F. William Engdahl info@williamengdahl.com via aweber.com
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Dear Readers,
For this installment of
my geopolitical newsletter I want to share a chapter from a yet-to-be published
book of mine titled The Think Tanks in which I go into the background of the
influential private network of USA and European think tanks which shape the
real political agenda of Washington or London or Brussels today. I present here
a section from the book in which I go into the little-known origins and circles
creating the infamous Bilderberg group during the Cold War in the 1950’s. The
key actors will no doubt surprise many.
I also want to
encourage you to consider making a support contribution at my website,
www.williamengdahl.com, that I am able to continue offering my content such as
presented here without cost. I want to thank those of you as well who have
already chosen to offer your financial support.
For a better reading
experience I converted the text to a pfd-file which You can find in the
attachment of this mail. It's 10 pages in A4 format.
Thank you again for
your interest,
F. William Engdahl
Frankfurt, Germany
www.williamengdahl.com
Chapter Three:
Bilderberg Group keeps
Europe and USA Under the Thumb
At a Grand Hotel in
Holland
In May, 1954 in
Oosterbeck in Holland, near to the German border, a highly secret meeting was
held at the Hotel de Bilderberg. The meeting was hosted by Prince Bernhard of
the Netherlands, husband of Queen Juliana. It was called simply, “De Bilderberg
Conference,” from the name of the hotel where the first talks were held. Out of
three days of private discussion, a new Trans-Atlantic think-tank was created.
It was to become the most effective organization for influencing world events
after 1954 up to the present, and one of the most secretive.[1]
German-born Prince
Bernhard was a controversial figure, a notorious playboy philanderer, who had
been a member of the German NSDAP and Reiter SS, and later in 1976, was accused
of accepting more than a $1 million bribe from the US fighter aircraft maker,
Lockheed, to influence purchase of US fighter planes by the Dutch Air Force.
When Bernhard was forced to resign because of the scandals, he was succeeded as
Bilderberg Chairman by then German Bundespräsident, Walter Scheel, and then
afterwards by Britain’s Lord Carrington, a confidante and later business
partner of Henry Kissinger. [2]
In 2014 the Bilderberg
Group’s official website, with sparse information, stated its purpose as simply
to, “foster dialogue between Europe and North America.” It meets once a year
with around 120 select attendees from finance, politics, industry, media and
academia. Its rules mandate that two-thirds come from Europe and the remainder
from the USA and Canada, with one third of the total always from the world of
politics. Bilderberg participants from the US are always members of the Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR).[3]
In their own words,
“The conference is a forum for informal discussions about megatrends and major
issues facing the world.” It’s no ordinary open, public think-tank such as the
Council on Foreign Relations, where meetings are publicized and reports
published to the larger public to shape mass opinion. In their own words, “The
meetings are held under the Chatham House Rule, which states that participants
are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the
affiliation of the speaker(s) nor of any other participant may be revealed.
Thanks to the private nature of the conference, the participants are not bound
by the conventions of their office… There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions
are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.” [4]
Shadowy origins
The Bilderberg Group,
in the words of the first Bilderberg Secretary General, the shadowy and
enormously influential Polish exile, Joseph Retinger, came from an initiative
Retinger made in 1952 to counter, “growing distrust of America which was making
itself manifest in Western Europe and which was paralleled by a similar distrust
of Western Europe in America.” [5] In brief, its aim was to make certain that
the strategic policy orientation of Western Europe and of the United States was
in harmony. The decisive point was harmony in pursuit of which geopolitical
goals.
Joseph Retinger was one
of the most influential political figures shaping the pro-Atlanticist
architecture of post-World War II Western Europe. He founded the
Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, to lobby for the Washington-backed plan for
creation of a United States of Europe. He created the CIA-funded European
Movement, as well as the CIA-funded European Youth Campaign. By far his most
influential project was bringing the Bilderberg Group into being and serving as
its key European director and Secretary General, all far away from the public
eye, as he preferred. [6]
That was the time the
Korean War was ending and US Marshall Plan aid to Europe as well. Józef
Hieronim Retinger had spent the war years in London as adviser to the exile
government of Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorski. While Retinger’s name
was virtually unknown to the world at large, he was one of the most influential
string-pullers of the postwar period in Europe and the United States, who was
able to get private audiences with the Pope as well as the American President
at will. It was he who selected Prince Bernhard to act as figurehead host and
who selected which Americans and which Europeans would be invited.
The first Bilderberg
meeting in 1954 was organized by a Steering Committee of influential persons
that included on the European side, Paul Rykens chairman of the giant Unilever
food group, Italian Prime Minister de Gasperi, British Labour politician Denis
Healey, and two prominent Germans--Professor Carlo Schmid, and Otto Wolff von
Amerongen. [7]
The American Steering
Committee for the first Bilderberg Meeting in 1954 consisted of USA chairman
Joseph E. Johnson, president of the Rockefeller-tied Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. Others included George Ball, who during the Second World
War was in London serving as director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, to
analyze the impact of British and American bombing of German cities and
civilian populations. After the war in 1945 Ball began close collaboration with
Jean Monnet and the French government. Later Ball played a key role regarding
the Marshall Plan. In 1950 he helped draft the Schuman Plan and the European
Coal and Steel Community Treaty.
The American Bilderberg
Steering Committee also included H. J. Heinz II, of the food group; George
Nebolsine, a State Department consultant on the Marshall Plan; and Dean Rusk,
then President of the Rockefeller Foundation and later Secretary of State. [8]
The real guiding hand
behind the American side of the Bilderberg Group, however, was the first head
of the newly-established Central Intelligence Agency, General Walter Bedell
Smith. In 1950 Smith became Director of the CIA. The CIA helped organize, and sponsored
the formation, and operation of the Bilderberg Conferences.
In late 1952, Retinger
went to America to test his Bilderberg idea on his American contacts. Retinger
met Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller, and Bedell Smith, then the first
director of the CIA. After Retinger explained his proposal, Smith reportedly
said, “Why the hell didn’t you come to me in the first place?” The CIA chief
then told Retinger to go to C. D. Jackson, who was about to become President
Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Psychological Warfare, and liaison between
the Pentagon and CIA. [9]
The attendees at the
1954 initial Bilderberg Meeting at the Hotel de Bilderberg in addition to the
above-named Steering Committee, included David Rockefeller, who today is the
only Bilderberg “Advisory Group” Member. It included State Department official,
Paul Nitze. As well, Gardner Cowles, a US media baron and founder of Look
magazine (similar to the German Stern), who had been the US Government deputy
director of the Office of War Information, the US propaganda ministry that
created the Voice of America (VOA). It included J.P. Morgan Bank director
Nelson D. Jay, who was a close Rockefeller associate.
The first Bilderberg
attendees list also included C.D. Jackson, then Eisenhower’s architect of the
Cold War; Alcide de Gasperi, Italian Prime Minister; Sir Gardner Franks,
chairman of Lloyds Bank in UK; Sir Harry Pilkington head of the Federation of
British Industries; Alberto Pirelli of the Italian industrial group; Vittorio
Valletta, president of FIAT; Guy Mollet head of the French Socialist Party; Max
Brauer, Minister President of Hamburg; Gerhard P.Th. Geyer of German Esso (part
of the Rockefeller oil group); Heinrich Troeger, Staatsminister der Finanzen in
Hessen; H. F. van Walsen director of the Dutch electrical giant Philips, and
Antoine Pinay, a former French Prime Minister. Pinay was to become, along with
his close friend and collaborator,Joseph Retinger, the decisive personality
shaping the long-term agenda of Bilderberg.
In Retinger’s words he
founded Bilderberg Group simply to, “foster dialogue between Europe and North
America.” That was for public consumption. In reality he built a very dark
agenda that drew in the most reactionary circles in postwar Europe and tied
them to the most powerful of postwar American oligarch families, that of
Rockefeller and their emerging “American Century.” The Bilderberg Group was to
insure that that Century would be heavily influenced by postwar Vatican
geopolitics. Its first meeting in 1954 was funded by Walter Bedell Smith’s CIA,
with subsequent meetings financed by the CIA’s close ally during the Cold War,
the Ford Foundation. [10]
Le Cercle—the
Vatican-Rockefeller Alliance
The key to the
extraordinary power and influence of the annual Bilderberg Meetings from 1954
laid in the unpublished role of the secretive pan-Europeanist organization then
known as Le Cercle, sometimes referred to as Cercle Pinay, a reference to the
pivotal role in shaping Bilderberg played by the network of French Prime Minister
Antoine Pinay, an intimate friend of Bilderberg organizer, Retinger.
Pinay’s Le Cercle (The
Group) was the link that covertly tied most European intelligence services
including the German BND and BfV, MI6 in Britain, France’s SDECE, Holland’s
BVD, Belgium’s Surete de l’Etat and Swiss and later even Saudi intelligence and
apartheid South Africa’s secret service, BOSS. Prominent politicians associated
with Pinay and Le Cercle included Franz Josef Strauss, Otto von Habsburg,
Konrad Adenauer, Julio Andreotti of Italy, General Antonio de Spinola of
Portugal, a conservative who went on later to become President; Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. [11]
Antoine Pinay’s group,
Le Cercle, was tied as well to the powerful and very right-wing Roman Catholic
lay organization, Opus Dei, which had just been given final Catholic Church
official approval in 1950, two years before plans for Bilderberg began, by Pope
Pius XII. The organization was made well known, to its discomfort, as a subject
of the 2003 Dan Brown historical novel, Da Vinci Code. [12]
Among the later
achievements of Le Cercle was the manipulation of the 1979 British elections
that successfully brought in anti-labor right-wing Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. It was done with Le Cercle leading members, Sir Brian Crozier, MI6
head Sir Arthur Franks, and MI6 division head, Nicholas Elliott. [13]
The late Bavarian
political czar, Franz Josef Strauss, “The Lion of Bavaria,” noted in his
memoirs that he had held a friendship with Le Cercle’s Antoine Pinay since the
two first met in 1953. Le Cercle networks in Germany promoted Strauss’s
candidacy, unsuccessfully, to become German Chancellor. In 1955 Strauss also
became a regular member of the Bilderberg Meetings.[14]
Bilderberg founder,
Josef Retinger, a Polish-born Roman Catholic, organized his European network of
the Bilderberg through the mediation of an Italian CIA asset, Prof. Luigi
Gedda, head of Azione Cattolica. Gedda was also medical adviser to Pope Pius
XII, a very strong right-wing anti-communist pontiff, who before the Second
World War, as Cardinal Eugenio Giovanni Pacelli, had been architect of the 1933
Reichskonkordat with Hitler’s Nazi Party. Already in 1932 Pacelli as Vatican
Secretary of State had played a key role in convincing Roman Catholic German
Chancellor Franz von Papen to steer his Catholic Center Party into an anti-left
alliance with the NSDAP of Hitler. [15]
Clerical fascism and
Pius XII
As Pope, Pius XII had a
clear political bias and it was towards support of clerical or nominally Roman
Catholic fascist or extremely repressive right-wing regimes, a form of what
some termed clerical fascism, the fusion of the Church with fascist or
dictatorial political regimes, such as in Franco Spain.
During the Second World
War Pius XII refused to condemn the clerical fascist pro-Hitler regime of Roman
Catholic Ante Pavelić, the leader of the newly proclaimed Croatian state.
The Pope went so far as refusing to publicly condemn the expulsions and forced
conversions to Catholicism perpetrated on Croatian ethnic Serbs by Pavelić’s fascist Ustaše. Informed by
Catholic clergy of the genocidal murders of Orthodox Serbs who had refused to
embrace the Catholic faith, Pius XII, even though he possessed a list of
Croatian clergy members who had "joined in the slaughter," did not
condemn the Pavelić regime or take action against the clergy involved.
Instead he elevated Aloysius Stepinac—a Croatian
archbishop convicted of collaborating with the Ustaše—to Cardinal.[16]
In effect, Retinger’s
European Bilderberg networks linked the extreme right-wing European
anti-communist networks—including the Vatican of Pius XII, of Opus Dei, of the
Franco government, of Portugal’s General
Spinola and numerous other right-wing European anti-communist networks—to the
triumphant American elites around the powerful Rockefeller group, through the
networks and person of David Rockefeller. It was a power marriage that was to
have a profound effect on the development of postwar European society and
politics.
The Vatican’s Cold War
A very-hidden chapter
in post-1945 American history was the unpublicized but central role that the
Vatican played in demonizing the Soviet Union for the American population in
the 1950’s, with the consequence that what was a rather democratic political
process in the United States after the war was increasingly turned into a national Security State, a state in which
every crime and abuse of public trust by the CIA or State Department could be
hidden from the American public under the guise of “national security,”
necessary for defense against the “threat of godless Communism.”
It was secondary
whether the crimes of Stalin were as claimed, though they usually were.
Stalin’s brutality to his people served as the prefect justification for the
oligarchic circles around especially the Rockefellers and their inner circle,
including the then-very-junior Bush family of Senator Prescott Bush, to corrode
American democratic processes in the name of Cold War.
Key Roman Catholic
figures in the United States during the 1950’s included New York’s Cardinal
Francis Spellman. Spellman was so powerful until his death that he was referred
to as the “American Pope.” He had a direct line to Pius XII on all things
American and shared the Pope’s virulent anti-communism.
From 1881 through to
the First World War, though the United States was overwhelmingly Protestant in
its population, floods of immigrants from Catholic Ireland, Catholic Italy and
elsewhere had increased the USA Catholic base by fully five million, a
significant and growing political factor. By 1950, at the dawn of the Cold War
against “Godless Bolshevism,” America’s recent World War ally, there were
twenty eight million American Roman Catholics, many of them now middle class,
university educated, well-off financially and a very significant political
power base. Pope Pius XII who earlier had shown little compunctions about
organizing Papal Concordats with Hitler’s vice Chancellor von Papen in 1933 and
Italian fascist Mussolini, mobilized his significant population base through
the Church in the United States to fan the flames of Cold War. [17]
For the Rockefeller
group and their Bilderberg allies, who controlled the CIA, State Department and
owned the key companies of the military-industrial complex, a Vatican
anti-communist crusade was a gift from Heaven so to say.
In August 1950, Francis
Matthews, American Secretary of the Navy, held a speech in Boston. Matthews, a
devout Roman Catholic, was former Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus,
described by some as the Catholic counterpart to freemasonry. He was intimate
with the highest levels of the Church.
Just before he
delivered the Boston remarks, Matthews checked the content with Cardinal
Spellman, who approved. The Vatican in Rome was informed and also approved, as
was the Roman Catholic American right-wing General Douglas MacArthur and Father
Edmond Walsh, S.J., the very influential head of the private Roman Catholic
Georgetown University School of Foreign Relations in Washington D.C. Under Edmond Walsh, Georgetown’s School of
Foreign Relations held a unique role in shaping Cold War US foreign policy. It
was where most US diplomats were trained as well as future President Bill
Clinton. Walsh, in response to seeing the preview of Matthews’ speech, declared
that the United States should even use the atomic bomb against Russia. [18]
In that Boston speech,
Navy Secretary Matthews called on the United States to launch a preemptive war
against the Soviet Union, saying it would make the American people the “first
aggressors for peace.” Matthews declared a rather bizarre logic that George
Orwell would have enjoyed: “To have peace we should be willing to pay any
price—even the price of instituting a war…That would brand our program as
imperial aggression…we could accept that…a character new to a true
democracy—the initiator of a war of aggression.” [19] Fortunately President
Truman, who had not been informed before, publicly denounced the provocative
speech and the US did not nuke the Soviet Union.
Pope Pius XII was
silent about the Matthews call for preemptive war against the Soviet Union.
Matthews at the time was a Privy Chamberlain of Pius XII.[20]
That background
clarifies much about the true nature of the secretive Bilderberg Group that
Joseph Retinger, with quiet backing of Pius XII, founded, together with the
leading figures of the anti-communist CIA and David Rockefeller, in 1954 at the
Hotel de Bilderberg.
The Bilderberg concept
was to create a fusion of right-wing predominately Roman Catholic
anti-communist business and political networks in Western Europe that would
coordinate global strategy with the mainly Rockefeller business empire in the
USA. That fusion profoundly altered the course of postwar global politics and
economics for the worse.
In their 1956
Bilderberg Meeting, the group discussed creation of a European Common Market.
The result emerged one year later, in 1957, with signing of the Treaty of Rome.
The CIA had financed Retinger and his European Movement via a front
organization called the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). For US
corporate multinationals, a single European Economic Community would make it
far easier and more profitable for large American corporations to gain a market
in Europe. For Washington, a transnational entity in Brussels that eroded
national sovereignty and national action was easier to manipulate during the
Cold War. For Opus Dei and the Bilderberg European leaders, it enabled their
corporate and political networks to slowly erode national sovereign borders.[21]
[1] Dr
J. H. Retinger, The Bilderberg Group, August 1956,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17514348/The-Bilderberg-Group-Dr-JH-Retinger, https://publicintelligence.net/bilderberg-group-retinger/
[2]
Anthony Browne, From beyond the grave, Prince finally admits taking $1m bribe,
4 December, 2004, Timesonline.co.uk.
[3]
Bilderberg official website, About Bilderberg,
http://www.bilderbergmeetings.org/
[4]
Ibid.
[5] Dr.
J.H. Retinger, op. Cit.
[6] [6]
David Teacher, Rogue Agents: The Cercle-Pinay Complex—1951-1991, revised 2008
online edition, http://www.christiebooks.com/PDFs/Rogue_Agents_the_Cercle_Pinay_complex_1951_1991.pdf
[7] Ibid
[8]
Ibid.
[9] Kai
Bird, The Chairman--John J. McCoy, The Making of the American Establishment
David Teacher, Rogue…Op.Cit.
https://www.amazon.it/Chairman-McCoy-Making-American-Establishment/dp/1501170643
https://www.amazon.it/Chairman-McCoy-Making-American-Establishment/dp/1501170643
[10]
Source Watch, Bilderberg, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Bilderberg
[11]
David Teacher, op. cit.
[12] Le
Cercle, Le Cercle-Incomplete membership
list continually updated, Geusau, Frans Alting Von,
https://wikispooks.com/ISGP/organisations/Le_Cercle_membership_list.htm.
[13]
Ibid.
[14]
Ibid.
[15]
Wikipedia, Pope Pius XII, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII
[16] Wikipedia, Ante Pavelic,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87. Wikipedia, Pope Pius
XII, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII
[17]
Avro Manhattan, The Dollar and the Vatican, Ozark Press, 1956, pp. 68-77.
[18]
Ibid., pp.79-82.
[19]
Ibid., pp.79-82.
[20]
Ibid.,p. 83.
[21]
Richard J. Aldrich, OSS, CIA and European Unity: The American Committee on
United Europe, 1948-1960, Diplomacy and Statecraft Vol. 8, no. 1 (Mar. 1997):
184-227
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