, after all, a copper embargo would be tentamount to "an act of war." A few days later [William] Merriam [ITT's Washington vice president] submitted a detailed 18-point plan, which was designed to prevent Allende from getting through the allegedly "crucial" next six months, to Peter G. Peterson, Nixon's White House aide for international economic affairs. Among other things, the plan called for an embargo on all Chilean expoerts to the United States, not just copper... The plan also contained a covert political action component of grandiose proportions, including subversion of ("developing contacts with") the Chilean military, judiciary, and civil service... Peterson later testified that he did not take the ITT program seriously...
On October 21, 1971, the major U.S. companies involved in Chile met with Secretary of State William Rogers, Jr. On that occasion ITT - once again in the lead - submitted to the Secretary its "White Paper on Chile," ... The reaction at the meeting was mixed, both on the part of Rogers and the other company representatives present. ...
The sudden approach of the CIA to ITT on September 29 was a partial result of two meetings of the 40 Committee on September 8 and 14, 1970, whose purpose was to plot a response to the fact of Allende's electoral victory. These deliberations led to a decision to unleash a program of covert political activity to deny Allende the presidency through constitutional means... The day after the second of these two conclaves, however, President Nixon summoned CIA Director Helms to his office, and in the presence of [national security advisor] Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell issued secret instructions to organize a military coup in Chile to forestall a Popular Unity government [under Allende]. So secret, indeed, were these orders that they were kept not only from the State Department and Ambassador Korey, but even from the 40 Committee itself. ...
In the period between election and inauguration, both ITT and the CIA, acting on instruction from President Nixon, explored various means of unleashing "economic chaos" in Chile... The CIA and ITT found it impossible to enlist other corporations and the banks in the plan to unleash "economic chaos." ...
The publication of the ITT documents by columnist Jack Anderson in March 1972 afforded the Allende regime a pretext to break off the talks." - May 17, 1981, New York Times, 'Why Carter Admitted the Shah': "The issue posed by the memo on Oct. 21, 1979, had been nagging the Administration for months: Should Mohammed Riza Pahlevi, the exiled Shah of Iran, be allowed to enter the United States? Despite the risks such a move would entail, especially for the skeleton crew of Americans manning the embassy in revolutionary Teheran, most of Carter's advisers were for it. The President himself had been adamantly opposed and had lost his temper more than once on the subject. But now a new and urgent development had changed the situation and Vance was on the telephone from Washington asking for a decision. Eighteen months later, in his first and only substantive interview on the Iranian crisis since leaving office, Jimmy Carter described the exchange. ...
The decision came after months of heated argument among top officials of the Administration and some of the nation's most influential private citizens. A high-powered, financial and political "old-boy network" - including David Rockefeller, who retired last month after long years as the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; Henry A. Kissinger, Secretary of State for Presidents Nixon and Ford, and the lawyer-diplomat John J. McCloy - waged a campaign on behalf of the Shah's admission that was far more intensive than has previously been disclosed. Carter now concedes that he resented the campaign at the time and that it influenced several of his advisers. Moreover, it was a decision based, in significant measure, on misinformation and misinterpretation. The New York Times has learned, for example, of an important discrepancy between what Carter remembers being told about the Shah's medical state and the facts as recalled by the private physician who was the Administration's sole source of information about the Shah's condition. It was not medically necessary - as the President had been informed - to treat the Shah in the United States. And according to the Shah's doctor, he advised that the mon-arch should be treated promptly, not that he was "at the point of death." Further, the Shah had successfully concealed the truth of his cancer from American intelligence for six years, even to the point of misleading American doctors. Knowledge of the seriousness of his condition and his limited probable life span might well have altered American policy toward Iran and, with it, the course of events (see "The Shah's Health: A Political Gamble," page 48). ...
In the second week of March, the Shah moved to a palace in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. By that time, the Carter Administration was groping for a decorous way to let him know that the earlier invitation had been withdrawn. In search of an emissary to break the news gently, the State Department contacted two of the Shah's staunchest supporters: David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. David Rockefeller's personal offices, 56 floors above Rockefeller Center, seem modest enough - until a visitor notices the French Impressionist originals on the walls. In a recent interview, during which Rockefeller frequently consulted typewritten notes to refresh his memory, he said he had received "legal authorization" from the Shah's family to discuss, for the first time in any detail, his relationship and that of his bank with the Pahlevi family.
"I got a call on March 14, 1979," Rockefeller said, "from David Newsom (Carter's Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs). Newsom said they had intelligence reports from Iran which suggested that, if the Shah were admitted to the United States, the American Embassy would be taken and it would be a threat to American lives. Therefore, the President wanted me to go and tell the Shah that it was not convenient for him to come to the United States at this time. "I said I thought it was a mistake, that (the Shah) was a great friend of the United States and was seeking asylum and that it was in the American tradition to admit anybody under those circumstances, most particularly a friend. So I refused to do it."
In the months that followed, Rockefeller showed himself to be a true friend to the Shah. He and his staff helped to find the Shah a home in the Bahamas, to secure visas, to engineer his transportation by chartered jet, to facilitate his medical care. He also played a leading role in the campaign to persuade the Carter Administration to admit the Shah.
Today, Rockefeller charges that his motivations have been "monstrously distorted" by the press, pointing particularly to suggestions that he acted solely out of concern for Chase Manhattan's profits. "Contrary to what has been said by a number of people," he insisted, "we have never been the (personal) bankers for the Shah or his family or the Pahlevi Foundation. There may have been small accounts of convenience, but they had no real significance." (The Pahlevi Foundation distributed funds for the construction of hospitals and schools in Iran.)
On the other hand, Rockefeller does not deny that the financial relationship between Chase Manhattan and the Shah's Government was clearly significant. By 1975, for example, Chase had emerged as the principal syndicator for Iran's vast Eurodollar deposits. Some $2 billion in Iranian transactions were handled by Chase that year. Rockefeller emphasized, however, that the Shah's departure drastically changed that picture. As of January 1981, shah page 40 Chase's loans to and claims on Iran had dwindled to about $340 million, and clearly whatever help Rockefeller provided the Shah could only make matters worse with Khomeini's regime. But it is equally true that, had the Shah been restored to power during those early months, Chase's position would have been more enviable than ever. David Rockefeller had been a longtime business acquaintance of the Shah, but his late brother Nelson, former Vice President and Governor of New York, had been a personal friend of the monarch for nearly two decades. By the end of 1978, Nelson Rockefeller had become alarmed about the Shah's eroding political position. "He wrote a personal, handwritten letter expressing his friendship and concern," David Rockefeller recalled, "which he sent to the Shah with Robert Armao."
Robert Francis Armao, then 30 years of age, had just been hired by Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, the Shah's twin sister and a longtime resident of New York City, to mount a public-relations campaign in the United States in defense of the Shah's regime. A New York native with a dandy's taste for clothes, Armao had worked as a laborrelations aide to Nelson Rockefeller in Albany and New York before starting his own public-relations firm.
Later, when the Shah's illnesses sapped his strength, Armao would grow ever more influential with the monarch and, in the process, engage in tempestuous arguments with senior officials of the Carter Administration. Armao contends that Carter aides repeatedly betrayed their promises to assist and protect the Shah; Jimmy Carter today describes Armao as "a troublemaker who wouldn't tell the truth, who made damaging statements to the news media and, I think, caused the Shah a lot of grief."
Robert Armao delivered Nelson Rockefeller's letter to the Shah on the evening of Jan. 9, 1979, in Niavaran Pal- ace in Teheran. A few days later, Ardeshir Zahedi, the Shah's Ambassador to Washington, visited Nelson Rockefeller in New York and asked his help in finding a refuge for the Shah in the United States. Sunnylands, the California estate that had been prepared for the Pahlevis, was no longer considered safe. There had been several West Coast protests against the Shah and his regime's human-rights violations. Nelson Rockefeller's staff located a suitable and secure substitute, a mansion on the grounds of Callaway Gardens, a resort in Georgia, but the Administration had other plans.
In mid-March, the State Department attempted again to find an influential emmissary to tell the Shah he was no longer welcome in the United States. Now the target was Henry Kissinger, long a supporter of the Shah and protege of the Rockefeller family, and once again the caller was David Newsom. "I refused with some indignation," Kissinger said, recalling the telephone conversation. "I considered it a deeply wrong thing to do, a national dishonor, and I still do." The Administration finally dispatched a C.I.A. agent to do the job." - Ibid. "Within days, the Shah received another jolt. King Hassan made it clear that the Shah's presence would be particularly awkward during the upcoming Islamic summit conference in Marrakesh. With his friend Nelson Rockefeller now dead, the Shah appealed to David Rockefeller for help in finding another refuge. "We had to find a place very quick- ly," Rockefeller recalled. "I discussed it with Henry Kissinger and the idea of the Bahamas came up." The Bahamian government agreed to provide a visa but insisted that the Shah go to the Resorts International complex on Paradise Island. David Rockefeller and some State Department officials believe that Lynden O. Pindling, the Bahamian Prime Minister, had a financial interest in Paradise Island operations and stood to benefit from the publicity that would inevitably accompany the Shah's arrival. However, Pindling insisted in an interview that he had no financial stake in the resort and played no part in the decision."
- January 1977, Texas Monthly, 'Howard Hughes Lives!':"[But] by late 1970, Hughes had decided to replace Maheu with Intertel.
It could be said that Intertel had better CIA connections than Maheu. In fact, they were socially superior. Intertel's owner was James Crosby, good friend and host of Rebozo and Nixon. Crosby was also the chairman of Resorts International, an immense gambling-and-tourist complex in the Bahamas which (with many a camouflage) had been taken over from Meyer Lansky by the CIA. ... Resorts International came right out of the Crosby Miller Corporation, in which a controlling interest had been acquired in 1958 by Mary Carter Paint, a corporation originally gotten up by Allen Dulles and Thomas E. Dewey.
If the CIA hierarchy had icons analogues to the Mayflower, they were Allen Dulles, Thomas E. Dewey, and the Mary Carter Paint Company. By such cachet James Crosby of Intertel was to Maheu's CIA pornies and assassination capers as Louisburg Square to Scollay Square. In addition, Intertel may also have been in position to offer Hughes the Glomar Explorer contract if he would take them on.
The changeover in 1970 was accomplished with the maximum of mystery. The man, Hughes, six feet four inches, reported to weigh 97 pounds and, by a Las Vegas doctor's report, next to death, gave over his authority to Maheu's most determined enemies with a proxy which enabled these enemies to bring Intertel's security force into the casinos and drive out Maheu's troops, a dramatic night for Las Vegas... Sometime after Intertel took over from Maheu, Hughes replaced [Maheu's friend and Washington lobbyist] O'Brien with Bob Bennett. The son of Senator Wallace Bennett (R), from Utah, Bob Bennett was a churchgoing Mormon." - *) January 1977, Texas Monthly, 'Howard Hughes Lives!': "Compounding valuation problems even further is the matter of the CIA, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and $1.6-billion, 45,000 employee Hughes Aircraft (HAC), the nation's eighth-largest overall defense contractor and largest CIA defense contractor. ... Hughes Aircraft, which specializes in electronics, is not part of Summa Corporation's assets, but is owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a tax-exempt foundation Hughes set up in 1953 with himself as sole trustee. ...
In [March] 1967, Hughes made his entrance into Las Vegas by buying the Desert Inn from former Cleveland hood Moe Dalitz. But even before then, the Hughes organization, had established ties to the Mob through former Hughes aide Robert Maheu, who hired John Roselli and Sam Giancana for a CIA attempt to assassinate Cuban premier Fidel Castro. After the stormy Maheu period ended in [late] 1970, the Hughest organization gained a reputation for making the casinos honest -- that is, stopping the illegal cash rake-off or "skim" commonly practiced in local gaming establishments -- but skeptics wondered whether Hughes had simply begun skimming for the CIA as well as for the Mob and for himself."
*) August 16, 1976, Norman Mailer for New York Magazine, 'A Harlot High and Lowe: Reconnoitering Through the Secret Government': "Hughes's corporation earned more than half a billion dollars a year from government contracts alone and 32 such contracts were with the CIA. That was the largest number held by any corporate entity with the Company. Time fortified such figures: "During the past ten years Hughes Aircraft, which relies almost exclusively on Government work, has won nearly $6 billion in Government contracts... There was also about 6 billion dollars more in secret contracts with the CIA over this period." ...
Hughes was Daddy Warbucks to the CIA. Hughes owned half of Las Vegas. Hughes, by way of various intermediaries, had absorbed it from Meyer Lansky. Since the CIA already had associations with Lansky, easily as old as their mutual attempts to assassinate Castro, the Company could now, by way of Hughes and Las Vegas, enter into another majestic interface with the Mafia, that is, with half the labor unions of America, and nearly all of the entertainment industries, the construction industries, the highway, travel, and tourist industries, not to speak of the more celebrated nonlegal industries like prostitution, porny, narcotics, and -- the finest operation yet discovered for laundering huge sums of money and evading the IRS -- gambling. ... In turn, the high-potential money in the CIA would want to discharge into the great sea of Syndicate [mafia] wealth. There the take -- voices fill in awe -- came to $50 billion a year, and that was twice General Motors' if only half the size of the defense budget." - *) May 1, 1979, The Globe and Mail, 'To the man in the street, Iran is definitely on the right track'.
*) June 20, 1977, Newsweek, 'Rights and Wrongs - A Chamber of Horrors'.
*) See ISGP's American Security Council article for citations from these articles. - May 27, 1983, Washington Post, 'Presents and Formers For Kissinger's Birthday': "Henry Kissinger, former You Know What, brought out an international pack of political swells this evening, gathered together at a private dinner-dance at the Pierre Hotel to celebrate his day of birth. David Rockefeller was there. A host of other Formers, including Helmut Schmidt, Peter G. Peterson, Lady Bird Johnson, Happy Rockefeller, Jihan Sadat and Richard Helms were there. ... The highest ranking Present present, from the political point of view, was probably George Shultz."
- *) August 18, 1978, The Dispatch, 'Helms Joins Bechtel Corp.': "The spokesman said Helms, 65, also a former ambassador to Iran, will provide consulting services "relating to Iran and the Middle East.""
*) July 4, 1982, Chicago Tribune, 'Bechtel Group - builders of power': "One of the men who rides in a Bechtel limousine is George P. Shultz [Pilgrims], president of the company and President Reagan's choice to replace Secretary of State Alexander Haig [Pilgrims]. Shultz's nomination has created consternation among many supporters of Israel and has focused an unwelcome spotlight on the intensely secretive Bechtel Group, one of the world's biggest and least known companies. Another Bechtel alumnus is [former company vice president and now] Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger [Pilgrims]. ... Last year Bechtel bought out one of New York's oldest family investment houses, Dillon, Read & Co. Inc., adding C. Douglas Dillon [Pilgrims], Treasury secretary in the Kennedy administration, to its list of executives. ... Nixon-era CIA Director Richard Helms [Pilgrims family] served as a frequent Bechtel consultant, although a company spokesman said that his work dropped off after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979. Helms had served as ambassador to Iran at one time. .... At one time John A. McCone, former head of the Atomic Energy Commission and director of the CIA, served as an executive in a Bechtel oil refinery branch." - February 20-27, 1987 issue of The LA Weekly, 'The Seizing of the American Broadcasting Company by Andy Boehm': "Cap Cities was founded in 1954 by several men who were or would become prominent. Chief among them, and the principal players in the company, were famed explorer-newscaster [Lowell] Thomas [Pilgrims]; Tom Dewey [Pilgrims]... and William J. Casey, who was Cap Cities' chief counsel and a member of its board of directors until 1981, when he joined the Reagan administration. He still owns $7.5 million in stock in the now-merged entity called CC/ABC, his largest holding. ... (Allen Dulles, a friend, wartime colleague and, rumor has it, business partner of Casey.) Lowell Thomas was a larger-than-life figure — an explorer, a broadcast personality, a film documentarist and a best-selling author. The Soviets long accused Thomas of also being an American intelligence agent because he often appeared with photographers and film crews at highly sensitive points of "communist versus the Free World" conflict. Thomas, though he had at minimum good journalistic connections in the U.S. intelligence community, always denied being a spook in the face of published articles questioning his activities. But he made no bones about his staunch anti-communist leanings. (He even appeared with John Wayne, Martha Raye and several U.S. generals in No Substitute for Victory, a denunciation of commie-coddling sponsored by the far-right John Birch Society.) Thomas lived in a New York state enclave for the rich where one of his neighbors was Thomas E. Dewey. (Another was Lawrence E. Walsh, later to become special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra affair.) ... Joining Dewey and the Murphy family in Cap Cities ownership were powerful New York GOP leader Alger Chapman [Pilgrims] and, for balance, John McGrath, who managed Democrat Averell Harriman's [Pilgrims] New York gubernatorial races in the 1950s. ... Kohn has reported that both the CIA (via Dulles [Pilgrims]) and the Mafia (via Lansky) funneled money and valuable information to Dewey's political campaigns as well as to Dewey's protege, Richard Nixon, and to Nixon's pal Florida Sen. George Smathers...Rolling Stone in 1977, after being legally challenged by Resorts, retracted a story that CIA Director Allen Dulles was majorly involved in the buyout. Quoting CIA sources, Kohn wrote that in 1958 Dulles gave Dewey and Thomas $2 million in CIA money to set up a front company. ... At issue in the ABC situation in particular is an extraordinary story overlooked by most of the press and never taken up by congressional investigators: Who actually took over ABC when Capital Cities Communications bought it in March 1985? ... The CIA challenged ABC's right to retain its broadcasting licenses just before Cap Cities bought out the company and during the period it was negotiating for the purchase. This attack had the result of driving down the price of ABC stock on the public market. In the Iran-Contragate aftermath, with some of the manipulations this administration and William Casey are wont to engage in becoming known, the Cap Cities-ABC deal and Casey's possible role in it have to be considered high on the curiosity list of unexplored events of the last couple of years. For with the Cap Cities takeover, one of the three primary influences on America's public consciousness was delivered into the hands of a company that may well have its own agenda. ... NBC is the most obvious case of just such a potentially political takeover. Until last year, NBC was owned by RCA, whose other interests included consumer electronics, a record label, broadcast equipment and a fair amount of military electronics. Then RCA was acquired by General Electric (GE), an even larger defense contractor. The new GE, containing RCA, is one of the largest, if not the largest, military suppliers in the world. This led Ted Turner to deplore the acquisition because he felt NBC News would have a vested interest in perpetuating the arms race. Turner's Cable News Network, of course, competes with NBC News. However, Turner donates much of his time, his money and his cable "superstation's" prime time to agitating against nuclear escalation."
*) Aug. 13, 1948, Schenectady Gazette, 'Says People Are Shocked By Attitude of President': "Also at the conference were Allen W. Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, Dewey's adviser on foreign affairs; Alger B. Chapman, director of the Dewey campaign in New York State..." - Relevant information on RAND used to draw the conclusion that 10-15% of trustees were Eastern Establishment:
*) RAND Corporation, 1976-1977, p. 102: "BOARD OF TRUSTEES: J. Paul Austin, Chairman [and] Chairman and Chief Executive, The Coca-Cola Company; Lewis M. Branscomb, Vice President and Chief Scientist, International Business Machines [IBM] Corporation; ... Donald H. Rumsfeld; President and Chief Executive Officer, G. D. Searle & Co.; ... Frank Stanton, Chairman, American National Red Cross [and] former President, CBS Inc. ... Walter B. Wriston, Chairman, First National City Corporation, First National City Bank..." Most non-Eastern Establishment names cut out.
*) RAND Corporation, 1976-1977, p. 103: "FORMER TRUSTEES: Frederick L. Anderson (1959-1969)*; Robert F. Bacher (1950-1960); F. R. Collbohm (1948-1967); Mark W. Cresap, Jr. (1960-1963)*; Charles Dollard (1948-1961)*; Lee A. DuBridge (1948-1961); Michael Ference, Jr. (1963-1973); H. Rowan Gaither, Jr. (1948-1959, 1960-1961)*; T. Keith Glennan (1963-1974); J. Richard, Goldstein (1951-1973); Philip L. Graham (1961-1963)*; Caryl P. Haskins (1955·1965, 1966-1976); Lawrence J. Henderson, Jr. (1948·1971); William R. Hewlett (1962-1972); John A. Hutcheson (1948-1959); Ernest O. Lawrence (1956-1958)*; Alfred L. Loomis (1948-1957)*; Edwin M. McMillan (1959-1969); Philip M. Morse (1948-1949, 1950-1962); Philip E. Mosely (1951-1961, 1963-1972)*; Harvey S. Mudd (1949-1955)*; Lauris Norstad (1963-1973); James A. Perkins (1961-1971); Thomas P. Pike (1971-1976); Kenneth S. Pitzer (1962-1972); Don K. Price (1961-1971); Henry S. Rowen (1967-1972); David A. Shepard (1959-1963, 1965-1973); Frederick F. Stephan (1948-1961)*; George D. Stoddard (1948-1963); J. A. Stratton (1955-1965); Charles Allen Thomas (1959-1969); Charles H. Townes (1965-1970); William Webster (1950-1960; 1961-1971)*; John P. White (1973-1977); Clyde E. Williams (1948-1963). * Deceased."
*) RAND Corporation, 1976-1977, p. 106: "MAJOR SPONSORS OF RAND RESEARCH: United States Air Force; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA]; Agency for International Development [USAID]; ... Defense Communications Agency; Defense Nuclear Agency; Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; Department of Housing and Urban Development; Department of Labor ... National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] ... National Science Foundation; National Security Council; ... Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense; ... Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering ... U.S. Arms Control & Disarmament Agency; U.S. Army Electronics Command; U.S. Geological Survey; ... State of California; Department of Water and Power of the City of Los Angeles; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; C. F. Kettering Foundation; Ford Foundation; John and Mary R. Markle Foundation; Lilly Endowment, Inc.; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Rockefeller Foundation; ...
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology; Sandia Laboratories, Inc.; Netherlands Rijkswaterstaat."
*) 1980, Institute for Civil Justice on Rand Corporation trustees, various lists of 1980-1989, pp. 89-113: "Rand Corporation ... Board of Trustees: Donald H. Rumsfeld, Chairman; .... Harold Brown, Chairman, Johns Hopkins Foreign Policy Institute... Solomon J. Buchsbaum [of] Bell Laboratories; Frank C. Carlucci ... William T. Coleman, Jr. ... Michael Collins ... Richard P. Cooley ... James C. Gaither ... Carla A. Hills ... Walter J. Humann ... Walter E. Massey ... Michael M. May ... Lloyd N. Morrisett .... Newton N. Minow ... J. Richard Munro ... Donald B. Rice ... Brent Scowcroft ... Donald W. Seldin ... Gustave H. Shubert ... Dennis Stanfill ... George H. Weyerhaeuser ... Charles J. Zwick ..." - March 27, 1971, history.state.gov, 'Memorandum From the President's Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs (Haig) to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger)', 'SUBJECT: Review of the Intelligence Community'.
- December 27, 1972, history.state.gov, 'Transcript of a Memorandum to the President's Assistant (Haldeman) Dictated by President Nixon'.
- *) 2006, John Prados, 'Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA', pp. 390-391: "Bob Haldeman records in his diary for November 20, 1972, the fateful day at Camp David, that Helms recommended either Bill Colby or Tom Karamessines as his successor."
*) 2006, State Department, 'Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers': "Helms "pushed" William Colby or Thomas Karamessines as his successor." - December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh for the New York Times, 'Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years; Files on Citizens; Helms Reportedly Got Surveillance Data in Charter Violation'.
- ...
- January 19, 1975, New York Times, 'The Secret Committee Called '40'': "The operations of the 40 Committee are so secret that in his Senate testimony, Mr. Colby was reluctant even to identify the chairman, who, as it turned out, was a well‐known public figure:
Senator Symington: "Very well. What is the name of the latest committee of this character?"
Mr. Colby: "Forty Committee."
Senator Symington: "Who is the chairman?"
Mr. Colby: "Well, again, I would prefer to go into executive session on the description of the Forty Committee, Mr. Chairman."
Senator Symington (incredulous): "As to who is the chairman, you would prefer an executive session?"
Mr. Colby: "The chairman, all right, Mr. Chairman, Dr. Kissinger is the chairman as the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs."" - January 13, 1975, Observer Reporter, 'Top Spy Group Shuns Probe': "Investigators of the CIA may get a glimpse into one of the most shadowy areas of American intelligence operations. It is the so-called 40 Committee, the super-secret group headed by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger that sets most CIA policy and supervises its work. Kissinger is described by State Department associates as anxious to keep the 40 Committee out of the inquiries by congressional committees..."
- May 22, 1996, John L. Helgerson, 'CIA Briefings of Presidential Candidates', cia.gov, chapter 5: "In late June 1976, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter distinguished himself in the eyes of CIA officials by becoming the first presidential hopeful to request intelligence briefings even before receiving his party's nomination. ... Bush recommended to Ford that as a first step he, Bush, should meet with Carter to discuss the ground rules and arrange for follow-on briefings, which would be delivered by intelligence professionals. The ever-cautious Scowcroft recommended instead that all briefings should be given by the DCI, accompanied and supported by the appropriate National Intelligence Officers, who were the Intelligence Community's senior substantive experts."
- August 1, 1978, U.S. News & World Report, 'How Old School Ties Help Carter Fill Jobs': "What do Stansfield Turner, A. Vernon Weaver, Robert H. McKinney and John M. Sullivan share with Jimmy Carter? First, all are 1947 graduates of the U. S. Naval Academy. Second, all now either hold or have been named to high federal posts."
- *) January 16, 1977, Washington Post, 'Trilateral Commission-Web Enough for the Plot-Minded': "If you like conspiracy theories about secret plots to take over the world, you are going to love the administration of President-elect Jimmy Carter. Righ-wingers are going bananas over it. So are left-wingers. ...
The Trilateralist were picked originally by David Rockefeller, aided by Brzezinski and Rockefeller's foreign-policy assistant, George Franklin, longtime executive director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The organization has all the interlocking features which inspire the conspiracy theorizers - an overlap with the CFR and the Bilderberg Society...
[Carter] was a not very famous governor of Georgia, interested in foreign trade and national politics, when Brzezinski, Franklin and Rockefeller went looking for a Southern governor to serve. They were impressed by his seriousness, and Carter did participate earnestly - attended all the North American meetings and the one international session in Japan before the presidential campaign swallowed up all his time. He phone personally to commission headquarters in New York to keep up with the latest studies."
*) April 25, 1992, Washington Post, 'Beware the Trilateral Commission!': "People had taken note of the number of former Trilateralists in the Carter administration. There was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, the man considered the ideological godfather of Trilateralism. And also Walter Mondale, Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown, W. Michael Blumenthal, Andrew Young.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, Bush's Trilateralist background is said to have disturbed Ronald Reagan's supporters on the far right. On top of that, third-party candidate John B. Anderson was a Trilateralist too." - 1992, Allan R. Millett, Williamson Murray, 'Calculations', p. 232: "Additional information came to Roosevelt from his New York neighbor and friend, Vincent Astor. Owner of Newsweek magazine and a sirector of both the Western Union Telegraph Company and the Chase National Bank, this multimillionaire had an interest in intelligence matters that predated FDR's election, and he used his business and social contacts to organize a loose informal intelligence circle marked by its Anglophile views. Through his contacts, Astor supplied political and economic data directly to FDR, including details on the movement of foreign funds passing through Chase bank. Not only could this help in keeping track of foreign purchases of raw materials and other strategic goods within the country, but it also could assist in counterintelligence work. Astor reminded FDR that "espionage and sabotage need money, and that has to pass through the banks at one stage or another."[61] In providing his own intelligence system to the President, Astor did not limit himself to working within the country. In 1938 he sailed his private yacht Nourmahal to the Pacific to gather information on Japanese-controlled islands. [62] Roosevelt would later appoint Astor as the intelligence coordinator in the New York City area, where, as a Commander in the United States Naval Reserve, he would work with the FBI, ONI, MID, and William Stephenson."
- 1987, Anthony Cave Brown, '"C": the secret life of Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, spymaster to Winston Churchill', pp. 123-124, 264: "As Sir J. W. Wheeler-Bennett, the royal historian, noted in his biography of King George VI: "Indeed, Britain did not abandon war planning against the United States until 1933. ... Despite the revival of the ancient [Anglo-American] grudge, however, there remained the small but important group of Americans, and a larger group of Britons, who believed that an Anglo-American understanding was fundamental to the containment and perhaps the liquidation of bolshevism. That group included Vincent Astor, a member of the American branch of the British family; Kermit Roosevelt, who had fought in the British army during the war; David Bruce, Andrew Mellon's son-in-law; Nelson Doubleday, the New York publisher; Winthrop Aldrich, the banker; Henry Gray, the New York lawyer; Judge Frederick Kernochan; and what has been described as "a distinguished selection of stockbrokers, philanthropists, and academics."
The group met monthly at 34 East 62nd Street, New York City, in an apartment "with an unlisted telephone number and no apparent occupant." Known as "The Room," the group was essentially a private intelligence service that worked in collaboration with the British secret service. Later, The Room seems either to have been superceded by, or to have had contact with, the Walrus in New York, a dining club whose members consisted exclusively of leading citizens who were Anglophiles. The principal point of contact with that service was Sir William Wiseman, chief of the the British secret service in New York during World War I, who had remained in New York and become a partner in Kuhn, Loeb, the New York merchant bankers. He became a member both of The Room and the Walrus Club. "Wild Bill" Donovan, a leading Wall Street lawyer and the founder of the OSS ... was certainly a member of the Walrus and was probably also a member of The Room. ... At the suggestion of Vincent Astor, a mutual friend and the founder member of The Room and the Walrus Club, Roosevelt entertained Stephenson at his estate at Hyde Park...
Stephenson left England in mid-June, traveling by Cunarder with his American wife, Mary. Installing himself on the thirty-third and thirty-fourth floors of Rockefeller Center (which he obtained at a peppercorn rent from the owner, Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the old private intelligence organization, The Room, and of that exclusive diner the Walrus Club)." - *) history.state.gov/historicaldocuments /frus1950-55Intel/d210 (accessed: September 18, 2016): "210. Memorandum From the Director of the Bureau of the Budget (Hughes) to President Eisenhower1 Washington, March 3, 1955.
SUBJECT Coordination of Economic, Psychological, Political Warfare, and Foreign Information Activities...
The Operations Coordinating Board has two major responsibilities:
(1) Whenever the President directs, as to an approved national security policy, the OCB shall (a) advise with the operating agencies concerned as to the coordination of the interdepartmental aspects of the detailed operational plans... The operating agencies concerned have the responsibility for developing and carrying out their respective programs under approved national security policies or other approved policies transmitted by the President to OCB.
(2) Under NSC 5412 [dating back to March 15, 1954], the Central Intelligence Agency’s charter for covert operations, the members of OCB are advised in advance of major programs involving covert operations relating to policies and the OCB is the normal channel for securing coordination of support for covert work among the Departments of State and Defense and the CIA. Later in this paper it is recommended that NSC 5412 be amended to remove any conflict with the functions assigned to the Special Committee referred to in d. below and with the duties recommended below to be given to the Planning Coordination Group.
d. As indicated above, the President recently approved the establishment of a Special Committee under the Chairmanship of Special Assistant Nelson Rockefeller to coordinate the implementation of policies contained in NSC 5502/1 and NSC 5505/1. Besides the Special Assistant as Chairman, this Special Committee is composed of the Under Secretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and the Director of Central Intelligence, (each of whom may be represented in day-to-day operations by deputies appointed by them), with participation as appropriate of representatives of the Department of Justice, the Foreign Operations Administration, the U.S. Information Agency, and other interested departments and agencies. The duties of this Special Committee include reviewing current programs and developing new programs to carry out the above-mentioned national security policies, ensuring coordination of actions taken thereunder, and [Page 619] making evaluative progress reports to the President through the National Security Council. This Special Committee mechanism was established in this connection because of need for high-level, restricted attention to developing the sensitive programs, and the coordination of actions thereunder, called for by the above-mentioned national security policies. ...
The cited paragraph concerned the NSC recommendation that the President designate a special committee to be headed by Nelson A. Rockefeller to review programs to carry out policy stated in NSC 5505, "Exploitation of Soviet and European Satellite Vulnerabilities," dated January 18. On March 10 at the 240th meeting of the National Security Council, the special committee was replaced by the Planning Coordination Group through an amendment to NSC Action No. 1314–d by NSC Action No. 1349...
On March 10 President Eisenhower designated Rockefeller a member of the Operations Coordinating Board and the OCB Vice Chairman. The President also asked Rockefeller to serve as chairman of the Planning Coordination Group. (Eisenhower Library, Whitman File, Administration Series, Rockefeller, Nelson, 1952–1955)..."
*) 2009, L. Schwarz, 'Political Warfare against the Kremlin', p. 175: "Following the recommendations of the report on exploiting Soviet vulnerabilities, a Planning Coordination Group (PCG) under the leadership of Nelson Rockefeller, C. D. Jackson's replacement as special assistant for Cold War planning, was formed to coordinate overall economic, psychological, and political warfare efforts. The PCG was a short-lived organization, which was in operation for only the nine months between March 1955 and December 1955."
*) 2004, Wilson P. Dizard, 'Inventing Public Diplomacy: The Story of the U.S. Information Agency', pp. 68-69: "The Eisenhower's administration's approach to psychological operations, both overt and covert, was flawed overall. A 1955 attempt to correct this situation ultimately failed. It involved the creation of a White House "Planning Coordination Group," specifically charged with integrating psyops planning with political and military operations. The group was headed by Nelson Rockefeller, who had both the experience and enthusiasm to deal with the issue, based on his wartime direction of propaganda programs in Latin America. Now his assignment was extended to dealing with communist propaganda across the globe, using all the resources of the Washington bureaucracy. The bureaucracy, in particular the State and Defense Departments, did not take kindly to such outside interference. Their opposition was aided by the Rockefeller group's lack of funding. (The operation was eventually financed, largely by the CIA and Rockefeller's personal funds.) The group's small staff spent its time drawing up position papers, including one that identified 177 Societ-bloc vulnerabilities that could be addressed by coordinated psyops programs. A great deal of time was also spent planning a "Position Room," a sort of command center decorated with graphics that would provide up-to-date information on various communist threats around the world. These efforts produced no result, and the Planning Coordinating Group was eventually abolished in December 1955, less than a year after it was set up." - 1996, Cary Reich, 'The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958', p. 559: "When [Nelson] Rockefeller arrived, he took [former CIA deputy director and future Eisenhower national security advisor William] Jackson's seat on the OCB [Operations Coordinating Board]. Working with the CIA was nothing new for him. Soon after joining HEW [the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which he created under Truman], he was asked to address an internal CIA seminar on the role of the agency in a changing economic world. (His appearance was arranged by Joan Braden, obviously working her special connection to the CIA higher-ups through hubby Tom.) And according to a report that surfaced two decades later, while at HEW he was aware that his department was used as a cover for some of the CIA's most sensitive programs, code-named Artichoke and MK-Ultra: programs of experimentation with the new hallucinogenic drug LSD" Reportedly, Rockefeller knew — and Hobby didn't — that the CIA was funding some of its experiments through the HEW's National Institute of Mental Health. Rockefeller, with his unabashed enthusiasm for clandestine operations dating back to his coordinator days, was perfectly comfortable with the strong links to the CIA that his new position entailed. In fact, he was eager to make them even stronger, to formalize the relationship. He knew full well that in this administration the already blurred line between psychological warfare and covert activity was growing even fainter. Close ties to the ascendant intelligence agency would undoubtedly magnify his effectiveness: a weak relationship would, just as surely, undermine it. And so, in his first weeks on the job, the new special assistant sought to pull the CIA even more into his orbit. Using skills honed in numerous past turf battles, he endeavored to carve out a special role for himself in the agency's affairs. In this, he found himself the beneficiary of Eisenhower's penchant for organization and planning. Believing that the administration's Cold War efforts — specifically, its economic, psychological, political warfare and foreign information activities — ought to be better coordinated, the President asked the Budget Bureau to pull together some proposals. The study conveniently coincided with Rockefeller's arrival on the scene; no sooner had he settled himself in than he began working vigorously to leave his stamp on the deliberations.
Actually, as good as Rockefeller's relations were with the CIA, his brother David's were better. During the war David had served in Army intelligence in North Africa, and afterward he discreetly maintained his contacts with the intelligence community. "David kept in very close touch," recalls Tom Braden. "He was a friend and confidant of Allen Dulles, and in some instances furnished a front" — agreeing to finance a do-good foundation that was a CIA cover. "I remember briefing him, in great detail, about the work of the division that I headed in the CIA. Allen asked me to brief him, and I gave him a full briefing, so that he knew everything that I was doing. And I think he did it with the other division chiefs, too. He was close to intelligence work — much, much, much closer than Nelson was." - April 25, 1949, Chicago Daily Tribune, 'Rockefeller's Loss of Power Changes Policy: Now He's for Private Investments': "Nelson A. Rockefeller is blamed by many South Americans for contradictions in the economic policy of the United States in the Americas since 1940. Today he is no longer interested in trying to formulate and direct foreign policy, but is actively engaged in investments in South America. ... Last month, speaking at the convocation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he again told the American republics they should open the door to private capital. ...
In 1944 Rockefeller achieved the pinnacle he had sought since 1937 to try to dominate American policy in Latin America. He was promoted from co-ordinator of inter-American affairs [since 1940] to the post of assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs. Rockefeller had been one of the severest critics of the state department as he struggled for control of foreign policy in Latin America. ...
Rockefeller lured Edward H. Robbins, a cousin of President Roosevelt, to act as liaison officer with the Latin American embassies in Washington and the White House. This brought about an open clash with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. On April 22, 1941 President Roosevelt was forced to intervene and restore Rockefeller to proper subordination. ...
Rockefeller succeeded in 1944 when Edward R. Stettinius became secretary of state. Rockefeller wrote Stettinius intimating he would like to direct Latin American policy. He repeated this plea for a policy chief for Latin America. On Dec, 4, 1944 he was nominated for that job. South American diplomats shuddered at the news. They expressed fears that the team of Stettinius and Rockefeller presaged the formal return of the "Wall St. era" of influence in American foreign policy. These fears were justified months later when both Stattinius and Rockefeller tried to subordinate the Pan-American system to globalism and the United Nations. ... Rockefeller couldn't cope with Ambasador Spruille Braden's personal intervention in politics there [at the United Nations in San Francisco]. ... Rockefeller's resignation was announced and Braden was named to replace him." - Unfortunately I lost the exact source in which conflicts between Nelson Rockefeller and secretary of state John Foster Dulles during the Eisenhower were described. The source was an old newspaper article.
- 1986, Samuel Kernell and Samuel L. Popkin, 'Chief of Staff: Twenty-five Years of Managing the Presidency', pp. 173-175, interview with Dick Cheney, Gerald Ford's chief of staff 1975-1977: "In the Ford administration, we had major problems in managing the vice-presidential relationship [of Nelson Rockefeller]. I think the Carter administration and Reagan administration subsequently have done much better. But President Ford came in and, because he'd been vice-president, wanted to have substantive responsibility assigned to the vice-president. He picked Nelson Rockefeller because he was the kind of man of stature that he needed as an unelected president in his own right.
As Don [Rumsfeld] made some reference to yesterday, President Ford put the vice-president in charge of all domestic policy making, put him in charge of the Domestic Council, gave him the assignment of creating new policy, and let him staff the operation out. Everybody on the staff said, "Mr. President, you shouldn't do that. It's going to create conflict." But the president is president. He went ahead and made the decision to do it anyway. ...
From the standpoint of the vice-president, you are a bad guy, an obstacle to his opportunity to have significant impact on policy. The ultimate result is great personal hostility between, in my case, myself and the vice-president, and Don before that. About this time, Nelson Rockefeller became the first vice-president to have the new vice-presidential quarters in Washington. ... He never lived in it because he had a nice house up on Foxhall Road. [laughter]
But he had a series of parties to break in the house. He invited everybody in the press corps, everybody in the administration, everybody on Capitol Hill in a series of events to visit the vice-president's house. I was never in the vice-president's house until Walter Mondale was vice-president, and I was the only individual in town who was never invited to one of those affairs. It was unfortunate, it was difficult, but from the standpoint of the president, it was absolutely essential. He ended up having a good relationship with Nelson Rockefeller.
But I was the SOB, and on a number of occasions, got involved in shouting matches with the vice-president. He finally told Ford at one point that the only way he would serve in a second Ford administration as vice-president was if he could also be chief of staff. If you ask President Ford today why that relationship was strained, it was always the staff problem with the vice-president. His relationship with the vice-president was excellent. But the problem, in fact, was created by the president. We had to deal with it, and the staff's responsibility in this case was to be that cushion . . . between the president and vice president." - October 27, 1991, Tulsa World, 'LBJ Wanted Rockefeller on GOP Ticket, Ex-Aide Says': "Califano, who was at Johnson's side from the time he awakened until he went to bed...
[Califano] suggests that at one point Johnson schemed to be succeeded by neither Humphrey nor Republican Richard M. Nixon but another Republican: Nelson A. Rockefeller.
Califano says Johnson "despised" Nixon and became furious at Humphrey [at the last moment] for not making use of wiretap information that would have portrayed Nixon as trying to undermine efforts to end the war in Vietnam.
That's not the way Clark Clifford remembers it. In his memoirs last spring, Clifford, a LBJ confidant, says Johnson felt "ambivalent" toward Humphrey [note: only last minute did the conflict arose between Humphrey and LBJ], his vice president, and delayed a bombing halt in the closing days of the campaign to Humphrey's detriment and Nixon's benefit.
Nixon won by a hair. The election ended a succession of Democratic presidencies and turned the government from a social activist course to a conservative track [note: but not with regard to opening up China or CIA operations].
"While both Rockefeller and Humphrey would attempt to nourish the Great Society programs, Johnson seemed to believe that Rockefeller had a greater chance of success," Califano wrote. He quoted Rockefeller's wife, Happy, as having said later: "LBJ urged him to run. He did want Nelson to be president." Califano said Johnson secretly had the Rockefellers as White House guests. In a whispered conversation in St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City a few days after Johnson's withdrawal, the president "gently nudged Rockefeller to seek the Republican nomination," the former aide wrote.
Johnson was also motivated by his hatred of Robert F. Kennedy, who he feared might get the Democratic nomination, Califano wrote. Johnson thought Rockefeller was more likely than Nixon to beat Kennedy.
After Nixon and Humphrey won their nominations that summer, Johnson became estranged from Humphrey because the vice president wouldn't use the material that could have turned the election against Nixon, Califano said.
From "intelligence sources," Califano wrote, Johnson learned of the role played by Nixon fund-raiser Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of a World War II hero. Mrs. Chennault urged Nixon to press the South Vietnamese not to go along with Johnson's last-ditch efforts to arrange peace talks, promising a better deal if he were elected. And she urged South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to stall until after the election.
Mrs. Chennault's contacts with the South Vietnamese were known at the time and have been recounted before. "LBJ now suspected that Nixon had acted on Chennault's advice and treasonously, to his thinking, subverted his own government in order to win the election," Califano wrote. "At last, now in the final hours, Johnson desperately wanted Humphrey to win the election," Califano added, and offered the information to Humphrey, including a wiretapped call from Chennault to the South Vietnamese embassy. "Humphrey didn't want to do it," Califano wrote. "Johnson was furious, thinking it was `the dumbest thing in the world not to do it.' Humphrey thought it would be 'terrible to do that sort of thing,' when he wasn't absolutely certain of the facts."" - *) 2003, Christopher Booker & Richard North, 'The Great Deception, The secret history of the European Union', p. 43: "Shortly after The Hague Congress, two of the most active campaigners for integration, Josef Retinger and Churchill's son-in-law Duncan Sandys, went to America to lobby for support for their campaign for European unity. Here they met two key figures, William J. 'Wild Bill' Donovan, founder in 1947 of the CIA, and his colleague Allen Dulles, later to become head of the CIA under President Eisenhower... A new organization was set up, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). From this time on, as academic research has established, the ACUE was used as a conduit to provide covert CIA funds, augmented by contributions from private foundations such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Institute [Rockefeller Foundation]...
Between 1949 and 1960, [the European Movement] was kept afloat almost entirely on $4 million of CIA money, these contributions amounting to between half and two-thirds of the Movement’s income. ACUE funds were also used for a range of other purposes in Europe, including the financing of anti-Communist parties."
*) June 24, 2001, The Mail on Sunday, 'CIA supported pro-Euro group': "When Sandys tried to disband the European Movement, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), led by [CIA director] Allen Dulles, later head of the CIA, forced him to stand down as its president. French politicians took over the lead role and, with ACUE help, set up a secretariat in Brussels..." - *) June 19, 1956, American Committee on United Europe letter (PDF): - "William J. Donovan, Chairman. - Paul G. Hoffman, Vice-Chairman [and Ford Foundation chair and Pilgrim]... - George S. Franklin, Jr., Secretary [and David Rockefeller roommate and Trilateral Commission co-founder]... Directors: ... - Lucius D. Clay ... - [Pilgrim and chief Rockefeller man] John J. McCloy. - Frederick Osborn [major Pilgrims family which has been key in sustainable development; close to Rockefellers] ... Dear Senator [Herbert] Lehman [director as well at some point] ... You have stood with our Committee for a long time. ..."
*) March 1997, Richard J. Aldrich in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 'OSS, CIA and European unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60', pp. 187-224: "The conduit for American assistance was the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE), directed by senior figures from the American intelligence community. This body was organized in the early Summer of 1948 by [CIA founder, upcoming CIA head and Pilgrims executive] Allen Welsh Dulles [and] William J. Donovan... the ACUE Board of Directors was drawn from four main groups: senior figures from government, such as [General Lucius] Clay, [CIA director Walter] Bedell Smith [Pilgrims executive] ... Paul Hoffman [Ford Foundation; Pilgrims] ... Herbert H. Lehman ..."
*) January 7, 1981, New York Times, 'Frederick Osborn, a General, 91, Dies': "Mr. Osborn, a native New Yorker, who was said to have made a fortune in railroads and investment banking... He later joined a national Crusade for Freedom headed by Gen. Lucius D. Clay, which staged rallies and marches in support of free governments for Eastern Europe. Mr. Osborn's wife, Margaret Schieffelin, is a descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States." - March 1997, Richard J. Aldrich in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 'OSS, CIA and European unity: The American Committee on United Europe, 1948-60', p. 216: "Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952... Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower's psychological warfare coordinator, CD. Jackson..."
- 1972, John Pomian and Joseph Retinger, 'Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise' , p. 212: "I found in America a unanimous approval for our [Independent League for Economic Cooperation] ideas among financiers, businessmen and politicians: Mr. [Russell] Leffingwell, a senior partner in J. P. Morgan's, Nelson and David Rockefeller, Alfred Sloan ... Sir William Wiseman, partner in Kuhn Loeb, George Franklin and especially my old friend Adolf Berle Jr. were all in favor, and Berle agreed to lead the American section [of ILEC]. John Foster Dulles also agreed to help us. ...
Later on, whenever we needed any assistance for the European Movement, Dulles was among those in America who helped us the most." - See ISGP's article on the John F. Kennedy assassination, note 91 for CIA and establishment overlap between the Crusade for Freedom and the American Committee on United Europe.
- CIA officer Thomas "Tom" Braden biography: Dartmouth; OSS during WWII; co-author with fellow OSS veteran and CIA-tied journalist Stewart Alsop of the 1946 book Sub Rosa: The OSS and American Espionage; executive secretary of the Rockefeller's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where he became a "covert cultural agent [of the CIA]" 1947-1949 (MoMA was supported through the CIA front the Fairfield Foundation); (formally) joined the CIA in 1950, for which he funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to anti-communist elements in labor unions such as the AFL-CIO; then became the chief of the CIA's Directorate of Plans' International Organizations Division (IOD), tasked with overseeing the CIA's network of student associations, magazines (including Encounter magazine) and radio stations (Radio Free Europe and the like); oversaw the CIA's IOD until September 1954, when he was succeeded by Cord Meyer; publisher of the Blade-Tribune newspaper 1954-1968, bought with a $100,000 loan of Nelson Rockefeller; publicly defended the CIA in a 1967 Saturday Evening Post article; tangled a lot in the 1970s with soon-to-be CNP leading light Pat Buchanan; liberal co-host of the CNN's "Crossfire" 1982-1989, with Buchanan providing the right-wing view
- 1996, Cary Reich, 'The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller: Worlds to Conquer, 1908-1958', p. 559.
- 1998, Kai Bird, 'The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms', pp. 180-181, 461: "It was during these years that Bundy first met David Rockefeller. The occasion was a cocktail party in 1953 hosted by Charles Cremeans, the number two analyst on Near Eastern affairs for the CIA. An Arabist, Cremeans had befriended Rockefeller in North Africa during the war, and when Rockefeller expressed an interest in meeting some CIA analysts Cremeans invited him to the party.
When Bundy and the thirty-eight-year-old Rockefeller were introduced, something clicked. Rockefeller, who had just become a vice president of Chase Bank, had become very interested in foreign affairs because of his new job and Bundy impressed him as a most knowledgeable professional. The two men were uncommonly serious, intense and studious. Their natural reserve could sometimes be taken for aloofness. And both men had brothers whose public brilliance somehow placed their own achievements in the shadows. Bill Bundy was exactly the kind of solid character David Rockefeller could easily come to trust. Over the years they saw each other regularly, and in 1971 David would present his friend with the gift of a new career--the editorship of Foreign Affairs [editor from 1972 to 1984].
By 1959, Bill Bundy had spent seven and a half years in the CIA and he was tiring of tiring of the routine. He knew that if he stayed, there was only one other step up for him and that would have been to replace his boss, Bob Amory, as deputy director of intelligence. "I would have found that interesting, but I frankly felt that the Agency was a bit cramping." So when in February 1960 he was offered a leave of absence to serve as staff director of President Eisenhower's Commission on National Goals, Bundy immediately accepted. The idea of bringing together a group of wise men to study what the country's goals ought to be for the coming decade was a notion particularly pleasing to Eisenhower's orderly military mind. In due course eleven commission members members were named. ...
Bill Bundy also was not afraid to offend the man who had hired him [as editor of Foreign Affairs]. In 1979-1980, Bundy rejected an essay from David Rockefeller defending the Shah of Iran." - 1983, Edward Berman, 'The Ideology of Philanthropy: The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy', pp. 131-132. Citation to be found in ISGP's "Liberal CIA" article, under Ford Foundation.
- 1999, Frances Stonor Saunders, 'Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', p. 141: "On 21 January 1953, Allen Dulles, insecure about his future in the CIA under the newly elected Eisenhower, had met his friend David Rockefeller for lunch. Rockefeller hinted heavily that if Dulles decided to leave the Agency, he could reasonably expect to be invited to become president of the Ford Foundation. Dulles need not have feared for his future. Two days after this lunch the New York Times broke the story that Allen Dulles was to become Director of Central Intelligence."
- Ibid., pp. 141-142: "As High Commissioner in Germany, McCloy had agreed to provide cover for scores of CIA agents, including Lawrence de Neufville. Although officially employees in his administration, unofficially they were accountable to their chiefs in Washington, who were under few obligations to tell McCloy what they were really up to. A political sophisticate, McCloy took a pragmatic view of the CIA's inevitable interest in the Ford Foundation when he assumed its presidency. Addressing the concerns of some of the foundation's executives, who felt that its reputation for integrity and independence was being undermined by involvement with the CIA, McCloy argued that if they failed to cooperate, the CIA would simply penetrate the foundation quietly by recruiting or inserting staff at the lower levels.
McCloy's answer to this problem was to create an administrative unit within the Ford Foundation specifically to deal with the CIA. Headed by McCloy and two foundation officers, this three-man committee had to be consulted every time the Agency wanted to use the foundation, either as a pass-through or as cover. 'They would check in with this particular committee, and if it was felt that this was a reasonable thing and would not be against the foundation's long-term interests, then the project would be passed along to the internal staff and other foundation officers [without them] knowing the origins of the proposal,' explained McCloy's biographer, Kai Bird (5).
With this arrangement in place, the Ford Foundation became officially engaged as one of those organizations the CIA was able to mobilize for political warfare against Communism. The foundation's archives reveal a raft of joint projects. The East European Fund, a CIA front in which George Kennan played a prominent role, got most of its money from the Ford Foundation. The fund forged close links with the Chekhov Publishing House, which received $523,000 from the Ford Foundation for the purchase of proscribed Russian works, and translations into Russian of western classics. The foundation gave $500,000 to Bill Casey's International Rescue Committee, and substantial giants to another CIA front, the World Assembly of Youth. It was also one of the single largest donors to the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent think-tank which exerted enormous influence on American foreign policy, and which operated (and continues to operate) according to strict confidentiality rules which include a twenty five-year embargo on the release of its records." - 1991 version, (1979 original) Deborah Davis, 'Katherine the Great', p. 177: "Without asking Katherine [owner of the Washington Post], [President] Kennedy appointed John Hayes, still the [Washington] Post Company's vice president for radio and television, to a secret CIA task force to explore methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to Communist China. The other members of the team were Richard Salant, president of CBS News; Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor at Columbia University who had been on the agency [CIA] payroll for several years; Cord Meyer of the CIA [and Operation MOCKINGBIRD]; McGeorge Bundy, special assistant to the president for national security; Leonard Marks, director of the USIA; Bill Moyers, who went on to become a distinquished and highly independent journalist for CBS and then for PBS; and Paul Henze, the CIA chief of station in Ethiopia who had established secret communications capabilities there and who later worked on African problems for Brzezinski in the Carter White House."
- *) 2002, David Rockefeller, 'Memoirs': "The key moment in my freshman year was meeting George S. Franklin, Jr. (for obvious reasons known as Benjy) and Richard Watson Gilder. ... As prep school graduates, Benjy and Dick had many friends at Harvard. They included me in their circle, dispelling my sense of isolation. We lived together in Eliot House for our three final years at Harvard in close proximity to several other friends [in a location] called the "goldfish bowl." I am not sure exactly what people meant by this, but it may have been because all of us were from prominent families..."
*) January 16, 1977, Washington Post, 'Trilateral Commission-Web Enough for the Plot-Minded': "If you like conspiracy theories about secret plots to take over the world, you are going to love the administration of President-elect Jimmy Carter. Righ-wingers are going bananas over it. So are left-wingers. ...
The Trilateralist were picked originally by David Rockefeller, aided by Brzezinski and Rockefeller's foreign-policy assistant, George Franklin, longtime executive director of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)." - 1989, Laton McCartney, 'Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story', p.124: "With the assistance of [Rockefeller Standard Oil consultant Cornelius Stribling] Snodgrass [also vice president of Bechtel Saudi Arabian operations and head of a CIA firm called LSG Associates] and his similarly well-connected successors (including former CIA director Richard Helms, who joined the company as an "international consultant" in 1978), Bechtel's operations increasingly mimicked those of the CIA. The company drew up its plans and plotted its business operations with the same devotion to secrecy and clandestine intelligence-gathering as its governmental associate, much of them based on reports furnished by friends at the CIA and the Departments of State, Commerce and Defence."
- December 1982 issue, Seymour Hersh for the Atlantic Monthly, 'The Price of Power: Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile': "Kissinger has written and said little about his high-level exposure to clandestine operations in the early 1950s. Former intelligence officials, in interviews, recall that the young Harvard scholar had come to the attention of Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's influential CIA director, even before the Rockefeller appointment. "He was highly regarded," one senior aide says. "Allen spoke of his meetings with him. He and Walt Rostow [Kissinger's predecessor as national security adviser, and then a professor at MIT] were considered to be kind of a team." One little-known fact is that Rockefeller was replaced as the presidential adviser on Cold War planning in late 1955 by Richard Nixon, then Vice President. There is no evidence that Nixon and Kissinger met in those days, although, many former intelligence aides say, it is highly likely that Nixon was aware of Kissinger's intelligence work. By 1956, Kissinger was at work as director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., in New York. ...
By the time Kissinger joined the Nixon administration, he was far from a newcomer to covert intelligence operations. He had served in the Army Counter Intelligence Corps in occupied West Germany after World War II, and was eventually assigned to a unit whose functions included the recruitment of ex-Nazi intelligence officers for anti-Soviet operations inside the Soviet bloc. He retained his ties, as a reserve officer, to military intelligence after entering Harvard in 1947 at age twenty-four as an undergraduate. By 1950, after his graduation, he was working part time for the Defense Department (he was one of the first at Harvard to begin regular shuttles to Washington) as a consultant to its Operations Research Office, a unit under the direct control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that conducted highly classified studies on such topics as the utilization in CIA activities of former German operatives and Nazi partisan supporters. In 1952, Kissinger was named a consultant to the director of the Psychological Strategy Board, an operating arm of the National Security Council for covert psychological and paramilitary operations. In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his special assistant in charge of Cold War planning, a position that involved monitoring and approval of covert CIA operations. These were the days of CIA successes in Iran, where the Shah was installed on the throne, and in Guatemala, where the government of Jacobo Arbenz, considered to be anti-American and anti-business, was overthrown. In 1955, Kissinger, already known to insiders for his closeness to Rockefeller and for Rockefeller's reliance on him, was named a consultant to the Operations Coordinating Board, the highest policy-making board for implementing clandestine activity against foreign governments." - *) January 13, 1975, Lewiston Daily Sun, p. 12, 'Super-Secret Group': "Kissinger won't speak for the record about the committee. In background sessions he has said the committee does not recommend CIA programs but only passes on proposals from the agency. Other State Department sources say the 40 group's role isn't always just backchecking. One source said that Kissinger runs the major CIA programs. Another source, a former Kissinger aide, said Kissinger usually just calls the other committee members or sees them individually, either in his office or at other meetings, and they hardly ever meet formally. An example given by another State official concerned formation of the Rockefeller commission. Kissinger personally recommended that President Ford establish the panel. He told a newsman that he didn't know if any other administration official made similar suggestions. Yet, Kissinger reportedly made his recommendation in the name of the committee. Other officials say that Kissinger proposed the outlines of CIA activities in Chile against the government of President Salvadore Allende. Congress was not told of the CIA operation during the time it was going on."
*) October 31, 1975, Milwaukee Sentinel, 'Kissinger Depicted As US Master Spy': "One witness, William Watts, said that 40 Committee decisions were never discussed at the 20 to 25 National Security Council meetings he attended. The security council is composed of the president, secretary of defense and secretary of state. The other witness, James Gardner, said that the 40 Committee did not meet at all between April, 1972 and the end of 1974 when about 40 covert activities were authorized. According to his testimony, Kissinger would decide whether or not to approve the activities and then would telephone the other committee members to inform them of his decision.
Rep. Ron Dellums (D-Calif.) contended that Kissinger's power is "unprecedented in the United States" and that Kissinger has "an armlock on the intelligence community." Committee questioning indicated that its members may blame Kissinger Friday for some of the excesses and illegal activities of the CIA. "The CIA does not go galloping off by itself conducting operations," Rep. Otis G. Pike (D-N.Y.), the committee chairman said. He added that there was "approval from higher up the line." Rep. Morgan Murphy (D-Ill.) called the 40 Committee "a sham" and said that a private US citizen traveling overseas once revealed a clandestine action that 40 Committee members did not know about.
Kissinger's power is unprecedented, officials have said, because he is both secretary of state and the president's national security advisor. In the past, the positions were held by different individuals. Because he has both jobs, he is the first person to serve both on the National Security Council, which has overall responsibility for all security operations, and as chairman of the 40 Committee, responsible for covert intelligence gathering operations. Other members of the 40 Committee are the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the deputy secretary of defense and the undersecretary of state for political affairs. In theory, the 40 Committee was established to avoid secret activities which might risk war with other countries or which might prove politically embarrassing to the U.S.
When Rep. Robert W. Kasten (R-Wis.) asked Gardner which member of the 40 Committee was most influential, Gardner emphasized that Kissinger was. Gardner said that only the president reviews decisions of the 40 Committee about secret activities in other countries and that the presidential review is requested only in unusual circumstances. Garner served as a State Department liaison man with the 40 Committee for nine years until his retirement last year. Watts was the senior staff member at the National Security Council in 1969 and 1970."
May 2001, The Spectacle, 'Christopher Hitchens' Trial of Henry Kissinger: A Review': "The documents show that Kissinger orchestrated the delivery of "sterile" (non-traceable) weapons, funds, and orders to the plotters. The key document is the White House "memorandum of conversation" of 15 October, 1970 recording the discussions between Kissinger, Mr. Thomas Karamessines, the head of covert operations at the CIA, and General Alexander Haig, a member of Nixon's White House staff. This memo states that Kissinger instructed Karamessines to "preserve Agency assets in Chile, working clandestinely and securely to maintain the capability for Agency operations against Allende in the future; and that our encouragement to the Chilean military in recent weeks be kept as secret as possible." ... It fully documents that Kissinger was a co-conspirator in a planned act of violence, which, in a bald-faced lie, he denied in an interview on the PBS Newshour, broadcast on 20 February, 2001. That act of violence was the ostensible kidnapping of Schneider, as part of a general coup. On 22 October 1970 the military plotters assassinated General Schneider." - November 18, 1990, The Observer: "Declassified secret service papers reveal that Ted Shackleton [sic], deputy chief of the CIA station in Rome in the 1970’s introduced the notorious Licio Gelli – head of the neo-fascist P2 masonic lodge and for years a fugitive in Argentina – to General Alexander Haig, then Nixon's chief of staff, and later, from 1974 to 1979, NATO Supreme Commander. P2 was a right-wing shadow government, ready to take over Italy, that included four Cabinet Ministers, all three intelligence chiefs, 48 MPs, 160 military officers, bankers, industrialists, top diplomats and the Army Chief of Staff. After meetings between Gelli, Italian military brass and CIA men in the embassy, Gladio was given renewed blessing – and more money – by Haig and the then head of the National Security Council, Henry Kissinger."
- December 27, 1972, history.state.gov, Transcript of a Memorandum to the President's Assistant (Haldeman) Dictated by President Nixon: "Schlesinger's report [3] is brilliant, and must be implemented in a number of directions.
Here, however, you have a very delicate responsibility. What you must do is to convince Henry [Kissinger] of the necessity of my appointing Schlesinger as the top White House man responsible for reorganizing the intelligence community and in charge of intelligence activities. It's of course going to be in Henry's shop, but Schlesinger must be the man in charge.
I say this for a number of reasons, of which the following are the most important:
1) The Congress is particularly jealous of its authority in the intelligence field. If they got the impression that the President has turned all intelligence activities over to Kissinger all hell will break loose. If on the other hand I name the new Director of CIA Schlesinger as my top assistant for intelligence activities we can get it by the Congress.
2) Henry simply doesn't have the time to spend which is needed, to spend on this project which is needed. The fact that I have been bugging him and Haig for over 3 years to get intelligence reorganized with no success whatever proves that point. For example, just read Schlesinger's report of 2 years ago and note it has not been implemented in any respect and you can see what the problem is.
3) Henry cannot move in this field [unclear], due to his very close contact with Haig. Haig with all of his superior qualities is after all a part of the present system.
4) Hanging over this whole intelligence question is FIAB [Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board]. It is a prestigious group, but instead of really being independent, being an independent advisory group, it really represents various segments of the status quo in the intelligence community. FIAB will vigorously oppose many of the attempts to reorganize intelligence. ...
On the other hand [Schlesinger] does not emphasize as much as I would like the need to improve quality as well as reduce quantity of top intelligence people in the CIA itself. The CIA, like the State Department, is basically a liberal establishment bureaucracy." - *) January 13, 1975, Lewiston Daily Sun, p. 12, 'Super-Secret Group': "One source said that Kissinger runs the major CIA programs. ... An example given by another State official concerned formation of the Rockefeller commission. Kissinger personally recommended that President Ford establish the panel. He told a newsman that he didn't know if any other administration official made similar suggestions. Yet, Kissinger reportedly made his recommendation in the name of the [40] committee."
*) January 13, 1975, Observer Reporter, 'Top Spy Group Shuns Probe': "Kissinger is described by State Department associates as anxious to keep the 40 Committee out of the inquiries by congressional committees and that President's commission that will look into the spy agency. The secretary reportedly argues that the investigations should be limited to charges that the CIA illegally spied on Americans in the United States. He doesn't want a search of the way he and the other four members of the committee operate. Sources on the congressional panels involved, as well as the special commission headed by Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, indicate a willingness to comply, if they can." - January 19, 1975, New York Times, 'The Secret Committee Called '40'': "The operations of the 40 Committee are so secret that in his Senate testimony, Mr. Colby was reluctant even to identify the chairman, who, as it turned out, was a well-known public figure: ... Mr. Colby: "The chairman, all right, Mr. Chairman, Dr. Kissinger is the chairman as the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.""
- February 18, 1967, Memorandum From the President's Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson (history.state.gov): "Mr. President: Herewith the records in our minutes of meetings of the 303 Committee (and its predecessor group, 5412 Committee [successor group: 40 Committee) which refer to CIA connection with support for youth and student groups. The first such reference is 25 February 1959; the last is 3 December 1964. [2]
Those present at the meetings are noted.
You should know that the basic work of the 303 Committee is to examine new programs; although, in the period I have been here, I have asked for reexamination of certain programs when current issues arose.
Clark Clifford's committee [the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, chaired by Clifford at the time] may be more deeply engaged in studying the whole of the CIA program; although I am not sure about this." - December 26, 1974, New York Times, 'Clifford Favors a Special Inquiry Into C.I.A. 'Spying'': ""What they [the C.I.A.] did was just never mentioned to us during their briefings," Mr. Clifford said. "These fellows [at the C.I.A.] obviously were operating with the greatest degree of secrecy." "I can tell you," he added, "that whatever they did they did at their peril. If J. Edgar Hoover had heard of it, he would have come in blasting. It would have caused quite snarl." ... He added, he knew of no secret White House directives that would give the C.I.A. any operational power in the United States, even in the case of foreign espionage agents. "If a secret agent conies to the United States," he said, "the C.I.A. must immediately inform the F.B.I.""
- March 18, 1975, Chicago Tribune, 'Never told about CIA plots--Clark Clifford': "Clifford told the Rockefeller Commission Monday he was never 'informed' of any alleged CIA plans to assassinate any foreign leaders. ... Clifford was in a key CIA planning role in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, serving on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board."
- 2009, John Acacia, 'Clark Clifford: The Wise Man of Washington', pp. 60-61: "The National Security Act of 1947 also established the Central Intelligence Agency. ... In January 1946 [Truman] asked Clifford and Leahy to study proposals submitted by the State Department and the military for intelligence coordination, and Leahy handed off the project to Clifford. Knowing next to nothing about intelligence, Clifford turned to a friend from St. Louis, Rear Admiral Sydney Souers. ... The CIG thus established [at Truman's instigation], Clifford pressured Souers to accept the appointment as the first director of central intelligence. Souers reluctantly accepted [as the CIG wasn't near as powerful as he preferred], but agreed to serve for only six months. ... Clifford shared Elsey's criticism and was also concerned that the CIA would become involved in domestic intelligence, which was outside its mandate and properly belonged to the FBI. On July 12 he sent a memorandum to Vandenberg, in which he said, "The failure to distinguish between 'intelligence' and 'foreign intelligence' will raise a serious question in many minds as to whether the real intent of the bull is actually the same as that stated in the 'Purpose of the Act.' ... I fear that this will lead to the suspicion that the 'National Intelligence Authority' and the 'Central Intelligence Agency' will attempt to control, with the powers granted to them in this bill, the F.B.I. and other intelligence activities."
- *) April 13, 1971, Jerry N. Hess interview with Clark M. Clifford (trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/cliford2.htm): "When I had been in the Naval Aide's office, I developed a relationship with Jim Forrestal, who was then Secretary of Navy. I began to get involved in military matters. When he became Secretary of Defense, I was very much involved with him. I gradually grew into the position of liaison between White House and first the War Department and Navy Department and then the Defense Department. ... When I came in there, Dean Acheson was Under Secretary of State. I had met him here in Washington and we had developed an excellent relationship. ... Under Secretary of State [under George Marsahll] then was Robert Lovett and he and I were already friends."
*) 2012, Amanda Kay McVety, 'Enlightened Aid: U. S. Development As Foreign Policy in Ethiopia', p. 180: "In 1965, Johson created two committees to review America's foreign aid. ... Headed by Dean Rusk, the committee tackled the issues of USAID's general framework.... The outside review committee, dubbed the Clifford Committee," included Clark Clifford, Eugene Black... Douglas Dillon... David Rockefeller, and Dean Acheson."
*) October 13, 2015, Huffington Post, 'My Half Century in the Nation's Capital': "Walter T. Ridder, the bureau chief and cousin of the publisher of the St. Paul papers, took me under his wing and made sure I met the movers and shakers of the nation’s Capital. ... One day [from late 1965 to 1967], Ridder took me to lunch at the exclusive Metropolitan Club, where he motioned to a nearby table where David Rockefeller, Clark Clifford, Averill Harriman and Douglas Dillon sat, and said, "Take a good look. You'll never see that much wealth in one place again."" - December 13, 1976, Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 3, No. 50, 'Corter's Cabinet The Trilateral Commission Moves to Washington': "The fact is. every prominent name mentioned this week for a cabinet post with the prospective Carter administration is a Trilateral Commission member: ... Paul Warnke is a member of Clifford, Warnke, Glass. McIlwain and Finney. the legal counsel for Standard Oil of California and coordinating arm between government and private intelligence networks. Warnke himself is closely associated with the Institute for Policy Stuties.. Clark Clifford: is a partner in Warnke's law firm and actually was the late 1940s architect of the CIA. ..."
- *) October 11, 1998, New York Times, 'Clark Clifford, a Major Adviser To Four Presidents, Is Dead at 91': "Mr. Clifford left the White House in 1950 to open a law firm in Washington, hoping to repair his personal finances, which had been tattered by his years in the Government, most of them at an annual salary of $12,000. ...
Clients lined up outside his door. One of the first was Mr. Hughes, who asked Mr. Clifford to be the Washington counsel for Trans World Airlines. There followed a clientele that represented blue-chip America and included General Electric, A.T. & T., I.T.T, the RCA Corporation, ABC, Du Pont, Hughes Tool, Time Inc., [Rockefeller's] Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum and El Paso Natural Gas." - *) September 29, 1977, Harvard Crimson, 'Open Season for Prosecutions': "[Disgraced CIA director Richard Helms has been] enlisting the aid of old friends from within government as well as without. Former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and others have made private appeals to the Carter administration to spare Helms' neck, and the Justice Department's continued reluctance to arrive at a final verdict on whether to indict him [for perjury] testifies to the influence wielded by the "Helms lobby.""
*) 2005, Joseph Trento, 'Prelude to Terror', p. 367: "Helms by this time was under criminal investigation for lying to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations about the CIA's role in Chile. He was in deep financial trouble over legal costs. The Saudis arranged for their top lobbyist and lawyer, Clark Clifford, to begin a campaign to stop the investigation of Helms. Clifford voiced the threat that Helms would reveal embarrassing state secrets as part of a "graymail" legal defense being conducted by famed--and expensive--Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams. Helms himself confided to old friend and colleague (from Iran) Tom Braden that he would resort to such a defense and "bring down Henry Kissinger" in the process." - *) October 11, 1998, New York Times, 'Clark Clifford, a Major Adviser To Four Presidents, Is Dead at 91': "Except for Spiro Agnew and a lone article in Ramparts magazine, nobody had a bad word to say about [Clark Clifford] in public, at least not until the B.C.C.I. scandal.
Whether in the White House or in his law offices across the street from the White House, Mr. Clifford was the man politicians and business leaders turned to for advice. ...
B.C.C.I., which he also represented... Ten years later, Robert M. Morgenthau, the District Attorney in Manhattan, disclosed that his office had found evidence that the parent company of Mr. Clifford's bank was secretly controlled by B.C.C.I."
*) For more details on the BCCI affair and the role of elites in it, visit ISGP's article A History of CIA Drug Trafficking. - 1983, Seymour Hersh, 'The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House': "Kissinger escaped any serious investigation during Watergate, as those attorneys who had some doubts soon found themselves immersed in various other matters. One prosecution official, discussing that White House tape recording years later, recalled a quality of Kissinger's conduct in front of Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman that made him wish he could have listened to more of Kissinger's Oval Office meetings. "He was like one of the boys, talking tough. One says, 'Let's bring knives.' Another says, 'Let's bring bats.' And Henry pipes up, 'Let's bring zip-guns.'" The prosecutor recalled his surprise at hearing Kissinger: "I thought he might have been classier."
That Kissinger had lied about his role ... was widely assumed in the Washington press corps, and even inside the Watergate Special Prosecution Force, but Kissinger was permitted to slide by with his half-truths and misstatements. Only Richard Nixon, Alexander Haig, some of the men around them, and a few Watergate prosecutors fortunate enough to have learned what was on the White House tapes understood the truth: Kissinger was involved." - January 17, 1976, Star-News, 'Kissinger has survivor's record': "Unlike those who chortled over Friday's White House announcement that Kissinger no longers heads the 40 Committee directing U.S. intelligence operations... [Kissinger] has been accused of tapping telephones, undoing the Marxist government of Chile's late Salvador Allende and sacrificing U.S. interests in exchange for detente with Russia. ... Kissinger lost the directorship of the National Security Council, and with it chairmanship of the 40 Committee. It can be argued this deprived him of ability to dominate NSC intelligence operations. His successor as NSC chief [is] Brent Scowcroft [later of Kissinger Associates]..."
- See the Republican vs. Democrat system discussion in ISGP's intro article for sources on Condoleezza Rice being a protege of George Shultz and the NGOs she and Colin Powell have been involved in.
- Ibid. Information on AmeriCares can also be found in ISGP's American Security Council article.
- Ibid.
- October 22, 1995, The Independent, 'Modern art was CIA 'weapon'': "The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was [the Rockefellers' Museum of Modern Art's] chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949."
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- March 28, 1998, New York Times, 'Paid Notice: Deaths: Whitney, Betsey Cushing': "The Trustees and Staff of The Museum of Modern Art and Members of its International Council are deeply saddened by the passing of Honorary Trustee Betsey Whitney, a longtime friend of the Museum and a 40-year member of the Council. She and her husband John Hay Whitney were thoughtful and devoted patrons of the Museum as well as generous benefactors and donors. To her daughters Kate and Sara and to her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren, we send our warmest and most heartfelt sympathy. David Rockefeller, Chairman Emeritus..."
- From the biography of the highly-connected MI6 propaganda asset Brian Crozier, who became chairman for some time of the secretive CIA-MI6-Opus Dei-ran Cercle group:
*) 1993, Brian Crozier, 'Free Agent', p. 62: "... in the late 1950s during my Economist years, ... I had been among the priviliged few journalists invited to his [Jock Whitney's] small lunches at the Connaught Hotel, and the more formal receptions at his residence in Regent's Park."
*) Also detailed in Crozier's biography: The CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) approached Brian Crozier to reconstruct and commercialize their organization. Crozier, however, turned down this offer as he was too busy with his other undertakings. He later did a study for the CCF, investigating its South American network. Some time after that study, in 1965-1966, he reconstructed the CCFs Forum Service, turning it into Forum World Features (FWF). John Hay Whitney was the one who took over the financial burden of FWF from the CIA when it was commercialized. - 1999, Frances Stonor Saunders, 'Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', p. 261: "Planning Coordination Group which oversaw National Security Council decisions, including covert operations. Rockefeller's close friend was John 'Jock' Hay Whitney, a long-time trustee of [the Rockefellers'] MoMa, who also served as its president and chairman of the board. Educated at Groton, Yale and Oxford, Jock had converted a substantial inheritance into a vast fortune by bankrolling fledgling companies, Broadway plays and Hollywood movies. As director of Rockefeller's motion picture division at CIAA in in 1940-2, Jock oversaw production of such films as Disney's Saludas Amigos, which brimmed with inter-American goodwill.
He joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1943, was captured in southern France by German soldiers in August 1944, and loaded on to a train heading east before making a daring escape.
After the war, he set up J. H. Whitney & Co. as 'a partnership dedicated to the propagation of the free-enterprise system by the furnishing of financial backing for new, undeveloped, and risky businesses that might have trouble attracting investment capital through more conservative channels.' [21] A prominent partner was William H. Jackson, a polo-playing friend of Jock's who also happened to be deputy director of the CIA. Jock had a position on the Psychological Strategy Board, and found 'many ways of being useful to the CIA'. [22]
He also had a museum, the Whitney Museum in New York. According to one account, 'senior trustees and board of directors members of the Whitney Museum can be shown to have wittingly served as CIA fronts during the Cold War, and the Whitney Museum had a cultural agenda that it took on the road around the world'. [23] Another link was William Burden [Pilgrims Society, like Jock Whitney], who first joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940. Descended from 'commodore' Vanderbilt, Burden epitomized the Cold War establishment. Formerly Secretary of State for Air, he too had worked for Rockefeller's CIAA during the war. He had also earned a personal fortune and a reputation as 'a venture capitalist of the first rank'. Chairing numerous quasi-governmental bodies, and even the CIA's Farfield Foundation [financed the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom]..." - May-June 1996, Lisa Pease for Probe Magazine, 'Indonesia, President Kennedy & Freeport Sulphur'. While "alternative", this is a lengthy and very well-sourced article. (PDF)
- 1999, Frances Stonor Saunders, 'Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', p. 261: "He also had a museum, the Whitney Museum in New York. According to one account, "senior trustees and board of directors members of the Whitney Museum can be shown to have wittingly served as CIA fronts during the Cold War, and the Whitney Museum had a cultural agenda that it took on the road around the world'. [23] Another link was William Burden [Pilgrims Society, like Jock Whitney], who first joined the museum as chairman of its Advisory Committee in 1940. Descended from 'commodore' Vanderbilt, Burden epitomized the Cold War establishment. Formerly Secretary of State for Air, he too had worked for Rockefeller's CIAA during the war. He had also earned a personal fortune and a reputation as 'a venture capitalist of the first rank'. Chairing numerous quasi-governmental bodies, and even the CIA's Farfield Foundation [financed the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom]..."
- *) March 23, 2015 issue, The New Yorker, 'A Friend of the Devil': "Almost exactly twenty years after Truman’s speech, in February, 1967, the government's cover was spectacularly blown by a college dropout. The dropout's name was Michael Wood, and the operation he exposed was the C.I.A.'s covert use of an organization called the National Student Association. The revelation had a cascading effect, and helped to mark the end of the first phase of the Cold War."
*) 1967, unknown source (seen PDF scan), 'The CIA and the Foundations': "From a Report by Congressional Quarterly [note: see below]: "A series of disclosures during the week of Feb. 19-24 [1967] linked a number of organizations In the fields of law, journalism, labor, education and religion to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The disclosures had begun Feb. 13 when the National Student Association (NSA) announced it had been receiving funds from the CIA since 1952."
*) 1967, Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 'Groups Channeling, Receiving Assistance From CIA': "Foundations linked with the CIA generally fell into three categories:
(1) CIA "dummy" foundations set up by the CIA to give CIA funds directly to certain organizations or to channel CIA funds to established foundations which then served as conduits by giving the money to CIA-designated organizations;
(2) suspected CIA "dummies" which, if they were not "dummies," were cooperating with the CIA in some capacity; and
(3) CIA "cooperators," established foundations serving as conduits for CIA money channeled to them, usually through "dummy" foundations. The CIA refused to say which foundations it worked with or to disclose in what capacity any of the foundations identified by press reports might have been serving. ...
CIA 'Cooperators': ...
- Cleveland H. Dodge Foundation Inc., 300 Park Ave., New York, N.Y.; established in 1917; principal officer: Cleveland E. Dodge, president; assets (1964): $6.2 million; ...
- Farfield Foundation Inc., 145 East 52nd St., New York, N.Y.; established in 1952; principal officer: Donald S. Stralem, president; assets: $1,361,330 (1964); ...
- J. M. Kaplan Fund Inc., 55 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y.; established in 1944; principal officer: Jacob K. Kaplan, president; assets: $14,691,002 (1964)...
Press reports identified a number of organizations that had been receiving grants from foundations believed to be channeling CIA funds. Since many of the foundations also had additional sources of income, not all the grants made by the foundations were necessarily made with CIA funds and thus not all organizations receiving grants from the foundations got CIA money. Listed below are those organizations most widely reported to have been the ones which benefited directly from the CIA funneling process, the amount received and the foundations involved. The amounts listed are not necessarily complete but rather only those amounts which were disclosed in the press.
- African American Institute...
- American Society of African Culture...
- Asia Foundation...
- Congress for Cultural Freedom...
- Foreign Policy Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. ...
- National Council of Churches...
- Radio Free Europe...
- Stanford Research Institute, Palo Alto, Calif.; $20,000 in 1964 (Littauer).
- United States National Student Assn., Washington, D.C.; $3 million since 1952 (FYSA, Independence, Rabb, Brown, Norman).
- United States Youth Council, New York, N.Y.; $150,000 annually (FYSA).
- John Hay Whitney Trust for Charitable Purposes, New York, N.Y.; $325,000 in 1964–65 (Granary). "
*) February 11, 1968, CIA asset and future neocon (pretending here to have been an independent journalist) Irving Kristol for the New York Times, 'Memoirs of a "Cold Warrior" (Cont.)': "Besides, as against such rumors there was the fact of the Farfield Foundation, our ostensible sponsor, which subsidized Encounter via a grant to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Farfield Foundation was no shadowy or ghostly entity. Its president, Julius (Junky) Fleischmann--whose millions derived from yeast, gin, and other profitable commodities--would float over to London every now and then, on his yacht, and Spender would give a "London literary party" for him. There, he would be introduced as "the patron" of Encounter...
On several occasions, both Spender and I questioned him about the rumors. He repudiated them indignantly, and said that if anyone dared to print the barest hint of such a libel, he would promptly institute legal proceedings. In the event, of course, they did, and he did not. ...
I am sure [Fleischmann] was moved by patriotic motives, and it is even possible that some of the money came from his own pocket. (Like many such conduits, the Farfield Foundation was a mixture of bona fide philanthropy and CIA dollars.)" - October 22, 1995, Frances Stonor Saunders of the The Independent, 'Modern art was CIA 'weapon'': "The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. ... Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism. ...
For the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson [close to Ted Shackley and involved in Le Cercle], has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it. ...
The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. ... At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter. ...
Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.
The [Rockefeller's MoMa] museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley ... John Hay Whitney ... Tom Braden ... Julius Fleischmann...
The money that Fleischmann provided [for 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting" when not enough funds were available], however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds." - *) February 11, 1968, CIA asset and future neocon (pretending here to have been an independent journalist) Irving Kristol for the New York Times, 'Memoirs of a "Cold Warrior" (Cont.)': "Besides, as against such rumors there was the fact of the Farfield Foundation. our ostensible sponsor, which subsidized Encounter via a grant to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Farfield Foundation was no shadowy or ghostly entity. Its president, Julius (Junky) Fleischmann--whose millions derived from yeast, gin, and other profitable commodities--would float over to London every now and then, on his yacht, and Spender would give a "London literary party" for him. There, he would be introduced as "the patron" of Encounter...
On several occasions, both Spender and I questioned him about the rumors. He repudiated them indignantly, and said that if anyone dared to print the barest hint of such a libel, he would promptly institute legal proceedings. In the event, of course, they, and he did not. ...
I am sure [Fleischmann] was moved by patriotic motives, and it is even possible that some of the money came from his own pocket. (Like many such conduits, the Farfield Foundation was a mixture of bona fide philanthropy and CIA dollars.)"
*) October 22, 1995, Frances Stonor Saunders of the The Independent, 'Modern art was CIA 'weapon'': "The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds. ... Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA."
*) 1967, 'The Foundation Directory: Volume 3', p. 556: "Farfield Foundation, Inc. 145 East 52nd Street New York, New York 10022. Incorporated in 1952 In New York. Donors: Miami District Fund, The Fleischmann Foundation... Officers: Donald S. Stralem,* President; Milton C. Rose,* Vice-President; Whitelaw Reid,* Secretary; Godfrey S. Rockefeller,* Treasurer; Frank C. Piatt, Executive Director. Directors:* William A. M. Burden, Cass Canfield, Gardner Cowles, Charles Fleischmann."
*) October 27, 1959, New York Times, 'Whitelaw Reid, Ex-Editor, to Wed Elizabeth Brooks; Director of' The Herald Tribune and Aide of Foundation Engaged': "She is executive secretary of the Farfield Foundation in New York. Her grandparents were the late Dr. and Mrs. Henry Turner Brooks of this city."
*) July 6, 2002, New York Times, 'John Thompson, 84, a Professor and Poet': "From 1956 to 1965 he worked as the executive director of the Farfield Foundation, which sponsored plays, magazines and other cultural activities in Africa and Europe." - October 22, 1995, Frances Stonor Saunders of the The Independent, 'Modern art was CIA 'weapon'.
- November 1999, The Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Vol. 31, Issue 6, 'The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited': "The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA "projects," and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publicly exposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left. ...
How could they ignore the absence, during their cultural congresses, of criticism of U.S. imperialist intervention in Guatemala, Iran, Greece, and Korea that led to millions of deaths?" - See ISGP's Liberal CIA oversight for Perspectives USA magazine.
- *) 2014, Meryl Gordon, 'The Last Mrs. Astor: A New York Story', p. 118: "Huguette and her mother sailed back from Europe to New York in October 1926... Other notables [on board] included Vincent Astor, his sister Alice, and her husband, the poloplaying Russian prince Serge Obolensky."
*) 2008, Frances Kiernan, 'The Phantom of Fifth Avenue', p. 118: "Vincent was fond of all four of Alice's children - even when he could not bring himself to forgive Alice for divorcing her first husband, Serge Obolensky [in 1932 and then marrying and divorcing three more times]..."
*) 2008, Meryl Gordon, 'Mrs. Astor Regrets', p. 26: "Emily's mother, Alice Astor -- Vincent Astor's sister -- suddenly died. Brooke and Vincent offered to adopt Emily, who was then fourteen, and when Emily declined, Brooke toured boarding schools with her. Even after Vincent died, Brooke worked with his two ex-wives to give Emily a coming-out party at the St. Regis, the hotel that Vincent had owned. ... Henry Kissinger remembers Mrs. Astor's spark when they all spent Christmas holidays together at the de la Rentas' luxurious Dominican Republic vacation home. "We always took a walk at the end of the day, on the golf course -- Annette, Brooke, myself, Barbara Walters," Kissinger said with a smile. ...
Even as adults, Vincent and Alice Astor were frightened of their mother. "She was a tigress," says Ivan Obolensky, Alice Astor's son. "They were terrified of her. Things had to be perfect."" - 2008, Meryl Gordon, 'Mrs. Astor Regrets: The Hidden Betrayals of a Family Beyond Reproach', pp. 13-14: "On New Year's Eve 1999, Brooke had been a guest at a party given by David Rockefeller... Astor had been friends with the Rockefeller family since her marriage to Vincent Astor. David Rockefeller, the youngest member of the family and her junior by thirteen years, recalls, "I think the first time I met her was in 1958, on a boat off Providence, Rhode Island. My uncle Winthrop Aldrich, who was the former ambassador to the Court of St. James's, took us out for a day sail on his boat, the Wayfarer."
Brooke became extended family to David Rockefeller and his brother Nelson. But her true confident in the family was another brother, Laurance, the conservationist and philanthropist. They were so enamored of each other in public that rumors circulated for decades that Brooke and the long-married Laurance were having an affair. ... "Laurance was in many ways the one of us that she saw the most of," says David Rockefeller. "I got to know her really well in the last twenty years, and saw a great deal of her." He took her out for horse-and-carriage rides in Westchester and Maine." - See the investigations of the [Governor Philip Fox] La Follette Civil Liberties Committee of 1937. It described the extremely violent union busting tactics of such companies as Ford, General Motors and Du Pont.
- 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 123.
- Ibid., pp. 34-47 ('Big Business Bossed Mussolini'.
- 1990, Ron Chernow, 'The House of Morgan', pp. 279-281: "After the war [WWI], J. P. Morgan and Company sparred with Dillon, Read for business with the Italian government. Lamont wanted an exclusive relationship, as understood by the Gentleman Banker's Code. In 1923, six months after taking power, Mussolini first met with Lamont to discuss how to restore Italian credit. Initially Wall Street viewed il Duce benignly, as the man who had saved strike-torn Italy from Bolshevik hands. The Blackshirt terror that killed a hundred people in the 1921 elections was conveniently overlooked. Traveling through Italy, Jack Morgan reported to a friend, "We had the great satisfaction of seeing Mr. Mussolini's Revolution... Afterward, Lamont wrote this paean: "The Italy through which I traveled seemed to be industrious and prosperous. The newspaper headlines in New York and even London papers seemed to me exaggerated. Everybody, both in and out of the Government, laughed at these stories of street fights, unrest upsetting the Government etc." Back at 23 Wall, Lamont received an autographed photograph from Mussolini, which was now featured as prominently on his wall as the earlier picture of Woodrow Wilson had been... As the big $100 million loan hung in the balance, Lamont made his most startling shift with Mussolini, one that went far beyond basic banking requirements. This former champion of the League of Nations began to coach the Italian dictator on how to appeal to Anglo-American opinion. He fed him sugared phrases, language that would make reprehensible policies palatable abroad. A modern man, Lamont knew that any product, if attractively packaged, could be marketed to the public. After Mussolini suspended town councils and bullied Parliament into passing 2,364 decrees at once, Lamont sent fresh publicity angles to Fummi for il Duce's consideration... As with the Dawes Loan to Germany, the Morgan loan to Italy proved a catalyst for further American investment. The bank itself went on to provide loans to Rome and to two industrial clients, Fiat and Pirelli. In December 1927, J. P. Morgan again joined with Ben Strong and established a credit for Banca d'Italia that permitted a return to the gold standard. On a Wall Street disturbed by European radicalism and worshipful of economic progress, Lamont wasn't the only Mussolini supporter. Jack Morgan and George Whitney both hailed him as a great patriot. Otto Kahn of Kuhn, Loeb likened his iron rule to that of a tough receiver straightening out a bankrupt company. With a poetic flourish, Willis Booth of Guaranty Trust said Mussolini lifted Italy "out of the slough of despair into the bright realm of promise." Judge Elbert Gary of U.S. Steel and publicist Ivy Lee joined the fan club."
- 2003, Paul Vysny, 'The Runciman mission to Czechoslovakia, 1938: prelude to Munich', p. 92: notes that Runciman was a great, outspoken supporter of Mussolini; and p. 93: notes that Runciman, as a Jew, was opposed to Nazi persecution of Jews.
- Sources are provided for cartel agreements and pro-Nazi policies of I.G. Farben, the Watsons of IBM, the Dillons, the Harrimans, the Dulles Brothers, and the Rockefellers.
*** I.G. Farben: December 11, 1945, Council Bluffs Nonpareil (Iowa), 'Farben tested poison gas on camp inmates': "Its cartel agreements numbered over 2,000 and included agreements with such major industrial concerns as Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Aluminum company of America, E. I. du Pont de Nemours, Ethyl Export corporation, Imperial Chemical Industries of Great Britain, the Dow Chemical company, Rohn and Haas, Establishments, Kuhlmann of France and the Mitsui interests of Japan."
*** DuPont company and General Motors, which it controlled (Du Pont family was loosely involved in the Pilgrims while GM chair 1937-1956, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. became a member after WWII):
*) 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 80: "Lammot DuPont and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., of the DuPont Empire and General Motors respectively, have been exposed by Congressional committees as subsiders of fascist organizations and movements. Both corporations and both men are also among the top flight rulers of the National Association of Manufacturers. ... NAM is the center of American Fascism..."
*) Ibid., pp. 75-77: "Alfred P. Sloan, president of General Motors and director of DuPonts, was charged by the U.S. Treasury (June 29, 1937), just five months before the date of our memorandum, with cheating the government out of $1,921,587 in three years through establishing personal holding companies to dodge taxes. DuPont representative. The four most important facts about the DuPont empire are: 1. that it controls General Motors, owning $197,000,000 of General Motors stock; b. that it financed the Liberty League, Sentinels, Crusaders and one dozen native American fascist outfits; c. that it knowingly and secretly and in violation of the U. S. and other laws, aided Hitler to arm for this war. d. that the DuPonts betrayed military secrets to Hitler. One great cartel of the merchants of death is Dynamite-Aktien-Gesellschaft (DAG). Exhibit 456 in the Nye-Vandenberg munitions investigation shows that DuPonts not only own stock but a voting right and a voice in the management of the cartel. Exhibit 456 also shows DuPont has a financial interest in I. G. Farbenindustrie... Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg. As part of the Nye-Vandenberg Munitions inquiry, Senator Vandenberg went after the Duponts and exposed their relations with Hitler. This was not a hardship for Vandenberg. He has always been Ford's friend, and Ford was the rival of General Motors, which the DuPonts controlled."
*) December 1, 1998, Associated Press, GM, Ford deny they aided Nazis: "General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. deny helping the Nazis during World War II and profiting from forced labor at their German subsidiaries. The Washington Post reported Monday that lawyers and historians were compiling evidence of collaboration for possible use in class-action lawsuits on behalf of former prisoners of war. Both GM and Ford have had German subsidiaries since the 1920s. The Post said documents show that American managers of both automakers allowed their German plants to be converted to military production while the companies resisted pressure to increase military production at their U.S. plants. GM spokesman John Mueller said in a statement that GM's Adam Opel plants in Germany were taken over by the Nazis during the war. "The stale allegations repeated in The Washington Post were reviewed and refuted by GM 25 years ago in hearings before Congress, when more individuals with firsthand knowledge of the facts were available," Mueller said."
*) December 14, 2006, Canadian Jewish News, 'As the Nazis amassed power, what did General Motors know, and when?': "Hitler's anti-Semitic demagoguery and the daily, semi-official, violent attacks against Jews were discussed in the American media almost daily. GM's president Alfred P. Sloan knew what was happening in Germany. Sloan and GM officials knew also that Hitler's regime was expected to wage war from the outset. Headlines, radio broadcasts and newsreels made that fact apparent. America, it was feared, would once again be pulled in. Nonetheless, GM and Germany began a strategic business relationship. That relationship is largely the focus of this JTA investigative series that re-examines the company's conduct on both sides of the Atlantic before, during and immediately after World War II. This four-part investigation reveals that while General Motors was helping mobilize the Third Reich, it was conspiring to demobilize America's electric mass transit, and in the process, was helping addict the United States to oil." This article can be read in full in the Pilgrims Society membership list, as various other articles.
*** Henry Ford (his grandson, Henry Ford II, was 1001 Club): Ford's devotion to Nazism and Hitler personally is very well known these days. One of the earlier articles happens to mention him.
*** Watsons (Pilgrims): 2001, Edwin Black, 'IBM and the Holocaust', online excerpt: "Hitler and his hatred of the Jews was the ironic driving force behind this intellectual turning point. But his quest was greatly enhanced and energized by the ingenuity and craving for profit of a single American company and its legendary, autocratic chairman. That company was International Business Machines, and its chairman was Thomas J. Watson... How much did IBM know? Some of it IBM knew on a daily basis throughout the 12-year Reich. The worst of it IBM preferred not to know--"don't ask, don't tell" was the order of the day. Yet IBM NY officials, and frequently Watson's personal representatives, Harrison Chauncey and Werner Lier, were almost constantly in Berlin or Geneva, monitoring activities, ensuring that the parent company in New York was not cut out of any of the profits or business opportunities Nazism presented. When U.S. law made such direct contact illegal, IBM's Swiss office became the nexus, providing the New York office continuous information and credible deniability."
*** Dillons (Pilgrims): Changed the name of W.A. Read & Company into Dillon, Read & Company in 1920. James Forrestal joined Dillon, Read & Company in 1923. General William H. Draper Jr. joined the firm in 1926 and described Forrestal already as the #2 man, right below Dillon. In January 1926, Dillon Read created the German Credit and Investment Corporation in Newark, New Jersey and Berlin, Germany. That same year, Dillon Read created the Vereinigte Stahlwerke (German Steel Trust), incorporating the Thyssen family interests under the direction of New York and London finance. Thyssen, together with banker Hjalmar Schacht, were the first major sponsors of Hitler.
*) April 23, 1948, Ogden Standard-Examiner - Drew Pearson, 'Nazi Arms Plants Spared Under New U.S. Policy': "For in 1932, it was the Krupps, the Thyssens, and the Ruhr industrialists who gave Hitler the money to take over Germany. Incidentally, it was also the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read and company, of which James V. Forrestal was head, that loaned a lot of money to these same munitions makers. Today, Forrestal is secretary of national defense, William H. Draper, former vice president of Dillon, Read, is undersecretary of the army, while Paul Nitze, another vice president of Dillon, Read, holds a key economic job in the state department."
*** Dulles brothers (Pilgrims):
*) September 28, 1944, Drew Pearson editorial in The Anniston Star (article appeared in many newspapers from late September to early October), pp. 4 and 9: "Even up until 1930, [John] Dulles continued optimistic about American investments in Germany. [John] Dulles made the statement in March 1939, that "these dynamic peoples (Germans, Italians and Japanese) determined to mould their states into a form which would permit them to take their destiny into their own hands and to attain that enlarged status which, under a liberal and peaceful form of government, had been denied them." Dulles went on to explain and condone the effort of the dictator nations to "enlarge their status," adding that "only hysteria entertains the idea that Germany, Italy or Japan contemplates war upon us." This, no doubt, was the Dulles speaking who instinctively adopted the banker attitude of the Chamberlains and the Clivedon Set that some way must be found to safeguard investments in Germany. Undoubtedly this also was the attitude of one important client of Dulles' law firm, the J. Henry Schroder Banking Corp. Dulles' brother and law partner, Allen Dulles, is a director of both J. Henry Schroder and the Schroder Trust Company, and the affairs of this international banking house are intimately tied up with the Dulles law firm. Whether the Dulles brothers knew it or not, it was a member of this banking house, Baron von Schroder, who financed Hitler. This was on January 4, 1933, when Hitler had made desperate efforts to get into power but had not succeeded. It looked as if he might not succeed at all. Then, suddenly, through Franz von Papen, now retired as Nazi ambassador to Turkey, Hitler met banker Baron von Schroder. Almost every recent historian agrees on this incident. As told by Rudolf Olden in "Hitler:" "There was no improvement in the financial situation of the party. Symptoms of decline were multiplying and party ties were loosening. Goebbels in his diary speaks of rats abandoning the sinking ship... Once again he (Hitler) had got to the suicide stage. Then came salvation: money suddenly reappeared. It was von Papen who opened it to Hitler again. With the greatest secrecy, Hitler and Papen met at Cologne at the house of Herr von Schroder, a banker who enjoyed the confidence of the steel and coal magnates. Goebbels' diary records triumphantly, 'If this coup succeeds, then power is not so very remote'." During the hectic months of 1933, Dulles was shuttling back and forth between New York and Berlin, trying to save something out of the financial wreck of Germany. He may have known nothing about the activities of his banker client. Or if he did, he may not have realized their significance. But certainly, during the succeeding years and right up until the outbreak of the war in 1939, John Dulles took the attitude that Germany was a misunderstood nation which had shown great investment promise and now should be treated with sympathy and understanding until she got back on her feet."
*** Harrimans (Pilgrims): John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 'The secret war against the Jews' (1994), pp. 360-361: "The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors. "Bert" Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York... In 1926... Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's specialty was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine. As we shall see, there is substantial evidence to support this charge. While the United States languished in the Depression, Walker made millions for his clients by investing in Germany's economic revival. He decided to quit W. A. Harriman in 1931, to concentrate on his own firm, G. H. Walker, while his son-in-law stayed behind to run the show for Harriman. Some say that Walker left George Bush's father holding the bag. Others say that Bush specialized in British investors in Nazi Germany, while Walker handled the Americans. In that same year Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directors of Union Banking. Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I. G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way. The holding company was Walker's American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking. In an elaborate paper trail, Harriman's stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker's office. The directors of this company were Averill Harriman, Bert Walker, and Prescott Bush. In order to understand the character of the firm, it should be recalled that Brown Brothers, Harriman had a bad reputation, even among international bankers, as hard-nosed capitalists who exploited every opportunity for profit in a harsh and ruthless manner... A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker's "Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States." Walker did not know it, but one of his American employers, Dan Harkins, had blown the whistle on the spy apparatus to Congress. Harkins, one of our best sources, became Roosevelt's first double agent... It was Allen Dulles [whom Harriman and Bush hired as lawyer]. According to Dulles's client list at Sullivan & Cromwell, his first relationship with Brown Brothers, Harriman was on June 18, 1936. In January 1937 Dulles listed his work for the firm as "Disposal of Stan [Standard Oil] Investing stock.""
*** Rockefellers (Pilgrims) #1 (Banking and partnership with the Schroders):
*) 1983, Charles Higham, 'Trading with the Enemy', p. 22: "As war approached, the links between the Rockefellers and the Nazi government became more and more firm. In 1936 the J. Henry Schroder Bank of New York had entered into a partnership with the Rockefellers. Schroder, Rockefeller and Company, Investment Bankers, was formed as part of an overall company that Time magazine disclosed as being "the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis." The partners in Schroder, Rockefeller and Company included Avery Rockefeller, Nephew of John D., Baron Bruno von Schroder in London, and Kurt von Schroder of the BIS and the Gestapo in Cologne. Avery Rockefeller owned 42 percent of Schroder, Rockefeller and Baron Bruno and his Nazi cousin 47 percent. Their lawyers were John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles of Sullivan and Cromwell. Allen Dulles (later of the Office of Strategic Services) was on the board of Schroder. Further connections linked the Paris branch of Chase to Schroder as well as the pro-Nazi Worms Bank and Standard Oil of New Jersey in France. Standard Oil's Paris representatives were directors of the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, which had intricate connections to the Nazis and Chase."
*) July 20, 1936, Time Magazine, 'Schroder Rockefeller': "Along with two other executives, Avery Rockefeller resigned from Manhattan's J. Henry Schroder Banking Corp. to set up a new investment house called Schroder Rockefeller & Co. which will handle the underwriting and general securities business given up by the U. S. branch of the famed old London firm under the Banking Act of 1933. J. Henry Schroder & Co. is one of the "Big Three" of British private banking, sharing the title with Baring Bros, and N. M. Rothschild & Sons. Founded in 1804, Schroder always has Schroders as partners, now boasts the third and fourth generations of the family in Baron Bruno Schroder and his son Helmut William Bruno Schroder. Formed shortly after the War to handle U. S. interests, J. Henry Schroder Banking Corp. will continue to operate as a commercial bank."
*) July 10, 1939, Time Magazine, 'Potash Politics': "So did their London bankers and sales agents—J. Henry Schroder & Co.—a firm which is an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis."
*) BBC Timewatch series, 'Banking with Hitler': described how Chase Paris completely cooperated with the Nazis, including the persecution of the Jews. (also described in 1983, Charles Higham, 'Trading with the Enemy', p. 25)
*** Rockefellers (Pilgrims) #2 (Standard Oil):
*) 1983, Charles Higham, 'Trading with the Enemy', pp. 46-47: "On March 26, Arnold appeared before Truman in an exceptionally buoyant mood in order to lay in front of the committee his specific charges against the oil company. He had dug up a great deal of dirt. He produced documents showing that Standard and Farben in Germany had literally carved up the world markets, with oil and chemical monopolies established all over the map. He flourished papers showing that Farish had refused to send vital patent information to Canada because Germany and Canada were at war. He showed how farish had flagrantly disregarded Lend-Lease and good neighbor policies in his connivance with Hitler. He zeroed in on the subject of synthetic rubber, pointing out that it had been denied to the U.S. Navy, and that Farish and Howard had deliberately sidetracked a Navy representative from seeing the process. He charged that cables showed Standard's arrangements with Japan that were to continue throughout any conflict or break in trade... Roosevelt was very unhappy with the hearings. Publicly exposing Teagle and farish was not helping him use them for America's purposes. He had enough of Arnold as the hearings concluded... Ickes wrote in his diary on April 5 that Arnold had been more or less gagged. The War and Navy departments insured that Roosevelt suspended any further antitrust actions against the corporations for the duration. They couldn't (as the Rockefeller Plaza meeting had made clear) run an Army and Navy without Standard."
1983, Charles Higham, 'Trading with the Enemy', pp. 59-62: "The [oil] shipments to Spain [coming in part from Standard Oil subsidiaries] indirectly assisted the Axis through Spanish transferences to Hamburg. At the same time, there were desperate shortages in the United States, long lines at the gas stations, and even petroleum rationing. While American civilians and the armed services suffered alike from restrictions, more gasoline went to Spain than it did to domestic customers... Asked by The New York Times how this could be explained, a spokesman for Cordell Hull declared blandly that the oil came from the Caribbean and not from the United States and was hauled by Spanish tankers. The evasiveness of the response was typical. The spokesman also neglected to mention that shipments were going to Vichy and to French Indian possessions under collaborative influence. Hayes revealed that the gasoline and petroleum products equaled the full capacity of the Spanish tanker fleet. He neglected to add that much of that fleet proceeded regularly to Germany and helped to fuel Nazis, including their embassies and consulates and military installations, tanks, armored cars as well as Spanish troop transports on the Russian front, fighting against the Soviet Union, which was America's ally. In addition to oil, 25,000 tons of sulphate of ammonia were shipped to Spain in 1943 along with 10,000 tons of cotton, despite American shortages in both commodities... Ickes had accumulated a dossier from his special staff of investigators. The dossier showed that in fact oil was going to Germany, that German agents were operating freely on Spanish territory, and that Franco had just released 400 million pesetas of credit to Germany. This would insure the Germans a flow of all the oil it needed, plus unlimited supplies of wolfram, the ore from which tungsten, a hard substance capable of penetrating steel, was made... For a brief period the truth emerged about Spain. Spanish ships were searched at sea, showing that oil, platinum, industrial diamonds, and liver extracts, from which the Germans made a tonic for fliers, submarine crews, and even shock troops, were coming from Argentina and the Caribbean on Spanish vessels, admitted through the British blockade by American licenses. On january 28, 1944, the British government cut off oil, gasoline, and other petroleum products to Spain. Franco protested violently. Dean Acheson remained sensibly silent. It was a brief period of sanity. On May 2, 1944, after only three and a half months of suspension, the oil lobby won a fight to restore shipments and to allow limited wolfram exports to Germany as well... 48,000 tons a month of American oil and 1,100 tons of wolfram began to flow back to the Nazis... On September 22, 1947, Judge Charles Clark delivered the final word on the subject. He said, "Standard Oil can be considered an enemy national in view of its relationships with I.G. Farben after the United States and Germany had become active enemies." The appeal was denied."
*) November 6, 1947, Oakland Tribune, 'Farben-U.S. Oil Firm Pacts That Hit War Effort Bared at Trial': "More than a year after the war began in Europe the United States suddenly awoke to the fact that it had no supplies of rubber which the Japanese couldn't cut off in a moment—as they later did... The way in which the biggest industrial nation in the world was crutched into this ridiculous and helpless position is one of the charges against 24 leading officials of I.G. Farben... Standard Oil, six of its subsidiaries, and three of its top executives already have paid fines of $5000 each in U.S. courts for their part in this unhappy picture. They didn't admit their guilt, but they didn't contest the action... Not only rubber is involved, but a host of other chemical developments... Farben and Standard Oil entered a solemn compact in 1929, dividing the world between them. Farben would be supreme in chemicals; Standard in petroleum. Where these two broad spheres rubbed shoulders, as they did inevitably, there would be further talks in the same spirit of "goodwill" which was recorded at the time... The Americans never received technical co-operation on rubber production, it said. Even with the "Jasco" deal, they received nothing of any importance, it went on... Farben in its turn, it said, had received from the Americans "over and beyond the agreement many very valuable contributions for the synthesis and improvement of motor fuels and lubrication oils, which just now during the war are most useful to us, and we also received other advantages from them.""
*) 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 259: "Standard Oil's Farish never denied he shipped oil to a Japanese navy which made possible the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan's ability to resist the Anglo-American Navies today. He excused himself by saying that Standard Oil was "an international concern." Standard Oil supplied Franco-Spain after 1939, National Maritime Union men giving testimony that oil went to Germany and Italy, for use against France and Britain. Technically, Standard Oil was not committing treason then because the United States was not at war."
*) 1994, John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 'The secret war against the Jews', pp. 164-166: "Rockefeller had discussed the position of Latin American spy chief with Harry Hopkins, one of President Roosevelt's top aides. It was hardly the kind of sales pitch that should have endeared Rockefeller to the Roosevelt administration. Rockefeller proposed that while Hitler and Churchill fought each other to death, the United States should be ready to pick up the pieces by seizing the opportunity to increase the economic influence of American businessmen. In effect, Rockefeller had proposed to Hopkins that regardless of which side won the war, the Nazis or the Allies, the country's international position had to be safeguarded by the use of "economic measures that are competitively effective against totalitarian techniques." By "totalitarian" Rockefeller meant the Soviets, not the Germans. As outlined earlier, the Rockefellers just happened to own the largest stock in Standard of New Jersey and were then in partnership with the Nazi-controlled I. G. Farben, which held the second largest share of the Rockefeller-controlled oil company, to develop synthetic gas and rubber. The sources among the former intelligence officers whom we interviewed on the Rockefellers say that the family was in complete agreement with the Dulles brothers and Forrestal on the question of preserving U.S. profits, no matter who won the war. After he accepted the job as head of the Office of Inter-American Affairs, Rockefeller told his staff, in essence, that their job was to use the war to take over Latin American markets. While Britain and France fought a bloody struggle against the Third Reich, Rockefeller's primary concern was to monopolize Latin America's raw materials and exclude the Europeans. Rockefeller's definition of Europe was very interesting: He meant the British, not the Nazis. As discussed earlier in this chapter, his friend Forrestal had authorized the Rockefeller oil company, Standard of New Jersey, to ship oil to the Nazis in 1941. That was before the United States entered the war, but Pearl Harbor made no difference to Rockefeller. All through the war, at least while Rockefeller was in charge, everything the Germans wanted in South America they got, from refueling stations to espionage bases. The British, on the other hand, had to pay in cash. Behind Rockefeller's rhetoric of taking measures in Latin America for the national defense stood a naked grab for profits. Under the cloak of his official position, Rockefeller and his cronies would take over Britain's most valuable Latin American properties. If the British resisted, he would effectively block raw materials and food supplies desperately needed for Britain's fight against Hitler. It was Rockefeller's own variant of Allen Dulles's oil blackmail. Naturally, Rockefeller's cronies were members of the Dulles-Forrestal clique. To implement his economic program to drive the British out of the lucrative Latin American markets, in each country Rockefeller set up coordinating committees composed of reactionary executives from Standard Oil, General Electric, and United Fruit, which promptly bled South America dry. It was just the sort of thing that endeared Rockefeller to the State Department. In November 1944 he was asked to serve as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs. Rockefeller did not exactly make South America safe for democracy. He was too busy shoring up profits to be bothered with minor details such as convincing the Latin American governments to declare war on the Axis let alone send troops. By February 1945 one-third of the nations on the continent had not even entered the war, while Dulles's friend, President Juan Peron of Argentina, led a bloc of decidedly pro-Fascist countries that were eager to help the architects of the Third Reich escape with their assets intact. In the end, these countries had to be ordered to declare war on Germany and Japan, under threat of exclusion from the United Nations... It was all a farce, of course. Argentina did not declare war until late April, two weeks before the German surrender... Rockefeller's political and corporate strategy was to use his bloc of Fascist nations to "buy" the majority vote at the UN to favor U.S.-sponsored resolutions."
*) Joseph Kennedy/Standard Oil: 1988, Michael Seidel, 'Streak: Joe Dimaggio and the Summer Of '41', p. 106: "For its part, I. G. Farben was given ownership of 20 percent of Standard Oil of New Jersey and shared an affilite company, Jasco, set up for any new patents and processes. Hitler knew about the Standard deal in the late 1930s and instructred I.G. Farben to get whatever patents they could from Standard Oil without providing any themselves. Standard Oil did not bother to review the arrangement and kept sending Farben the results of work at Jasco. But by late 1939 some Standard executives got nervous. They asked our ambassador to England at the time, Joseph Kennedy, to set up a secret meeting between Standard and I.G. Farben officials at The Hague. All Europe was a cinder box, and as one Standard executive remembers it, "We did out best to work out complete plans for a modus vivendi which would operate through the term of the war whether or not the U.S. came in."
*) Joseph Kennedy: August 23, 1978, Jewish and Israel News (JTA.org), 'Behind the Headlines I.g. Farben's Grim History': "First as an economist and later as a lawyer and historian, Joseph Borkin studied and investigated the corporate greed, evil and manipulations of the I.G. Farben Company. Now after 40 years of research and documentation of this industrial demon, he has presented a source book on the German chemical combine that dominated industrial giants in the very countries that Germany had sought to conquer in two world wars. ... Borkin points out that the I.G. main American asset was General Aniline and Film Corporation (GAF). A Swiss company, Interhandel, nominally owned it. Interhandel was originally established before World War II by I.G. Forben to conceal its foreign assets, evade German taxes and raise capital abroad. In 1942, however, the U.S. government considered GAF to be enemy property and seized it. After the war, Interhandel sought to regain GAF but no U.S. attorney general would allow it until 1963. In that year, Borkin reports, Interhandel's head, Alfred Schaefer, was introduced to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy through Prince Radziwill, Jacqueline Kennedy's brother-in-law. Under an arrangement worked out with Kennedy, Borkin reports, the U.S. government released GAF and sold it through an investment banker for $329 million, of which $124 million was paid to Interhandel. Borkin believes that Joseph P. Kennedy, the father of the President and Attorney General, had an interest in GAF and persuaded his sons to go through with the transaction. Five previous attorneys general had refused to do it, although influence on the U.S. government to restore GAF's assets to its German and Swiss owners had been strong for years." - *) 1942, John Hargrave, 'Montagu Norman', p. 217: "Early in 1934 a select group of City financiers gathered in Norman's room behind the windowless walls. Those present included Sir Alan Anderson, partner in Anderson, Green & Co.; Lord (then Sir Josiah) Stamp, Bank of England Director, and Chairman of the L. M. S. Railway; the Hon. Alexander Shaw, Chairman of P. & O. Steamship Lines; Sir Robert Kindersley, a partner in Lazard Brothers, Charles Hambro, banker; and F.C. Tiarks, head of J. Henry Schroder & Co. Governor Norman spoke of the political situation in Europe. A new power had established itself, a great "stabilizing force", namely, Nazi Germany. Norman advised his co-workers to include Hitler in their plans for financing Europe. There was no opposition... Although it may be said that Montagu Norman is not a Fascist, yet, in view of his activities during the rise of Hitlerism, it might be true to label him a crypto-fascist?" Bought book to verify quote, which has been mentioned by Eustace Mullins.
*) August 1939, The Living Age, 'British thumb in Nazi pie' (translated from the Neue Weltbuhne, Paris-German exile weekly): "Certain British business circles today maintain close relations with the Third Reich. These circles are extremely influential, and they have influenced Mr. Chamberlain. To be found on the so-called 'Committee of Six,' formed in January, 1933, to advise the Prime Minister in questions relating to armaments, are Messrs. P. F. B. Bennett, D'Arcy Cooper, Geoffey Clarke and J. S. Addison. Who are they? Bennett is one of the directors of Imperial Chemical Industries, which exchanges patents with the German Dye Trust and which shares ownership of certain enterprises with that trust. Imperial Chemical Industries has invested $55,000,000 in its sister organization in the Reich. The British organization counts among its friends at court such important stockholders as Neville Chamberlain, who owns 1,000 shares. His adviser, Bennett, conducted the Anglo-German trade negotiations last year in Dusseldorf... Geoffrey Clarke [has business ties to Siemens and is a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship]... As President of the British rayon trust Courtauldm Addison maintains relations with the German Vereinigte Glanzstoffabriken, of which Herr von Stauss is chairman of the board. Francis D'Arcy Cooper ... is chairman of the soap and margerine trust, Unilever, Ltd., which has branches throughout the world; these branches are partly owned by the brothers Schicht who gave the Sudeten leader Henlein the same generous support that Kirdorf and Thyssen once gave to Hitler. D'Arcy Cooper transformed the administration building of Unilever, Ltd., into the headquarters of the afore-mentioned Anglo-German Fellowship--the organization that rallies as the pro-Nazis in England. Cooper is on its board of directors. Apart from this, Lord Runciman's son, W. Leslie Runciman, who belongs to the board of directors of Lloyds bank and of British Imperial Airways, is a member of the fellowship. Lord Runciman [Pilgrims], whom the Czechs regard as Britain's agent in their betrayal last year, himself joined the board of directors of Westminster Bank during the time of his mission to Prague. ... Thus Chamberlain has at least four pro-Nazi advisers. But that is not all. There are other sources in the City who work for greater collaboration with the Third Reich. First, there is Montagu Norman, a personal friend of Chamberlain. He pushed aside Vansittart, the shrewd delegate of the Francophile wing of the Foreign Office. Norman controls the Bank of England. In his surrender of the Czech gold to the Third Reich, which created a furore in Parliament, he was assisted by Sir Otto Niemeyer, who, together with Norman, represents England in the Basel Bank for International Settlements. Some weeks ago, Niemeyer succeeded in having Herr Hechler, a Reichsbank official, elected successor of the late French vice-president of the Bank of International Settlements. The Third Reich has one especially impregnable citadel in British high finance in the J. Henry Schroder Bank. One of its owners, Bruno von Schroder [Pilgrims], consults with Montagu Norman in the operation of the Bankers Industrial Development Company. The other, H. W. B. Schroder, has an interest in Lloyds Bank, on the board of which is young Runciman. There also is encountered the Honorable Robert H. Brand [Pilgrims], managing director of Lazard Brothers, and a substantial shareholder in the often 'pro-appeasement' Times. In the Bank of England, in Lazard Brothers, in Schroder--all personalities of Munich are represented. The British Schroder Bank forms the bridge between the City and German heavy industry. A relative of the Schroders, Kurt von Schroder, negotiated an 'understanding' between Hitler and Von Papen in his Cologne villa in January, 1933. He is also vice-president of the board of directors of the Reichsbank and of the gigantic Flick concern, one of the owners of the Stein Bank in Cologne, president of the Rhenish Chamber of Commerce and the German Verkehrskreditbank." - *) 1966, Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope', p. 645: "The Entente governments were aware of these German problems, but, instead of seeking to increase them, they sought to alleviate them. When economic and political duress was put by Germany on the countries of southeastern Europe in October and November 1938, Chamberlain defended Germany's right to do so in the House of Commons. No economic support was granted to these countries to help them to resist, except for a loan to Turkey. On the contrary, the British government, through the Federation of British Industries, began to negotiate with Germany to create a complete system of industrial cooperation, with cartels dividing the world's markets and fixing prices for over fifty industrial groups. A coal agreement was signed, at Britain's request, at the end of January 1939, and a general agreement was signed between the Federation of British Industries and the Reichsgruppe Industrie on March 16, 1939."
*) 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 80: "Lammot DuPont and Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., of the DuPont Empire and General Motors respectively, have been exposed by Congressional committees as subsiders of fascist organizations and movements. Both corporations and both men are also among the top flight rulers of the National Association of Manufacturers. ... NAM is the center of American Fascism..." - *) Neville Chamberlain: August 1939, The Living Age, 'British thumb in Nazi pie' (translated from the Neue Weltbuhne, Paris-German exile weekly): "Imperial Chemical Industries has invested $55,000,000 in its sister organization in the Reich. The British organization counts among its friends at court such important stockholders as [prime minister May 1937-May 1940] Neville Chamberlain, who owns 1,000 shares."
*) Arthur Chamberlain: a first cousin of Neville and Austen Chamberlain (his uncle was the brother of their father) and very close to them. Director General Motors 1920-1922 with Lord McGowan. Governor Midland Bank until his death, again with Lord McGowan. Director General Electric in London since at least 1918 until his death (August 1, 1941, The Times, 'General Electric Company'). Augustus 11, 1941, The Times, 'Deaths': "Mr. Arthur Chamberlain, a cousin of the late Mr. Neville Chamberlain, died... He was a director of several companies and a member of the board of governors of the Midland Bank."
*) 1942, John Hargrave, 'Montagu Norman', p. 216-217 [quote from journalist Ladislas Farago]: "Between 1934 and 1937, Montagu Norman made several attempts to win Baldwin [UK prime minister 1923-1924, 1924-1929, and 1934-1937] over to his anti-Russian front. But this 'elder statesman' stubbornly resisted the Governor's persistent attacks; for even though he was no friend of Russian orientation, when faced with a choice he considered Hitler worse than Stalin. Nevertheless, Norman succeeded in planting the idea in the minds of several members of Baldwin's Cabinet...
The greatest victory was scored when Arthur Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also won for Montagu Norman's plan. This decision made him Baldwin's successer when Britain's elder statesman resigned after the Coronation [of George VII]. With Chamberlain's moving into 10, Downing Street, the Bank's anti-Soviet policy made its triumphant entry into Whitehall. It is easy to understand Chamberlain's decision to adopt this policy when one considers how closely he is connected with the financial clique and the armament industry. Among his extensive financial holdings is a considerable block of Imperial Chemical Industries shares, 883 preferential and 5,414 ordinary ones. His son, Francis Chamberlain, is on the staff of Imperial Chemical Industries' sales organization at the main office in Birmingham." - August 11, 1941, The Times, 'Deaths': "Mr. Arthur Chamberlain, a cousin of the late Mr. Neville Chamberlain, died... He was a director of several companies and a member of the board of governors of the Midland Bank." Neville Chamberlain was the notorious Nazi appeaser. Arthur was at Neville's funeral the year before. Arthur was a son of Arther Chamberlain (d. 1913), who was a brother of Joseph Chamberlain, who was the father of Austen and Neville Chamberlain. So Arthur and Neville were first cousins.
- *) General Motors Corporation Annual Report -- 1920 ( via Proquest Direct): "General Motors Corporation: Board of Directors: Pierre S. du Pont [older first cousin, Thomas, was a Pilgrim], Chairman. George F. Baker, Jr. [Pilgrims], Arthur Chamberlain, Henry F. du Pont, Irenee du Pont [older first cousin, Thomas, was a Pilgrim], Lammot du Pont [older first cousin, Thomas, was a Pilgrim], ... Sir Harry McGowan [Pilgrims; chair ICI], ... John J. Raskob, Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. [Pilgrims], Edward R. Stettinius [died early, but his son belonged to the Pilgrims], ... Clarence M. Woolley [Pilgrims], Owen D. Young [Pilgrims]..."
*) April 30, 1920, Wall Street Journal, 'General Motors': "Sir Harry McGowan and Arthur Chamberlain, newly elected directors of General Motors Corporation, are connected with the General Explosives Co., Ltd., of London." Arthur Chamberlain appears also on the 1922 annual report directors list. He was acousin of the notorious appeaser, Neville Chamberlain.
*) November 17, 1959, Los Angeles Times, 'Alfred P. Sloan out as Du Pont director': "Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., honorary chairman of General Motors, today resigned as a member of the board of directors of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Inc. His resignation was in compliance with a decision handed down by Judge Walter J. La Buy ... that no person shall serve on both boards. ... The five Du Pont directors who are also directors of General Motors will resign from GM at its next meeting Dec. 7, it was announced. They are... Lammot du Pont Copeland... - Arthur was supporting his cousin Neville in the appeasement policy: December 3, 1936, The Times, 'City Notes': "Mr. Arthur Chamberlain showed plainly that he does not believe the Government's rearmament programme will be to the country's benefit economically. That, of course, is true, but the rearmament has been adopted not for economic reasons. ... Much of the chairman's address was political in character and aimed at showing that the rearmament policy would not avert war. That also may be true in a sense, but while favouring cooperation between the nations to go to the assistance of any victim of aggression, he failed to show how the cooperators [i.e. England, France and other non-fascist countries] could maintain peace without adequate armaments to counter those of the non-cooperating nations [i.e. fascist countries as Germany, Italy and Japan]."
- March 4, 1935, The Guardian, 'Britain to increase spending on arms': "In a major reversal of rearmament policy Britain today announced new expansion plans for its army, navy and air force. The plans, in a defence white paper, are to demonstrate that Britain does not take lightly Germany's continuing rearmament. The white paper calls for an enlarged fleet, improved defences for warships against air attack, more aircraft for the RAF and new coastal and anti-aircraft defences. The emphasis on air defence follows fears that Britain is an easy target for cross-Channel air raids. Explaining the government's policy shift Stanley Baldwin said: "Our attempt to lead the world towards disarmament by unilateral example has failed." German rearmament now threatened to put peace at peril. Despite claims by Germany's leaders that they wanted peace, Britain could not ignore the way Germany's forces are constantly being mobilised, he added."
- *) September 8, 2003, Daily Telegraph, 'Pioneers of Spin' (letter to the editor): "According to a rising political correspondent, James Margach, who saw a good deal of him, Chamberlain was "the first prime minister to employ news management on a grand scale". Lobby briefings were put in the hands of Major (later Sir) Joseph Ball, a former MI5 officer who was director of publicity at Conservative Central Office and head of its research department. He came with a strong recommendation from the party chairman because of his wide experience "in the seamy side of life and the handling of crooks". The favourable press that Chamberlain's appeasement policies received owes a great deal to the sinister Sir Joseph - described by a Tory MP, whose house he bugged, as "a dislikeable man". Chamberlain himself joined him for lunches with hand-picked lobby correspondents. Ball even went so far as to run a newspaper, Truth, where far-from-truthful reports lauding Chamberlain appeared. Here, plainly, was a man who could have taught Alastair Campbell a few tricks."
*) May 25, 1997, Straits Times (Singapore), 'End of the affair for Britain's MI5?': "MI5 still has 2,000 employees and a (pound)200 million (S$ 474 million) budget. The battered Moscow Centre absorbs only 20 per cent of its resources. It needs another focus. The Zinoviev letter, which cost Labour the 1924 election, leaps to mind. Supposedly written by the Soviet Comintern chief to British closet communists, it is now thought to have been the handiwork of a senior Tory boss, Sir Joseph Ball, former head of MI5's investigative branch."
*) August 1990, Nick Davies for The Guardian, 'Tiny Rowland – portrait of the bastard as a rebel': "This associate of Tiny's wonders out loud at the bizarre co-incidence that one of the original directors of Lonrho who was responsible for hiring Tiny in 1961 was one Sir Joseph Ball [Pilgrims], formerly of MI5 and the Home Defence (Security) Executive. If Rowland was a British agent in the Isle of Man, Sir Joseph would have been one of his controllers. In his book, My Life With Tiny, Richard Hall notes that until 1973 Tiny shared his boardroom with Nick Elliot [Le Cercle] of MI6 and that on several occasions he appeared to be marching in step with British intelligence: during the Biafran war when he was uncannily well-informed about British plans; and later in Sudan, when there was an attempted Communist coup and Tiny flew key Government figures back to the fray while MI6 ensured that Communist supporters were diverted to Libya and a firing squad." - *) July 25, 1897, New York Times, 'Vanderbilt gives $5,000': "William K. Vanderbilt has qualified as a founder of the the New York Zoological Society by paying the prescribed fee of $5,000 .... Prof. Henry F. Osborn, Chairman of the Executive Committee... Some of the well-known New Yorkers who have become life members of the New York Zoological Society are ... Andrew Carnegie, Morris K. Jesup, William E. Dodge ... Henry F. Osborn [Pilgrims Society family], Philip Schuyler..."
*) February 10, 1915, New York Times, 'Snake "Movies" at Dinner': "The sixth annual dinner of the Board of Managers of the Zoological Society was held at the residence of Ogden Mills... Madison Grant, Vice President and Chairman of the Executive Committee, spoke of the growth of the society. ... Among those at the dinner were Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, ... Mortimer L. Schiff, ... Andrew Carnegie, ... Ogden Mills, ... George F. Baker..."
*) October 11, 1923, New York Times, 'Rockefeller gives $1,000,000 to Zoo - John D. Jr. Makes Largest Single Donation in [Zoological] Society's History': "Mr. Rockefeller's interest in the Zoological Society has increased ever since he became a member of the Board of Managers. ... Dr. Hornaday explained that the next step toward raising the $1,000,000 fund with which the society must meet the Rockefeller gift would be taken through Madison Grant, Chairman of the Executive Committee."
*) April 30, 1923, New York Times, 'Zoological Society Garden Party': "The Annual Garden Party of the Ladies' Auxilliary of the New York Zoological Society is to take place on Thursday, May 17. The chairman of the auxilliary, Mrs. Henry Fairfield Osborn, will have receiving with her Mrs. J. Pierpont Morgan, ... Mrs. G. F. Baker Jr., Mrs. Marshall Field, ... Mrs. William Woodward, Mrs. Ralph Sanger..."
*) May 14, 1933, New York Times, 'Zoological Society to give annual fete': "Madison Grant is president of the board of trustees, Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, honorary president [of the Zoological Society]; ... and Kermit Roosevelt, vice presidents; ... Cornelius R. Agnew, treasurer. Other members of the [ladies] auxilliary are Mrs. George F. Baker, ... Mrs. Cleveland E. Dodge, ... Mrs. J. Borden Harriman ... Mrs. Fairfield Osborn Jr., ... Mrs. Percy R. Pyne, Mrs. William G. Rockefeller [treasurer Standard Oil of N.Y. until 1911], Mrs. Kermit Roosevelt, ...Mrs. George Whitney." - *) December 19, 1935, New York Times, 'Tributes to Osborn paid at memorial': "More than 700 men and women ... paid tribute yesterday to Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, honorary president of the American Museum of Natural History [vice president and trustee 1901-1908, president 1908-1933, honorary president, 1933-1935; chair of the Zoological Society 1896-1903, president 1909-1923]. ... The special memorial services were arranged by a group of Professor Osborn's friends and associates. They were: ... Nicholas Murray Butler [Pilgrims president]... John W. Davis [Pilgrims president]... Among those present were J. P. Morgan [Pilgrims], Ogden L. Mills [Pilgrims], Felix M. Warburg [Pilgrims], ... Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney [named after two Pilgrims families]... The ushers were Junius S. Morgan [Pilgrims], Alexander P. Morgan, Winthrop Aldrich [Pilgrims], ... Cleveland Dodge [Pilgrims family], Kermit Roosevelt..."
*) Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr.'s son Perry (1884-1951), a Pilgrim, was 1st vice-president and trustee of the American Museum Natural History, according to his digital Who's Who.
*) Related: January 7, 1981, New York Times, 'Frederick Osborn, a general, 91, dies': "[Frederick Osborn, son of Pilgrim William Church Osborn] served as a trustee of ... the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research [and was involved in many other Rockefeller projects]..."
*) March 8, 2004, The New Yorker, 'The Measure of America': "Grant was soon the recognized "high priest" of American racism... In America, Grant's assertions were widely taken for scientific fact, because his book carried the stamp of approval of the American Museum of Natural History. Grant had become a museum trustee [besides his position as chair of the Zoological Society] thanks to his good friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, the curator of paleontology, who was appointed president of the board in 1908, after [Morris] Jesup's [Pilgrim and close to Morgan through trusteeship of the Peabody Education Fund] death. Osborn's inauguration took place in the library of his uncle, J. P. Morgan, and the splendor of his relations lent his scholarship an added glow. ... And so the Galton Society, established by Osborn and Grant in the American Museum of Natural History in 1918, took the undoing of U.S. immigration policy as its first command."
*) Digital Who's Who of Pilgrim Cleveland Hoadley Dodge (1860-1926): Vice president American Museum of Natural History.
*) Pilgrim Ogden Mills (1884-1937): trustee American Museum of Natural History.
*) These are just a few examples. The Pilgrims have dozens of members who sat on the board of the American Museum of Natural History. - *) June 13, 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 'Eugenics in the Past and Genetics Today': "The directors of the American Eugenics Society included Charles Davenport (the leading human geneticist in America), C.C. Little (the founder of the renowned mouse-genetics laboratory in Maine), and Madison Grant (a full-time propagandist for the Nordic race) [chairman Zoological Society, amidst the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, Vanderbilts, Osborns, etc.]. On the society's advising board were W.E. Castle (Harvard), Edwin G. Conklin (Princeton), Edward M. East (Harvard), Michael F. Guyer (Wisconsin), Samuel J. Holmes (Berkeley), H.H. Newman (Chicago), A. Franklin Shull (Michigan), Herbert E. Walter (Brown), and Sewall Wright (Chicago). This is not Cowan's "some geneticists," it is a who's who of the field at the time."
*) August 31, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times, 'Blind to a nightmare': "Eugenics was around before Olson took up the mantle. The term was coined in 1883 by British statistician Francis J. Galton by joining the Greek words for "well" and "born." A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton created a pseudo-science that drew on evolution and genetics and mixed in social planning, economics and philosopher Herbert Spencer's notion of "survival of the fittest." "Galton suggested that bountiful breeding of the best people would evolve mankind into a superlative species of grace and quality," Black writes. But while Galton pushed for "positive eugenics"--trying to ensure that people with what he deemed desirable bloodlines married and reproduced--others championed "negative eugenics," draconian measures to eliminate the bloodlines they considered "unfit." Those measures would include segregation, castration, other forms of compulsory sterilization, restrictions on immigration, deportation and euthanasia of newborns. When the movement moved to America, the focus shifted from social classes to race and ethnicity, [author Edwin] Black argues. The "unfit" would come to include "anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified." New York zoologist Charles Davenport became the movement's leader, securing funding from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Rockefeller Foundation and the widow of railroad magnate E.H. Harriman. Its U.S. headquarters opened on Long Island in 1904, the Station for Experimental Evolution of the Carnegie Institution at Cold Spring Harbor."
*) December 12, 2003, The Jewish Daily Forward, 'How American Eugenicists Helped Shape Nazi Tactics': "Edwin Black, the author of the award-winning "IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation" (Crown, 2001), has written a provocative new book that traces the influence of the American eugenics movement on Nazi Germany. ... American eugenicists also influenced their counterparts in Great Britain and Germany, where they encouraged measures to prevent the "breeding" of lives unworthy of living. Indeed, as Black informs us, "Germany's budding eugenicists became desirable allies for the Americans. A clear partnership emerged in the years before World War I. In this relationship however, America was far away the senior partner. In eugenics, the United States led and Germany followed." This relationship continued during the Third Reich. During the 1920s, the politically neutral Rockefeller Foundation played a major role in establishing and sponsoring major eugenic institutions in Germany, and during the Hitler years it funded Nazi-controlled institutions both in Germany and Austria until 1939. The Carnegie Foundation continued to fund the Eugenic Records Office until 1939, despite the office's support for the Nazi persecution of the Jews. In 1935, Hitler thanked Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society for sending him a copy of "The Case for Sterilization," a 1934 book that promoted the idea of using sterilization to protect the racial health of Anglo-Saxon America. Although following World War II American geneticists would claim that they had no connection with their Nazi counterparts, the author contends that this was not the case. For example, one American, U.H. Ellinger, published an article in the American Genetic Association's Journal of Heredity in April 1942 stating that the deliberate eradication of the Jews had nothing whatsoever to do with religious persecution, but was a large-scale breeding project with the objective of eliminating from the nation the hereditary attributes of the Semitic race. Ellinger concluded that when the problem arises as to how the breeding project may be carried out most effectively, after the politicians have decided upon its desirability, biological science could even assist the Nazis. It is apparent from Black's research that American eugenicists contributed to Nazi racial hygiene policy. The Nazi experiments with X-rays to sterilize their victims, euthanasia and even the gas chamber were all at one time or another proposed by American eugenicists as a means of eliminating the unfit from American life. To the extent that Black's research documents this connection between early 20th-century eugenics policy and its extreme escalation by the Nazis in the death camps, the book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the evolution of the Holocaust."
*) March - April 2009, Martyrdom & Resistance, 'American Corporate Complicity Created Undeniable Nazi Nexus': "Henry Ford, acting directly through the Ford Motor Company, virtually invented political anti-Semitism when he published worldwide the fake "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Ford's book quickly became the bible of German anti-Semites and early incarnations of the Nazi party. Nazis shipped the work throughout the country "by the carload." Among the many Germans massively influenced by the book was Adolf Hitler. Der Fuehrer read the work at least two years before "Mein Kampf" was written. In "Mein Kampf," Hitler wrote, "The whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie [as] shown incomparably by the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" The Carnegie Institution, the philanthropic incarnation of America's greatest steel fortune, propagated the deadly American race science of eugenics that idealized a blond, blue-eyed superior race. In pursuit of that dream, Carnegie scientists believed some 90 percent of humanity was to be eliminated using various methods. These methods included organized identification, seizure of assets, marriage prohibition or nullification, forced surgical sterilization, segregation into camps and publicly operated gas chambers. Carnegie spent millions to propagate American eugenic theories in post-World War I Germany, financing race science programs in universities and official institutions. While in prison, Hitler closely studied American eugenics. He proudly told his comrades, "I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock." Hitler was so steeped in American race science that he even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant, called his writing "my bible." Der Fuehrer merely exchanged the American term "Nordic" for the Nazi term "Aryan" and then medicalized his pre-existing virulent anti-Semitism and fascist nationalism to formulate the concept of the blond, blue-eyed Master Race he deified in "Mein Kampf." As Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess insisted, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology." The Rockefeller Foundation, the philanthropic incarnation of Standard Oil, acted as a full partner with Carnegie in establishing eugenics in Germany. In the quest to perfect the master race, millions of Depression-era dollars were transmitted by Rockefeller to Hitler's most anti-Jewish doctors. In this quest, one specimen was desired above all: twins. Rockefeller funded Hitler's chief raceologist, Otmar Verschuer, and his insatiable twin experimentation programs. Twins, it was thought, held the secret to industrially multiplying the Aryan racial type and quickly subtracting biological undesirables. Verschuer had an assistant, Josef Mengele. Rockefeller funding stopped during World War II, but by that time Mengele had transferred into Auschwitz to continue twin research in a monstrous fashion. Ever the eugenicist, he sent precise clinical reports weekly to Verschuer." - March 20, 2000, Associated Press State & Local Wire, 'Eugenics gone but effects linger': "Conceived in 1883 by Charles Darwin's cousin and disciple Sir Francis Galton, eugenics was quickly embraced in the United States. Indiana enacted the nation's first eugenical sterilization law in 1907 with Connecticut following soon afterward. The American Eugenics Society was created and proceeded to organize "fitter family contests" at state fairs. A 1926 AES display in Philadelphia warned that "some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest" unless the reproduction of inferior people was controlled. The movement did not win widespread approval until the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's eugenics law in 1927. By the 1930s, nearly two-thirds of the states had eugenics laws, but no states applied them as ardently as Virginia, California and North Carolina. California sterilized more than 20,000 people, the most in the nation. Virginia sterilized 7,450 and North Carolina sterilized nearly 6,300. The 1924 Virginia Statute for Eugenical Sterilization required sexual sterilization of the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic" in the belief they would produce similarly disabled offspring."
- *) December 21, 1993, Chicago Sun-Times, 'Beyondism Has Roots in Racism': "In 1916, a New York aristocrat named Madison Grant published his Passing of the Great Race. He served as vice president of the "Immigration Restriction League," while promoting the "American Eugenics Society." The preface to Grant's book was written by Henry F. Osborn, Columbia University professor of zoology, who warned of "the gradual dying out among our (white) people of those hereditary traits . . . and their insidious replacement by traits of less noble character." ... During the 1890s, the era of "Social Darwinism," Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge demanded a literacy test for all immigrants, which he hoped "will bear most heavily upon the Italians, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Greeks and Asiatics, and very lightly, or not at all, upon English-speaking emigrants or Germans, Scandinavians and French.""
*) May 5, 1923, The Chicago Defender, 'Nordic Race Supremacy': "Tersely stated, the theory [of Passing of the Great Race] is this: The passing great race is the blond type of mankind, the Nordic, whom the author claims to be the inherently superior group among men. The races of Europe are divided in into three majority groups -- the Nordics, comprising all the people of northern and central Europe; the Alpines, the inhabitants of southeastern Europe; and the Mediterraneans, those people of the Italian and Grecian peninsulas and their appartenants islands. The Nordics have given the world its greatest explorers, military conquerors, organizers, etc.; the basic achievements of our present-day civilization have emanated from their minds and souls, but war and military glory having its strongest appeal to this type, their numerical strength in society has been much reduced, not alone because of their military aggressiveness, but equally due to the inherent ability of the brunet type to better adjust itself to the circumstances of slavish routine of our present-day industrial system."
*) January 3, 1932, New York Times, 'The Nazi Mind: A Study in Nationalism': "In one Nazi pamplet one finds the republic indicted for not championing the "Nordics". ... If all this seems a bit fanciful, it is not at any rate original with the Nazis. In the Nazi library is a book written by an American ("The Passing of the Great Race" by Madison Grant)-- which sets forth precisely the contention about the "Nordic" race that those who have blond hair, blue eyes, fair skins and long heads belong to an inherently superior breed. ... " It was America," said Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader, to the present writer recently, "that taught us that a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations."" - *) March 8, 2004, The New Yorker, 'The Measure of America': "(Grant's family destroyed his papers after his death, but he is reported to have displayed a letter from Hitler that referred to his book as "my Bible.") [reportedly Leon Whitney and Madison Grant showed the letters they received from Hitler to each other]"
- *) Digital Who's Who, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr.: "Pres. N.Y. Zool. Soc. 1940-69 (mem. exec. com. of bd. trustees 1923-69, sec., 1935-39)... Author: Our Plundered Planet, 1948; The Limits of the Earth, 1953. Editor: Our Crowded Planet, 1962. ... President of the Conservation Foundation, 1948-62, chairman of board, 1962-69; mem. Am. Com. of Internat. Council of Museums; member council of Save The Redwoods League; Member exec. com., adv. bd. Am. Com. Internat. Wild Life Protection; mem. Am. Forestry Assn. (hon. v.p. 1957), Internat. Com. Bird Preservation,"
*) June 11, 1941, New York Times, 'Joins Oil Company': "... [Laurance S. Rockefeller is] a trustee of the New York Zoological Society." - *) April 6, 1948, New York Times, 'Conservation unit set up to warn U.S.': "Officers of the [Conservation] foundation will include Mr. [Fairfield] Osborn [Pilgrims] as president. ... and Samuel H. Ordway Jr. [later 1001 Club], vice presidents. ... David H. McAlpin [Pilgrims], treasurer. ... The initial trustees will include ... Mr. McAlpin, ... Mr. Osborn, Laurance S. Rockefeller [later 1001 Club]."
*) Henry F. Osborn, Jr., more commonly known as Fairfield Osborn, followed in his father's footsteps as a council member of the Save The Redwoods League. He did the same at the Zoological Society, serving as a trustee since 1923 and holding the presidency from 1940 to 1968 (December 4, 1968, New York Times, ‘Zoo Post to L. Rockefeller'). By the early 1940s Laurance Rockefeller had joined Osborn at the board of the Zoological Society (and would eventually succeed him as president). In cooperation with Laurance Rockefeller, Osborn set up the Conservation Foundation in 1948. Osborn would become founding president, Laurance Rockefeller joined the board and has been credited as the founder (September 16, 1958, New York Times, 'Resources job goes to L. S. Rockefeller'), with the Zoological Society supplying one-third of the necessary funds during the first three years. The founding of the Conservation Foundation was timed to take place just weeks after the publication of Osborn's book 'Our Plundered Planet'. The book raised awareness to problems surrounding erosion of topsoil, destructive agricultural techniques, and deforestation - some of the primary issues related to the Conservation Foundation.
*) Related: January 7, 1981, New York Times, 'Frederick Osborn, a general, 91, dies': "[Frederick Osborn, son of Pilgrim William Church Osborn] served as a trustee of ... the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Frick Collection and International House [also with the Rockefellers]. He also helped start and raise funds for the Office of Population Research at Princeton. In 1953, Mr. Osborn and John D. Rockefeller 3d began the Population Council to foster studies and education on the people of various nations in relation to their material and cultural resources. He was a director of the Population Association of America and the American Eugenics Society. Standing 6 feet 8 inches tall, Mr. Osborn was known as the tallest general in the Army..."
*) Laurance Rockefeller was involved in the founding and administration of various different conservation groups. An important aspect of the Esalen Institute, eventually he went on to finance very questionable UFO abduction research, Steven Greer's Project Stargate, and crop circle research - which are all part of the same establishment conservation agenda. Look up many of the details in ISGP's index of institutes. - 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', pp. 57-58, 63-64.
- *) 1940, H. G. Wells, 'The New World Order': "Such "good Christians" can be almost as bitterly critical as I am of the continual pressure upon the faithful by that inner group of Italians in Rome, subsidized by the Fascist government, who pull the strings of Church policy throughout the world, so as to do this or that tortuous or uncivilised thing, to cripple education, to persecute unorthodox ways of living. It is to the influence of the Church that we must ascribe the foolish support by the British Foreign Office of Franco, that murderous little "Christian gentleman", in his overthrow of the staggering liberal renascence of Spain. It is the Roman Catholic influence the British and French have to thank, for the fantastic blundering that involved them in the defence of the impossible Polish state and its unrighteous acquisitions; it affected British policy in respect to Austria and Czechoslovakia profoundly, and now it is doing its utmost to maintain and develop a political estrangement between Russia and the Western world by its prejudiced exacerbation of the idea that Russia is "anti-God" while we Westerners are little children of the light, gallantly fighting on the side of the Cross."
*) 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 58: "When Claude Bowers, American ambassador to Spain, suggested to the British Ambassador that if Franco won, Britain would have Hitler at Gibraltar and perhaps lose control of the Mediterranean, "the lifeline of empire," the British Ambassador answered that "private interests at home are stronger than national interests." He meant that Rio Tinto and other Spanish mine, electricity railroad and other stockholders in Britain preferred Fascism and even Hitler in Spain to the safety of Britain itself."
*) 1966, Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope', pp. 602-603: "Although the evidence for Axis intervention in Spain was overwhelming and was admitted by the Powers themselves early in 1937, the British refused to admit it and refused to modify the nonintervention policy, although France did relax its restrictions on its frontier sometimes, notably in April-June 1938. Britain's attitude was so devious that it can hardly be untangled, although the results are clear enough. The chief result was that in Spain a Left government friendly to France was replaced by a Right government unfriendly to France and deeply obligated to Italy and Germany. The evidence is clear that the real sympathies of the London government favored the [Franco] rebels, although it had to conceal the fact from public opinion in Britain (since this opinion favored the Loyalists over Franco by 57 percent to 7 percent, according to a public-opinion poll of March 1938)... On December 18, 1936, Eden admitted that the government had exaggerated the danger of war four months earlier to get the nonintervention agreement accepted... The nonintervention agreement, as practiced, was neither an aid to peace nor an example of neutrality, but was clearly enforced in such a way as to give aid to [Franco's] rebels and place all possible obstacles in the way of the Loyalist government suppressing the rebellion." - *) 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 58: "The so-called "Asia for the Asiatics" doctrine, which means simply "Asia for Japan," found Baron Hachirumon Mitsui its chief exponent. This is a Monroe Doctrine which marches with banners and is followed by an army of salesmen and exploiters. Hachirumon's fascist imperialism burned even more ardently in his successor, Baron Takakimi Mitsui. "Japan's financial oligarchy," wrote Anthony Jenkinson for the Institute of Pacific Relations, "is composed of great family trusts known as Zaibatsu. Its leading members are the houses of Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo and Yashuda. Between them they own the greater part of industry, trade, banking, and shipping. By 1937 they controlled more than one third of the total deposits in private banks, 70% of the deposits in all trust companies, and one third of total foreign trade. By controlling the banks, they controlled the smaller credit institutions throughout the country."... There is almost no middle class [in Japan]... In Japan, the "peak associations" are dominated by the Zaibatsu, or four ruling families, who are comparatively more powerful and richer than the thirteen ruling families of America."
- *) April 6, 1942, Capital Times, 'Standard Oil -- Axis Ally': "In September, 1939, Standard cabled to the Japanese monopoly, Mitsui, proposing that together they prepare the way at once for the re-establishment of commercial relations "after any interruptions in our trade," Which Standard feared might come. In other words, American industry believes that either the Axis will triumph or there will be a negotiated peace."
*) December 11, 1945, Council Bluffs Nonpareil (Iowa), 'Farben tested poison gas on camp inmates': "Its [Farben's] cartel agreements numbered over 2,000 and included agreements with such major industrial concerns as Standard Oil of New Jersey... E. I. du Pont de Nemours... Imperial Chemical Industries of Great Britain... and the Mitsui interests of Japan."
*) 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', pp. 49-50: "In addition according to the San Francisco journalist John Pittman, "among the owners of the Japanese business are International General Electric, which operates plants through its subsidiary, Tokyo Shibaura; Westinghouse Electric International, associated with Mitsubishi Electric Manufacturing Co.; Tide Water Associated Oil, handled by Mitsubishi; Libby-Owens-Ford, represented by Nippon Plate Glass Co.; Standard Oil, with a known direct investment of $5,000,000, exclusive of frozen credits and oil in storage; Ford, and General Motors, with approximately $10,000,000 sunk in Japan proper; Eastmen Kodak, and Singer Sewing Machine, with big organizations in the Japanese Empire; United Engineering & Foundry Co., holding a large stake in the Shibaura-United Engineering Co... In Japan one of Mitsui's partly owned corporations is the Nippon Steel Works, but this firm was controlled by Vickers. Their French connection was through the Franco-Japanese Bank, founded with the aid of Schneider Creusot, whose 1933 report stated that "our bank has acquired important participation in various activities of the Mitsui Group, a group destined to have a fine future." Baron Hachirumon Mitsui was reported at the time as controlling 65% of the industry of Japan, with the Japanese royal family owning a large interest in the Mitsui Consortium." - *) 1947, William L. Langer (History professor at Harvard; high ranking OSS official; special assistant to the Secretary of State), 'Our Vichy gamble', pp. 167-168: "His [Darlan's] policy of collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among French industrial and banking interests--in short, those who even before the war had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the saviour of Europe from Communism... Many important banking groups must be included in this category: the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l'Industrie (which was Laval's group par excellence), the Banque de l'Indochine (of which Baudoin was the chief), the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, and others. But peculiarly identified with the Darlan regime was the Banque Worms et Cie, headed by Hippolyte Worms, with Gabriel Leroy-Ladurie and Jacques Bernaud as the dominant figures. To realize the extent to which members of the Banque Worms group had been taken into the government by the autumn of 1941 a brief survey of the council and the Secretaries of State will be most profitable... All of the collaborationist banks had considerable interests in North Africa and the other French colonies, and maintained branches there. The Banque Worms, for example, owned extensive mines, shipping lines, and commercial companies in North Africa. It and others rapidly drained North Africa of such resources as could be made available to the Germans. It has been estimated that during 1941 alone some five million tons of goods were landed at French Mediterranean ports, mostly from North Africa. Included were such strategic materials as cobalt, molybdenum, manganese, and high-grade iron ore, to say nothing of foodstuffs. Probably sixty to eighty per cent of all these imports went to the Germans. Fortunately for them, the great banking and industrial interests, always intent on playing safe, were permitted by the Germans to transfer their huge profits to their North African branches. Calculations have shown that prior to the invasion of North Africa the French banks taken together transferred no less than twenty-five billion francs in this way."
*) 1966, Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope', p. 689: "There was also considerable pressure behind the scenes from anti-democratic French industrialists in monopolistic lines lines such as chemicals, light metals, synthetic fibers, and electrical utilities. These industrialists, together with politicians like Laval and private or commercial banks, like the Banque Worms, or the Banque de l'Indochine, had been negotiating cartel and other agreements with Germany for ten years, and felt an armitage would offer a splendid opportunity to complete and enforce these agreements." - BBC Timewatch series, 'Banking with Hitler': described how Chase Paris completely cooperated with the Nazis, including the persecution of the Jews. (also described in 1983, Charles Higham, 'Trading with the Enemy', p. 25)
- The first Lord Kindersley kept the French branch alive in the early 1930s through his influence at the Bank of England. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1st Lord Kindersley (1871–1954): "Kindersley's prominent role in national economic affairs in mid-1931 masked profound crisis and management shortcomings at Lazards. While in July 1931 Kindersley was in Paris seeking vital support from the Bank of France, Lazards was on the brink of collapse, the result of maladministration in the firm's Brussels office, which caused a £6 million loss and obliterated its capital. The need to conceal the precarious position of a leading London house at a moment of national crisis led to the resuscitation of Lazards through Bank of England support; and £3 million was made available, followed by additional support in 1932 when Lazard Frères of Paris ran into difficulties."
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2nd Lord Kindersley (1899–1976): "In 1919, after war service Kindersley joined Lazard Brothers & Co., the leading merchant bank, where his father was chairman and where he received a favoured apprenticeship. He was sent out to work in Lazards' businesses in Paris..."
October 20, 1965, The Times, 'Lord Hampden': "Lord Perth and A. D. Marris write:--Two of us who worked with Lord Hampden (Tommy Brand [4th Viscount, who was a leading figure at Lazards until his death in 1965; had joined in 1931] as he was then known to us all) in peace and war would like to supplement your account of his career by recalling his very close connexion and love of France. When he married and went abroad to learn about continental banking, he and his wife first went to Paris. He spent some nine months as a volunteer in the office of Lazard Freres et Cie where he was warmly welcomed by the then partners. He learnt not only much about banking but, in their society and that of their friends, a new and wider life was opened to him. It was natural, therefore, in 1940 when Jean Monnet, already an old friend [who was indebted to the Lazard Bank],.. asked Tommy to join him as one of his chief assistants in London... Under Lord Salter (then Sir Arthur Salter) [Pilgrims; Milner Group] Tommy carried on for him the work he had been doing for Monnet on war supplies..." - According to EIR: November 1940, Coordinator of Information (COI; predecessor of the OSS), confidential report titled '"Synarchie" and the policy of the Banque Worms group' (only those aspects of which ISGP has seen a photocopy compilation as published by Executive Intelligence Review Australia; important note: the COI was founded in July 1941, eight months after EIR claims this COI report was written): "In recent reports there have been several references to the growing political power of the Banque Worms group in France, which included amongst its members such ardent collaborationists as Pucheu, Benoit-Menchen, Laroy-Ladurie, Bouthillier, and representatives of the big French industrial organizations. 2. After unavoidable delay we have now obtained the following information, dated early November, from a source with good political contacts in Vichy, who has provided reliable information in the past. Similarity of aims of "Synarchie" and Banque Worms. (i) The reactionary movement known as "Synarchie" has been in existence in France for nearly a century. Its aim has always been to carry out a bloodless revolution, inspired by the upper classes, aimed at producing a form of government by "technicians" (the founder of the movement was a "polytechnician"), under which home and foreign policy would be subordinated to international economy. (ii) The aims of the Banque Worms group are the same as those of "Synarchie", and the leaders of the two groups are, in most cases, identical. Policy in regard to Great Britain. (xi) In regard to Great Britain the more particular aims of the group are as follows: (a) to bring about the fall of the Churchill Government by creating the belief in the country that a more energetic government is needed to prosecute the war; it is recognized that an effective means of creating suspicion of the Government's efficiency would be to induce the resignation of Lord Beaverbrook; (b) to bring about the formation of a new Government including Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Hore-Belisha. (Note. The source has added that in the Worms group it is believed that those circles in Great Britain who are favorably disposed to their plans, are most critical of Mr. Churchill, Lord Halifax and Captain Margesson.) (c) through the medium of Sir Samuel Hoare to bring about an agreement between British industry and the Franco-German "bloc"; (d) to protect Anglo-Saxon interests on the continent;"
August 4, 2006 issue, Jeffrey Steinberg for Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), 'Fact Sheet: The Enemy is Oligarchism' (this report quotes from the above document. Since ISGP has not seen a photocopy of the entire document, the sections quoted in this article which did not appear in the partial photocopy, are quoted here separately.): "The COI report then went on to detail the political agenda of the international Synarchy, as of August 1940: "(a) to check the 'Revolution Nationale' insofar as its development might entail the creation of a new social order; (b) to check any new social schemes which might tend to weaken the power of the international financiers and industrialists; (c) to work for the ultimate complete control of all industry by international finance and industry; (d) to protect Jewish and Anglo-Saxon interests." The document went on to note that there is sympathy for this Synarchist scheme among some key Nazi circle in Germany including "both Goering and Dr. Funk [Walther Funk, who was Nazi Minister of Economics, president of the Reichsbank, and Nazi Germany's representative on the Bank for International Settlements, following Hjalmar Schacht--ed.]... It is alleged that certain industrial circles in Great Britain are also in sympathy with the movement. Some headway is claimed to have been made in securing the adhesion of big U.S. industry to the movement."... The document concluded, "In regard to Germany, it is hoped ultimately to eliminate Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler with his Gestapo, from the political scene, thus facilitating the formation of an Anglo-Franco-German economic bloc." - Information on France's Synarchy movement:
*) August 23, 1941, Huntingdon (Pa.) Daily News, 'Sabotage, Recruiting For Free France Present Problems To Nazis In Paris': "Reports in the German controlled Paris press of the "uncovering" of a world-wide revolutionary plot, said to have American financial backing, diverted attention today from the use of force by German troops to subdue hostile factions in Paris. Rumors of a "plot," circulating for days, finally were published by the Paris weekly, L'Appel, which added a weird touch by associating the plotters with the mysterious deaths of the engineer, Jean Coutrot and, a few days later, of his secretary, Albert Thealet. L'Appel said Coutrot committed suicide "by order," and said he was the founder of the new revolutionary movement known as "synarchy," which, according to L'Appel, has its roots among graduates of the French Polytechnic School, who comprise most of the technical officers of the French army. The plotters, L'Appel said, have connections in Britain and in the United States, especially with the American DuPont and Ford interests. "Synarchy" leaders, according to the newspaper, have access to the United States embassy in Vichy "so it is not surprising to see Admiral (William D.) Leahy (the American ambassador) mixed excitedly in the affair." "Synarchy" was defined as the opposite of anarchy—seeking a strong concentration of power in contrast to anarchy's dispersal of authority. L'Appel published what it said was Coutrot's plan, calling for the earliest possible peace, the creation of a league of major nations of Europe and Africa under the name "Paneurafrica," and five leagues of minor nations. The major nations would pool their colonial interests to form a world empire."
*) October 30, 1941, Dunkirk Evening Observer, 'Darlan's regime being challenged by new clique': "Admiral Jean Francois Darlan's regime as active head of the Vichy government is being challenged, authentic advices from Europe reported today, by a clique of young French cabinet officers headed by Interior Minister Pierre Pucheu... The Darlan-Pucheu test of strength, it was said, also involves bitter competition between two huge French Banking institutions for the profits growing out of the Franco-German industrial "collaboration" program. So far Marshal Henri Philippe Petain is said to have supported Darlan, preventing the Pucheu group from seizing control. The Pucheu group was said to constitute what is known as the "synarchy" faction, favoring a frank dictatorship in France pledged to work in close political as well as economic collaboration with Germany... Cabinet ministers siding with Puchei were said to include Minister of Finance and Economy Yves Boulhillier; Secretary of State Jacques Benoit-Mechin [managing director Worms Bank] who now handles Franco-German negotiations; communications and transport minister Jean Berthelol; industrial production minister Francois Lehideux; Propaganda Secretary Paul Marion; and Jacques Barnaud [administrator Worms Bank] who handles Franco-German economic negotiations. The group reportedly represents and supports the great Worms banking interests which formerly was dominant in the financing of French trade. The opposing group, lead by Darlan, is regarded as a more conservative military clique. It also is tied in with banking interests, in this case the Banque de Paris et Pays Bas which thus far has provided the chief financing for French-German economic collaboration."
*) April 9, 1945, Tucson Daily Citizen, 'Petain will be tried in absentia': "Marshal Philippe Henri Petain will be tried in absentia soon as a traitor to France by a special high court of justice in one of the most important trials in French history... The justice spokesman said the court will show that before the war, Petain was a member of the Cagoule and the Synarchie, two Fascist secret societies. The prosecution will attempt to show that Petain was in contact secretly with the Germans before the war. For years, enemies of Petain have charged him with being involved in Cagoulard plots, but no direct evidence ever had been produced. Pierre Puchou, Vichy minister of the interior, later condemned to death as a traitor and executed by the DeGaulle government in Algiers, contributed large sums to the Cagoule."
*) November 9, 1946, The Nation, 'The People's Front': "Michael Sordet, in a remarkably documented article, The Secret League of Monopoly Capitalism, published in the scholarly Swiss review, Schweiner Annalen (No. 2, 1946- 47), gives us a full description of the synarchist movement in Europe. He describes the synarchists as "the representatives of international high finance," who not only helped to bring fascism to power in Germany and to provoke the war, from which they reaped enormous profits, but who contributed to the defeat of France and the rise of Petain and his traitorous clique... Le Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire (M. S. E.) was founded in Paris in 1922... Its original promoters numbered seven, three of whom have since been identified as Baron Leo de Nervo, with connections in some fifty financial and heavy-industry enterprises... Maxime Renaudin, a financier known to represent international Catholic interests, and Jean Coutrot, a close friend of Marshal Petain. The M. S. E. is rigidly aristocratic in structure: members are recruited in powerful big-business circles and are expected to enrol new adherents from among their friends... Frenchmen in general learned of the existence of the M. S. E. in the summer of 1941 when Jean Coutrot died under mysterious circumstances which were never cleared up. A collaborationist newspaper, l'Appel, which carded the announcement of his death, revealed at the same time that most of the ministers and generals in the Vichy entourage belonged to this secret society. Coutrot had told an intimate friend that the directing body of the M. S. E. consisted of four people, but he mentioned no names. What are the contents of the "Pacte synarchiste revolutionnaire," so vigilantly controlled? The most important section provides for the division of the world into five great federations imperiales, or societe mineures des nations. Metropolitan Britain and its colonies and dominions make up one. The federation of pan-American nations comprises the United States and the other countries of the Western continent with the exception of Canada. The pan-Eurasian federation consists of the Soviet Union, including all its Asiatic republics but excluding Finland and the Baltic states. The pan-European- African federation takes in Western Europe, including Finland, the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, and the African continent excluding the British colonies. China and Japan head the pan-Asiatic federation."
*) November 16, 1946, The Nation, 'The People's Front': "Despite the highly secret character of the M. S. E., the following men have been identified as members: Paul Baudoin [named as a major Opus Dei player], director of the Banque d'Indo-Chine and a friend of Mussolini, who with the help of the attractive Heltne de Portes became right-hand adviser to Premier Paul Reynaud in the last months before France's capitulation; Jacques Gudrard, a banker who held the post of Ambassador to Lisbon under the Vichy regime; Jacques Barnaud of the Banque Worms, a great favorite with Goring, who was responsible for handling over to the Germans the major French chemical industries headed by the Francolor trust; Jacques Benoit- Mechin, author of a book on the Reichswehr, who was rewarded for his services to the German army by being named a director of the Banque Worms after the 1940 armistice; Pierre Pucheu, Vichy Minister of the Interior and organizer of the Franco-German steel cartel. Today the M. S. E. is attempting to restore those intimate ties between French and German industrialists which it had so painstakingly built up before the war... In his article in the Schweizer Anmalen, Sordet hints that the main base of operations of the Synarchists is shifting from Europe to the United States, and he names Admiral Leahy, Robert Murphy, and du Pont de Nemours not as members but as individuals they hope to use to make contact with influential Catholic and industrial groups here."
*) 1947, William L. Langer (History professor at Harvard; high ranking OSS official; special assistant to the Secretary of State), 'Our Vichy gamble', pp. 167-168: "His [Darlan's] policy of collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among French industrial and banking interests--in short, those who even before the war had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the saviour of Europe from Communism. These were the elements which had originally backed Petain and Weygand--elements that stuck to the program after both these men had begun to back away from it. These people were as good fascists as any in Europe. They dreaded the Popular Front like the plague and were convinced that they could prosper even under Hitler's iron rod. Many of them had long had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of "synarchy," which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists. Laval had long been associated with this group. Darlan, though not one of the "boys," was clever enough to take them into camp. If they worshipped Laval, they served Darlan, as they would have served anyone who played the game. "This group," wrote Ambassador Biddle from London early in 1942, "should not be regarded as Frenchmen, any more than their corresponding members in Germany should be regarded as |Germans, for the interests of both groups are so intermingled as to be indistinguishable; their whole interest is focused upon furtherance of their industrial and financial stakes." Many important banking groups must be included in this category: the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l'Industrie (which was Laval's group par excellence), the Banque de l'Indochine (of which Baudoin was the chief), the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, and others. But peculiarly identified with the Darlan regime was the Banque Worms et Cie, headed by Hippolyte Worms, with Gabriel Leroy-Ladurie and Jacques Bernaud as the dominant figures. To realize the extent to which members of the Banque Worms group had been taken into the government by the autumn of 1941 a brief survey of the council and the Secretaries of State will be most profitable..."
*) 1969, William L. Shirer, 'The Collapse of the Third Republic', pp. 218-219: "Later Coutrot would be generally credited with being the man behind a technocratic movement called Synarchie, which to this day, despite many studies of it, remains - at least to this writer, who has pondered most of them - somewhat of a mystery... That some Synarchists organized as far back as 1922 a secret society with revolutionary aims has been established. It was called "Le Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire," or MSE, and its secret "Pact," containing "Thirteen Fundamental Points and 598 Propositions" for the Synarchist revolution, was discovered by the Vichy police in 1941 and published after the war... so far as one can make out from reading the lengthy document the movement would set up a sort of super monopoly capitalism, with competition abolished and endless plans drawn up for production and distribution, the whole - as well as the government - to be run by knowledgeable technocrats... That at one time the MSE was linked to the terrorist Cagoule [CSAR] also seems clear... " Here William Shirer confirms the rumors about the Synarchy, except that he believes this group "never got close to staging a revolution." This appears to be somewhat true, as the fascist militants which tried to overthrow the French government before the Nazi invasion failed at their mission.
*) 1983, Charles Higham, 'Trading with the Enemy', p. 27: "[Otto] Abetz paid 250,000 francs a month to fascist editors and publishers in order to run their vicious anti-Semitic newspapers. He financed the terrorist army known as the Mouvement Synarchique Revolutionnaire, which flushed out anti-Nazi cells in Paris and saw to it they were liquidated." - 1943, George Seldes, 'Facts and Fascism', p. 279 (lists the thirteen wealthiest families in the U.S. of the time, identified by the Temporary National Economic Committee by looking at the stockholdings in the 200 largest non-financial corporations).
- Described in great detail in Carroll Quigley's book 'Tragedy and Hope'. One of the more Well known excerpts, pp. 581-583: "The "anti-Bolsheviks," who were also anti-French, were extremely important from 1919 to 1926, but then decreased to little more than a lunatic fringe, rising again in numbers and influence after 1934 to dominate the real policy of the government in 1939. In the earlier period the chief figures in this group were Lord Curzon, Lord D'Abernon, and General Smuts. They did what they could to destroy reparations, permit German rearmament, and tear down what they called "French militarism."... The anti-Bolsheviks, including D'Abernon, Smuts, Sir John Simon, and H. A. L. Fisher (Warden of All Souls College), were willing to go to any extreme to tear down France and build up Germany." Chamberlain was part of this group. Pp. 308-309: "With these American loans Germany [under the Dawes plan] was able to rebuild her industrial system to make it the second best in the world by a wide margin, to keep up her prosperity and her standard of living in spite of the defeat and reparations, and to pay reparations without either a balanced budget or a favorable balance of trade. By these loans Germany's creditors were able to pay their war debts to England and to the United States without sending goods or services. Foreign exchange went to Germany as loans, back to Italy, Belgium, France, and Britain as reparations, and finally back to the United States as payments on war debts. The only things wrong with the system were (a) that it would collapse as soon as the United States ceased to lend, and (b) in the meantime debts were merely being shifted from one account to another and no one was really getting any nearer to solvency."
- 1926, Adolf Hitler, 'Mein Kampf', p. 472.
- 1942, John Hargrave, 'Montagu Norman', p. 217 (see note 53 for excerpt).
- 1926, Adolf Hitler, 'Mein Kampf', p. 119.
- April 23, 2007, New York Times, 'John R. Drexel III, 87, Scion of Banking Family': ""They were born to enormous privilege and they had a good time," Ms. O'Farrell said of her parents' prominence in the social scene of the 1940s, '50s and '60s in Newport, Manhattan, and Palm Beach and Hobe Sound, Fla. "This was in the days when you got into the newspaper for being at a party. At the time, it was a perfectly acceptable career pattern." The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were frequent guests at the Drexels' homes. In 1965, the guest list for their 25th wedding anniversary included notable names like Aldrich, Astor, Auchincloss and Rockefeller."
- The following quotes have been collected a few years back. They list other occasions on which Hitler spoke favorably about an Anglo-German peace, as he had done in his biography 'Mein Kampf' years earlier. Remember that David Irving, whose book 'Hitler's War' (the 2001 revision) is regularly quoted here, really is a fascist who still thinks that Churchill committed a sin by going to war with Germany. I've seen no evidence, however, that Irving made up Hitler's pro-England statements. It's just his motives that I question.
*) 2000, Ian Kershaw, 'Hitler 1936-1945, Nemesis', p. 295: "Hitler was alleged to have told his entourage a fortnight or so later that 'the army is the backbone of England and the Empire. If we smash the invasion corps, the Empire is doomed. Since we neither want nor can inherit it, we must leave it the chance.'" This is a quote from the book 'Er war mein chef. Aus dem Nachlass der Sekretärin von Adolf Hitler' from Christa Schroeder (1985- 1989, 4th edition), p. 105. The comment was allegedly made by Hitler on June 17, 1940. Schroeder, who died in 1984, was Hitler's secretary from 1933 until his suicide in April 1945.
*) 1966, Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope', p. 688: "By Hitler's direct order, no intensive ground attack was made on the Allied forces within the Dunkerque perimeter, as Hitler was convinced that Britain would make peace as soon as France was defeated, and wished to save his dwindling armoured forces and munitions for the attack on the rest of France."
*) 19 July 1940, Adolf Hitler to the Reichstag, 'A Last Appeal to Reason': "The leaflet emphasised Hitler's regret that, in spite of all his determined and honest efforts, he had not succeeded in achieving the friendship with England which he believed would have been a blessing for both people… "In this hour I feel it to be my duty before my own conscience to appeal once more to reason and common sense, in Great Britain as much as elsewhere. I consider myself in a position to make this appeal since I am not the vanquished begging favours, but the victor speaking in the name of reason. I can see no reason why this war must go on." (leaflets of this speech were dropped in Britain by German bombers returning from raids).
*) April 29, 1945, 4 a.m., Adolf Hitler, 'My political testament' (one day before his death): "Nor have I ever wished that, after the appalling First World War, there would ever be a second against either England or America. ... Only three days before the outbreak of the German-Polish war I proposed a solution of the German-Polish problem to the British Ambassador in Berlin - international control as in the case of the Saar. This offer, too, cannot be lied away. It was only rejected because the ruling clique in England wanted war, partly for commercial reasons and partly because it was influenced by the propaganda put out by international Jewry."
*) 1960, Edward Bishop, 'The Battle of Britain', p. 54: "By July 19th, when he made his 'final appeal to commonsense and reason', Hitler had almost given up hope of making peace. ...
It is recorded that Mussolini was greatly surprised when Hitler told him in June 1940, 'The British Empire is after all a force for order in the world," and Rudolf Hess, interrogated by Lord Simon, said 'In discussing the position with the Fuhrer (after the fall of France), Hitler... [unavailable]"
*) 1989, Luftwaffe general Adolf Galland interview in the documentary How Hitler Lost the War'': "Í had the occasion to talk to [Hitler] without any other company. And I told him, "We will have the opportunity to attack London [inaudible]... We can fly with everything we have [inaudible]..." And he said, "Stop it! Stop it! I don't want to hear this. The whole attack against England is against my ... willing. I would like I could stop it. The English population is of such high class and they are so similar to the Germans that I hate to fight England.""
*) David Irving: "Hitler told Major Quisling on the eighteenth [of August 1940]: 'After making one proposal after another to the British on the reorganisation of Europe, I now find myself forced against my will to fight this war against Britain. I find myself in the same position as Martin Luther, who had just as little desire to fight Rome but was left with no alternative.'"
*) David Irving: Halder wrote on the thirteenth [of July 1940]: "The Fuhrer . . . accepts that he may have to force Britain to make peace; but he is reluctant to do so, because if we do defeat the British in the field, the British Empire will fall apart. Germany will not profit therefrom. We should[n't?] be paying with German blood for something from which only Japan, America, and others would draw benefit.'"
*) David Irving: An adjutant overheard Hitler heatedly shouting into a chancellery telephone: "We have no business to be destroying Britain. We are quite incapable of taking up her legacy… [there will be] devastating consequences [if the empire collapses]."
*) David Irving: A general, present with Rundstedt and other generals at a June 2, 1940 meeting where Hitler spoke, wrote down the following comment about the meeting: "He points out that without a navy the equal of Britain's we could not hold on to her colonies for long. Thus we can easily find a basis for peace agreement with Britain. France on the other hand must be stamped into the ground; she must pay the bill."
*) David Irving: On June 17, Jodl's principal assistant confirmed to the naval staff that "the Führer has anything but the intention of completely destroying the British Empire, as England's downfall would be to the detriment of the White race. Hence the possibility of making peace with Britain after France's defeat and at the latter's expense, on condition that our colonies are returned and Britain renounces her influence in Europe. With regard to an invasion . . . the Führer has not so far uttered any such intention, as he is fully aware of the extreme difficulties inherent in such an operation. That is also why the High Command has as yet undertaken no studies or preparations. (The Commander in Chief, Luftwaffe, has put certain things in hand, e.g., the activation of a parachute division.)"
*) David Irving: Goebbels on April 21 [1940]: "The Fuhrer's intention is to administer one knockout punch. Even so, he would be ready to make peace today, on condition that Britain stay out of Europe and give us back our colonies. He does not want at all to crush Britain or to destroy her empire.'"
*) David Irving: Hitler in late early May 1940: "'They [the British] could have had peace on the most agreeable of terms. Instead they are fighting a war and shattering their empire to the core.' And he added some days after that, on May 7: 'We are neither able nor willing to take over their empire. There are some people whom you can talk sense into only after you've knocked out their front teeth.'"
*) 1948, Sir Basil Liddell Hart, 'The German Generals Talk', pp. 134-135: "But certain members of Rundstedt's staff regarded the excuses as thin, and believed that Hitler had a deeper motive for his halt order [at Dunkirk]. They connected it with the surprising way he had talked when visiting their headquarters at Charleville on May 24yh, the day after the armoured forces had been halted in their stride. Hitler was accompanied by only one of his staff, and talked in private to Rundstedt and the two key men of his staff-Sodenstern and Blumentritt. Here is what the latter told me--"Hitler was in a very good humor, he admitted that the course of the campaign had been 'a decided miracle,' and gave us his opinion that the war would be finished in six weeks. After that he wished to conclude a reasonable peace with France, and then the way would be free for an agreement with Britain. He then astonished us by speaking with admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world. He remarked, with a shrug of the shoulders, that the creation of its Empire had been achieved by means that were often harsh, but where there is planning, there are shavings flying. He compared the British Empire with the Catholic Church saying they were both essential elements of stability in the world. He said that all he wanted from Britain was that she should acknowledge Germany's position on the Continent. The return of Germany's colonies would be desirable but not essential, and he would even offer to support Britain with troops if she should be involved in difficulties anywhere. He remarked that the colonies were primarily a matter of prestige, since they could not be held in war, and few Germans could settle in the tropics. He concluded by saying that his aim was to make peace with Britain on a basis that she would regard as compatible with her honor to accept. Field-Marshal von Rundstedt, who was always for agreement with France and Britain, expressed his satisfaction, and later, after Hitler's departure, remarked with a sigh of relief-'Well if he wants nothing else, then we shall have peace at last.'" When Hitler continued to keep on the break, Blumentritt's thoughts ran back to this conversation. He felt that the "halt" had been called for more than military reasons, and that it was part of a political scheme to make peace easier to reach. If the British Army had been captured at Dunkirk, the British people might have felt that their honour had suffered a stain which they must wipe out. By letting it escape Hitler hoped to conciliate them. This conviction of Hitler's deeper motive was confirmed by his strangely dilatory attitude over the subsequent plans for the invasion of England. "He showed little interest in the plans," Blumentritt said, "and made no effort to speed up the preparations. That was utterly different to his usual behaviour." Before the invasion of Poland, of france, and later of Russia, he repeatedly spurred them on. But on this occasion he sat back."
*) Luftwaffe Gen. Hans Jeschonnek quoted on May 26, 1940 in John Lukacs, 'Five Days in London', May 1940 (New Haven, 1999), p. 41: "The Army is England's backbone . . . If we destroy it, there goes the British Empire. We would not, could not inherit it . . . My generals did not understand this." P. 42 (Hitler): "Churchill was quite unable to appreciate the sporting spirit of which I have given proof by refraining from creating an irreparable breach between the British and ourselves. We did, however, refrain from annihilating them at Dunkirk."
*) Ribbentrop's adviser on France, Otto Abenz, reportedly remarked caustically of the Dunkirk decision: "If Hitler had not been consumed by a diseased Anglophilia, everything would be different and easier."
*) Von Rundstedt, according to Wikipedia: "von Rundstedt and others subsequently argued that the [Dunkirk] decision was Hitler's and stemmed from his belief that Britain would more readily accept a peace treaty if he magnanimously spared what remained of her expeditionary force."
*) Leon Degrelle, of the Belgian Waffen-SS, who Hitler greatly admired, and occasionally confided in. During one discussion with his Fuhrer, Degrelle stated: "We talked about England. I asked him bluntly: "Why on earth didn't you finish the British off at Dunkirk? Everyone knew you could have wiped them out." He answered: "Yes, I withheld my troops and let the British escape back to England. The humiliation of such a defeat would have made it difficult to try for peace with them afterwards."
Degrelle founded of the pro-Nazi Belgian Rexism movement. He was a business partner of Otto Skorzeny and his daughter married Servando Balaguer, who was for some time the head of Blas Pinar's Fuerza Nueva. - September 24, 1929, The Times, 'Anglo-German Relations': "... to announce the formation of an Anglo-German Association. It has been felt for some time that there was a need for an Anglo-German organization comparable in its composition and aims to the Pilgrims or to the Anglo-French Association."
- Ibid.
- April 10, 1933, The Times, 'Germans and the Jews - Lord Reading's protest'.
- September 24, 1929, The Times, 'Anglo-German Relations': "The president of the British branch is Lord Reading and of the German branch Herr Cuno, a former Chancellor, and now chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika Line."
- *) September 24, 1929, The Times, 'Anglo-German Relations': "The aims of the association [Anglo-German Association] are to promote general friendly relations between Great Britain and Germany and to secure a better understanding between the two countries. The president of the British branch is Lord Reading and of the German branch Herr Cuno, a former chancellor, and now chairman of the Hamburg-Amerika Line [and soon a financier of Hitler]. I understand that the vice-presidents of the British branch include Lord D'Abernon [suggested a British alliance with Hitler, according to Quigley], Mr. Philip Snowden [governor BBC 1927-1933; first Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer 1929-1931; anti-Communist crusader; in a speech (vague, as usual) in the mid 1930s his wife seemed to take the side of Germany, which was surrounded by powerful adversaries as France and the Soviet Union; his wife visited the Anglo-German Fellowship after his death], Sir Robert Horne [regularly spoke out against Hitler in the 1930s], General Sir Ian Hamilton [very pro-Hitler and apparent relative of the Duke of Hamilton, whom Hess tried to reach in May 1941; Sir Ian was also on Hess "wish list" of people to reach], and Mr. H.A.L. Fisher [Milner Group and Hitler-appeaser]. Representative executive committees, which include members of all political parties, have been formed in both countries... [the Anglo-German association can be compared to the] Pilgrims or to the Anglo-French Association."
*) 1994, John Loftus and Mark Aarons, 'The secret war against the Jews', pp. 360-361: "The firm originally was known as W. A. Harriman & Company. The link between Harriman & Company's American investors and Thyssen started in the 1920s, through Union Banking Corporation, which began trading in 1924. In just one three-year period, the Harriman firm sold more than $50 million of German bonds to American investors. "Bert" Walker was Union Banking's president, and the firm was located in the offices of Averill Harriman's company at 39 Broadway in New York... In 1926... Walker made Prescott vice president of W. A. Harriman. The problem was that Walker's speciality was companies that traded with Germany. As Thyssen and the other German industrialists consolidated Hitler's political power in the 1930s, an American financial connection was needed. According to our sources, Union Banking became an out-and-out Nazi money-laundering machine. As we shall see, there is substantial evidence to support this charge. While the United States languished in the Depression, Walker made millions for his clients by investing in Germany's economic revival. He decided to quit W. A. Harriman in 1931, to concentrate on his own firm, G. H. Walker, while his son-in-law stayed behind to run the show for Harriman. Some say that Walker left George Bush's father holding the bag. Others say that Bush specialized in British investors in Nazi Germany, while Walker handled the Americans. In that same year Harriman & Company merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers, Harriman. Prescott Bush became one of the senior partners of the new company, which relocated to 59 Broadway, while Union Banking remained at 39 Broadway. But in 1934 Walker arranged to put his son-in-law on the board of directos of Union Banking. Walker also set up a deal to take over the North American operations of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, a cover for I. G. Farben's Nazi espionage unit in the United States. The shipping line smuggled in German agents, propaganda, and money for bribing American politicians to see things Hitler's way. The holding company was Walker's American Shipping & Commerce, which shared the offices at 39 Broadway with Union Banking. In an elaborate paper trail, Harriman's stock in American Shipping & Commerce was controlled by yet another holding company, the Harriman Fifteen Corporation, run out of Walker's office. The directors of this company were Averill Harriman, Bert Walker, and Prescott Bush. In order to understand the character of the firm, it should be recalled that Brown Brothers, Harriman had a bad reputation, even among international bankers, as hard-nosed capitalists who exploited every opportunity for profit in a harsh and ruthless manner... A 1934 congressional investigation alleged that Walker's "Hamburg-Amerika Line subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States." Walker did not know it, but one of his American employers, Dan Harkins, had blown the whistle on the spy apparatus to Congress. Harkins, one of our best sources, became Roosevelt's first double agent... It was Allen Dulles [whom Harriman and Bush hired as lawyer]. According to Dulles's client list at Sullivan & Cromwell, his first relationship with Brown Brothers, Harriman was on June 18, 1936. In January 1937 Dulles listed his work for the firm as "Disposal of Stan [Standard Oil] Investing stock."" - September 24, 1929, The Times, 'Anglo-German Relations': "I understand that the vice presidents of the British branch include Lord D'Abernon, Mr. Philip Snowden, Sir Robert Horne, General Sir Ian Hamilton, and H. A. L. Fisher."
- 1966, Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy and Hope' pp. 581-583.
- November 13, 1934, The Times, 'Imperial Policy - New Group's plea for strong programme': "The chairman of the executive committee is Mr. W. Nunn, M.P., and the chief organizers are Lord Scone, M.P., Mr. A. R. Wise, M.P., Mr. Kenneth de Courcy, and Mr. Victor Raikes, M.P."
- December 24, 1934, The Times, 'Imperial Policy Group' (letter of IPG board members to The Times).
- 2000, R. A. C. Parker, 'Churchill and Appeasement - Could Churchill have prevented the Second World War?', p. 251: "One of the backbenchers on whom Chamberlain relied ... [Victor] Raikes was one of the most articulate of twentieth-century party men. He it was who told the House after Munich that Chamberlain 'will go down in history as the greatest European statesman of this or any other time'" http://clublet.com/ why?NevilleChamberlain.
- February 18, 1942, The Times, 'High Court of Justice - King's Bench Division - Mr. Kenneth de Courcy's libel action settled': "Mr. Kenneth de Courcy, secretary of the Imperial Policy Group... the Imperial Policy Group was a body of members of both Houses of Parliament who had associated for the purpose of disseminating information and propaganating opinions in support of the interest of Great Britain and the Empire. From time to time they published reviews on world affairs, and Mr. de Courcy was the author of those reviews."
- Issue 41 - 2001, Scott Newton for Lobster Magazine, 'De Courcy, Pilcher and Hess': "I met de Courcy on three occasions while researching my book on appeasement... Before the war de Courcy did possess genuinely high level contacts in the British establishment. His papers, now kept at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, show that he really did go on unofficial diplomatic missions in the late 1930s, and that his reports went to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and to Stewart Menzies, Deputy to the Chief of SIS, Hugh Sinclair (until the latter's death in November 1939 when Menzies took over)... De Courcy, it is clear, knew Menzies. He told me that the IPG itself was an 'MI6 front'... The evidence in fact does not prove but tends to support the theory that de Courcy and Pilcher were part of a covert MI6 effort to promote a pro-Imperial and anti-Bolshevik outlook in the British establishment."
- February 24 - March 2, 1999, The Weekly Telegraph, No. 396, 'Obituary: Kenneth de Courcy': "In 1934 de Courcy became secretary of the Imperial Policy Group, which favoured appeasement as the best means of preserving the Empire. In this capacity he travelled the Continent in the years before Munich, being received by Mussolini and Eduard Benes, president of Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain regularly asked for de Courcy's reports of these interviews, much to the annoyance of the Foreign Office."
- Ibid.: "In the 1930's de Courcy was a confidant of Cabinet ministers and a dining companion of the Duke of Windsor."
- February 18, 1942, The Times, 'High Court of Justice - King's Bench Division - Mr. Kenneth de Courcy's libel action settled'.
- British Israel World Federation, Our Beliefs: "The Federation believes that Christ is our personal Saviour and Redeemer of the nation. We also believe that the descendants of the so-called "Lost Ten Tribes" of the Northern House of Israel are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic and kindred peoples of today. As the Federation believes in the whole Bible it therefore believes the Covenants made between God and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob-Israel are everlasting and that the British nation plays an important part of God's great plan for world order. "
britishisrael.co.uk/beliefs.php - August 22, 1997, Scott Thompson for Executive Intelligence Review, 'Hugh de Courcy vs. LaRouche: The British Israelites': "Kenneth Hugh de Courcy, the leading geopolitician of the Low Churches' British Israel World Federation, was chosen by the British Establishment to be an intermediary in the 1989 railroad of Lyndon LaRouche, Jr. and six other defendants in an Alexandria, Virginia Federal Courtroom. LaRouche described the "deal" offered by de Courcy in his allocution to the Court, after the railroad guilty verdict had come in: "I wish to deal briefly with a matter which bears directly on the business before us. During the middle of the preceding trial [that resulted in a mistrial in Boston, Massachusetts because of Government turpitude], I received a communication from a senior, well-known member of, high level to the British intelligence establishment. This gentleman is known as Kenneth de Courcy... He communicated to me that he had been in contact with people who claimed to be responsible in the Anglo-American liberal establishment for bringing of the prosecution and this trial. He also represented to me that he believed that persons with whom he had been discussing were interested in presenting to me political conditions to which if I would submit, they didn't specify the conditions, but if I would submit to them, they would use their influence to shape the outcoming of this proceeding trial and sentence. I responded to this by stating to them and to Mr. de Courcy that I was perfectly willing to discuss any political matter on its merits, but I was not going to engage in bargaining for influence on the outcome of the trial in the United States.... Mr. de Courcy subsequently informed me through intermediaries that my refusal to accept the offer, at very high levels of the British establishment, had meant that I was consigned in effect to hell...""
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/courcy.htm - The Times newspaper reports from the 1930s list Tennant as a prominent visitor of the Anglo-German Fellowship and a close associate of Ribbentrop. These articles do not identify Tennant as a founder of the Anglo-German Fellowship, but a number of internet sources do. Among them is the following Jstor source:
1970, James Douglas-Hamilton, 'Ribbentrop and War' (Jstor pdf): "During the late summer of 1939 the general manager of a bank sent to the Chief Intelligence Officer of RAF Fighter Command a document written be an acquaintance of his who had been a founding member of the Anglo-German Fellowship. The person who had written the document was a London merchant banker with business connections in Germany and his name was Ernest Tennant. The memorandum which he wrote was marked PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL and was dated 31 July 1939. It recorded in detail what Ribbentrop, the Nazi Foreign Minister, had said to Tennant during many hours of conversation on 26 July at Ribbentrop's castle on the Lake of Fuschl, near Salzburg in Austria, and on 27 July in the train carrying Ribbentrop to Berlin." - Names taken from visitor lists that appeared in:
*) July 15, 1936, The Times, 'Dinners - Anglo-German Fellowship'.
*) December 16, 1936, The Times, 'Germany's need of colonies - Vital to Standard of Life - Herr von Ribbentrop on Bolshevism'.
*) December 3, 1937, The Times, 'Friendship with Germany - Lord Halifax's visit - Herr Ribbentrop on new contacts'.
*) May 19, 1938, The Times, 'Receptions - Anglo-German Fellowship'.
*) March 6, 1939, The Times, 'Britain and Germany - Appeal for mutual understanding - Ambassador's speech'. - Ibid.
- July 9, 1945, Drew Pearson, Tucson Daily Citizen, 'Bureaus Battle Over Documents - Nazi records subject to dispute over jurisdiction': "Top-notch I. G. Farben officials are also considered important for establishing war guilt and ascertaining war secrets. They have been kept in prison ever since the armistice, though several seemed confident that high U.S. and British businessmen would get them out. The name they most frequently mention as the friend who would rescue them is Lord McGowan, head of British Imperial Chemical, Ltd. Some also mentioned Lammot Du Pont. Both Du Pont and Imperial Chemical had agreements with I. G. Farben before the war. Thomas H. McKittrick, head of the Bank of International Settlements, was also one who the I. G. Farben officials thought would help them; together with Leon Fraser, formerly with the Bank of International Settlements, who committed suicide last winter. I. G Farben officials, incidentally, did not know that he was dead."
- December 3, 1937, The Times, 'Friendship with Germany - Lord Halifax's visit - Herr Ribbentrop on new contacts'.
- 1970, James Douglas-Hamilton, 'Ribbentrop and War' (Jstor pdf) (text of Tennant's memorandum. 'PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL', July 31st. 1939).
- Full name Sir Ernest Tennant = Sir Ernest William Dalrymple Tennant (d. 1962). Full name Sir Peter Tennant = Sir Peter Frank Dalrymple Tennant (1910-1996). According to The Times of August 17, 1967, Peter Tennant was among a whole list of family members present at Sir Ernest Tennant's memorial.
- December 3, 1937, The Times, 'Friendship with Germany - Lord Halifax's visit - Herr Ribbentrop on new contacts'.
- January 9, 2000, The Independent on Sunday, 'Secrets of the Red Book: The Who's Who of British Nazis; Exposed: the establishment figures who wanted to turn the UK into a fascist dictatorship.'
- December 15, 1998, Daily Mail, 'Revealed: the Scots MP devoted to Hitler; The discovery of a little red book exposes fascist members of the upper classes'.
- January 9, 2000, The Independent on Sunday, 'Secrets of the Red Book: The Who's Who of British Nazis; Exposed: the establishment figures who wanted to turn the UK into a fascist dictatorship': "Running my finger down the list, written with a fountain pen in Ramsay's hand, the names still resonate: Arthur Wellesley the 5th Duke of Wellington, the Second Baron Redesdale, the Earl of Galloway, Lord Ronald Graham, Princess Blucher, Sir Ernest Bennett, Prince Turka Galitzine and Britain's most notorious Second World War traitor, William Joyce, later known as Lord Haw-Haw as he broadcast propaganda from Germany."
- October 12, 2004, Daily Telegraph, 'Nobles and admirals on war 'Suspect List'. File names 400 people with supposed pro-German views to be arrested on an invasion, reports Ben Fenton': "Domville and Maj Gen John Fuller, a close friend of Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, were both linked to the Duke of Bedford through membership of Capt Archibald Ramsay MP's Right Club."
- Ibid.: "Domville, who was the founder of the fascist organisation The Link, was to be picked up from his home in Hampshire at the first sign of invasion. Part of the MI5 report on him says he had told the inmates of a home for ex-servicemen that Hitler "would soon be in this country, but that there was no reason to worry about it, because he would bring the Duke of Windsor over as King and conditions generally would be much improved"."
- See note 97.
- All names taken from the newspaper articles mentioned in notes 95, 96, and 97.
- October 12, 2004, Daily Telegraph, 'Nobles and admirals on war 'Suspect List'. File names 400 people with supposed pro-German views to be arrested on an invasion, reports Ben Fenton': "At least five people on the list are named in MI5 reports as associates of Anna Wolkoff, a dress designer and leading figure in British fascism who was a close friend of the Duchess of Windsor. The Duke, who had abdicated in 1936 to marry the then Wallis Simpson, had been causing embarrassment to the British government in the immediate pre-war years by cultivating contacts with Hitler and his regime. In a number of cases the Suspect List quotes leading British fascists as expressing the hope that a victorious Nazi invasion would place the Duke back on the throne."
- Three Times newspaper articles have discussed this affair. This is where this information has been taken from.
*) October 18, 1968, The Times, 'The Mosley Memoirs-5 - Mussolini, Hitler, and wartime imprisonment'.
*) December 4, 1982, The Times, 'Revealed: The strange story of Tyler Kent, MI5 and the Right Club - The American tearoom spy'.
*) December 10, 1983, The Times, 'Moscow's moles and the 'nazi spy''. - See note 37.
- 1981, Professor Carroll Quigley, 'The Anglo-American Establishment - From Rhodes to Cliveden', p. 272.
- February 13, 1939, The Times, 'Too much defeatism - Capt. Balfour on British Air Strength'.
- 1973, Jules Archer, 'The plot to seize the White House - The shocking true story of the conspiracy to overthrow FDR', p. 20.
- 1966, Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time', p. 642: "Thus, from March [1939; after Hitler's full annexation of Czechoslovakia] onward, it became almost impossible to sell appeasement to the public, especially to the British public, who were sufficiently sturdy and sensible to know when they had had enough. But the British public and the British government were two different things... To the government the seizu