by Jon E. Lewis
Austria
Richard Schenz CEO and Chairman of the Board, OMV
Austria
Rudolf Scholten Member of the Board of Executive Directors, Oesterreichische Kontrollbank
Germany
Jürgen E. Schrempp Chairman of the Board of Management, DaimlerChrysler
Denmark
Tøger Seidenfaden Editor-in-Chief, Politiken
United States of America
Robert B. Shapiro Chairman and CEO, Monsanto Company
Russia
Lilia Shevtsova Carnegie Moscow Center
Portugal
Artur Santos Silva President and CEO, BPI Group
Spain
Pedro Solbes Mira Member of Parliament, Socialist Party
Hungary
György Surányi President, National Bank of Hungary
Great Britain
J. Martin Taylor Former Chief Executive, Barclays
United States of America
G. Richard Thoman President and CEO, Xerox Corporation
United States of America
John L. Thornton President and CO-COO, Goldman Sachs Group
Russia
Dmitri V. Trenin Deputy Director, Carnegie Moscow Center
France
Jean-Claude Trichet Governor, Banque de France
United States of America
Laura d’Andrea Tyson Dean, Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley
Finland
Matti Vanhala Chairman of the Board, Bank of Finland
Finland
Pentti Vartia Managing Director, Research Institute of the Finnish Economy (ETLA)
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Switzerland
Daniel L Vasella Chairman and CEO, Novartis
Greece
Thanos M. Veremis Professor of Political History, University of Athens; President of Eliamep
Austria
Franz Vranitzky Former Federal Chancellor
Netherlands
Lodewijk J. de Waal Chairman, Dutch Confederation of Trade Unions (FNV)
Great Britain
Martin Wolf Associate Editor and Economics Commentator, The Financial Times
International/United States of America
James D. Wolfensohn President, The World Bank
Germany
Otto Wolff von Amerongen Chairman and CEO of Otto Wolff GmbH
Turkey
Erkut Yücaoglu Chairman, Tusiad
Czechoslovakia
Michael Zantovsk Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Security, Czech Senate
Austria
Norbert Zimmermann Chairman, Berndorf
RAPPORTEURS
Great Britain
John Micklethwait New York Bureau Chief, The Economist
Great Britain
Adrian Wooldridge Foreign Correspondent, The Economist
IN ATTENDANCE
Netherlands
Maja Banck Executive Secretary, Bilderberg Meetings
Portugal
João A. Estarreja Local Organizer 1999 Conference
United States of America
Michael J. Farren Adviser, American Friends of Bilderberg, Inc.
Austria
Diemut Kastner Local Organizer 2000 Conference
BLACK HELICOPTERS
Sinister silent black helicopters are used for the surveillance of patriotic groups opposed to the takeover of the US by the United Nations/New World Order/foreign powers.
So claimed the late Jim Keith in his celebrated books Black Helicopters Over America: Strikeforce for the New World Order and Black Helicopters II: The End Game Strategy. He was not alone in believing the US government uses military aircraft for surveillance of backwoods patriots: a militia in Montana tried to shoot down a National Guard AH-64 Apache as it flew over a member’s ranch. Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth of Idaho publicly charged that federal agents in black helicopters were harassing Idaho ranchers, although in her version the helicopters were implementing the Endangered Species Act for the federal government. Ranches seem a popular visiting place for black helicopters: the first sightings, in the 1970s, were associated with cattle mutilations by aliens. Extraterrestrial technology from back-engineering at Area 51 is believed by some ultra-patriots to be used in the making of the black choppers.
There is no doubt that the military and law-enforcement agencies of the US do use black helicopters, as the “Black Hawk Down” special forces fiasco in Somalia reminded the entire world. Indeed the stealthy UH-60 Black Hawk perfectly fits the “black helicopter” bill – except that it is not employed by the UN in a takeover bid of the Land of the Free. Used by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency for narcotics busting maybe, by the CIA in surveillance of the Midwest militias plausibly, but by the UN or New World Order, no.
Keith’s claim that vast garrisons of UN troops, up to 20,000 strong, are already established in America, along with their matt-black choppers, might seem alarming were it not for the fact that no one save Keith and a handful of far-right paranoiacs has ever seen them. And even in the wide open spaces of the US, 20,000 commie-leaning blue-hatted UN troops are hard to conceal.
Black helicopters are advance guard of UN takeover of US: ALERT LEVEL 2
Further Reading
Jim Keith, Black Helicopters Over America: Strikeforce for the New World Order, 1994
Jim Keith, Black Helicopters II: The End Game Strategy, 1998
BOHEMIAN GROVE
If you go down to the Californian Sequoia woods in July you’re sure of a big surprise . . .
Occupying 2,712 acres (l,098ha) of ancient redwood forest near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, California, the Bohemian Grove is a private camping site for an annual two-week gathering of 2,000 or so of America’s great and their guests. It is run by San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, established in 1872 as a gentlemanly refuge from the crudities of frontier life. Initially the Club membership comprised journalists, writers and artists – hence the “Bohemian” nomenclature – among them being Mark Twain and the socialist writer Jack London. However, the Club was persuaded by member Ed Bosque that it needed monied types to pay for better facilities. Once let into the nest, the money-men took over. On a visit to the Bohemians, the Victorian dramatist Oscar Wilde quipped that, “I have never see so many well-dressed, well-fed businesslike bohemians in all my life.”
Bored with city life at their elegant San Francisco clubhouse, the Bohemians determined to take to the woods in an annual summer camp at the Grove. For a hundred years or more, the “Bohos” have claimed that the camp is merely an occasion for letting elite hair down and doing some uninterrupted male-bonding (women are excluded). Or, as Grove regular President Herbert Hoover put it, the Grove “is the greatest men’s party on Earth”. Heavy drinking, frat-pack-style “jinks”, lavish meals and musical and theatrical entertainments are certainly core to the Grove experience, in which the members and guests sleep in some 104 log-cabin “camps” scattered among the trees. As if in proof of the Bohos’ hedonistic intentions, an effigy of “Dull Care” (representing the burdens of everyday life) is burned every 14 July at the foot of a 40-foot (12m) concrete owl in the Grove’s mock-druidic “Cremation of Care Ceremony”. The motto of the Grove is: “Weaving spiders, come not here.”
But weaving spiders do go to the Grove, and some of them are tarantulas. And what a tangled web they spin! As the leading academic historian of the Grove, Peter Martin Phillips, observed: “A person would have to look very hard to find such a dense concentration and variety of American socio-economic elites in one place anywhere else in the United States.” Additionally, one would be hard pushed outside of the KKK to find a whiter crowd of Americans: just 1 per cent of the Club’s members are not Caucasian.
Every American Republican president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the Grove, including Richard Nixon, who complained that “it was the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine”. Current US politicians who attend the Grove include
Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell (a rare non-white) and Newt Gingrich. Meanwhile, approximately one-third of the leading US companies have a representative at the Grove summer fest; by Phillips’s estimate 11 per cent of Bohemian Club members together own US$30.476 billion of corporate stock. Alan Greenspan, once of the Federal Bank, and A. W. Clausen of the World Bank are both Grove habitués. It beggars belief that these elites do not “talk shop” together. Indeed, by the Grove’s own admission, the Manhattan Project to build the US atomic bomb was conceived in Mandalay camp at the Grove. Dwight Eisenhower began his bid for the presidency after canvassing support at the Grove.
A feature of the Bohemian Grove is the daily “Lakeside Chat”, a lecture by a worthy in his field. Ostensibly these “Chats” can be on any conceivable subject, but they tend to be skewed towards politics. Titles include “Defining the New World Order” and “America’s Health Revolution: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays?”
With its potent amalgamation of secrecy, money and power, the Bohemian Grove has been a target for investigative exposés. In Trance Formation of America (1995) Grove worker Cathy O’Brien recorded lurid tales of sex slaves, although no such torrid goings-on were found by British reporter Jon Ronson when he crashed the Grove for his book Them. Ronson similarly failed to find the Babylonian Brotherhood transforming themselves into giant lizards, as David Icke insisted he would, and nor did he find the New World Order there. “My lasting impression,” wrote Ronson, “was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking . . . emotionally they [the Grovers] seemed trapped in their college years.”
Many of the liberal-left political protests against the Grove are co-ordinated by the Bohemian Grove Action Network. According to BGAN:
When powerful people work together, they become even more powerful. The Grove membership is wealthy, and becoming more so, while the middle class is steadily becoming poorer. This close-knit group determines whether prices rise or fall (by their control of the banking system, money supply, and markets), and they make money whichever way markets fluctuate. They determine what our rights are and which laws have effect, by appointing judges. They decide who our highest officials shall be by consensus among themselves, and then selling candidates to us via the media which they own. Important issues and facts are omitted from discussion in the press, or slanted to suit their goals, but they are discussed frankly at the Grove. Is there true democracy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands? Is there any real difference between the public and private sectors when cabinet members come from the boardrooms of large corporations? Is the spending of billions on weapons, which are by consensus no longer needed, really the will of the people? Or is it the will of General Electric, General Dynamics, and the other weapons contractors represented at the Grove?
The BGAN overstates the case: the Grove is too unwieldy to rule America and thus the world. Aside from injecting an annual morale-boosting shot in the arm to the US Eurocentric male elite, the Grove is a good ole boys’ networking opportunity. It is the place in America to win friends (and contracts, jobs . . .) and influence people in high places.
Bohemian Gravers rule America as invisible dictators: ALERT LEVEL 4
Further Reading
Peter Martin Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, PhD thesis, University of California Davis, 1994
Jon Ronson, Them: Adventures Among Extremists, 2001
MARTIN BORMANN
Old Nazis never die. They go to Antarctica or, in the case of Adolf Hitler, to the Nazi Moon Base. Or, more plausibly, in the case of Martin Bormann they go to the Soviet Union.
In May 1941 Bormann was made Nazi Party Chancellor, a position he used to become the Third Reich’s main bureaucrat. He was also Hitler’s right-hand man, his personal secretary and his sounding board, and remained with the Führer until the end. The last incontestable sighting of Bormann was in the early hours of 2 May 1945, on Invalidenstrasse Bridge in Berlin, as he sought to escape from encircling Russian troops. Post-war investigation by the Allies surmised that Bormann had committed suicide or been killed near the bridge, but in the absence of a body there could be no confirmation. For two decades rumours flew that Bormann was alive and well and living in (variously) Germany, South America and Spain. Then, in 1971, Reinhard Gehlen published his memoirs, The Service, which stated as fact that Bormann had survived the war and hidden from view in the unlikeliest place of all, the USSR, where he had only recently died.
Unlike other Bormann spotters, Gehlen had pedigree. He was the former head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front and, with the help of the CIA and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had taken on the job of spy chief in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Gehlen asserted that there existed film of Bormann watching sports with Soviet bigwigs. And he made another sensational claim: Bormann was the Russian spy code-named Werther who had infiltrated Hitler’s military planning sessions, and passed on the top-secret knowledge to Moscow that Russia needed to win Stalingrad, Kursk and other battles on the Eastern Front.
Gehlen’s identification of Bormann as Werther received a boost in 2000 with the publication of Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich by Louis Kilzer. So fast was intelligence passed from Hitler’s ops room to Stalin’s, Kilzer posited, that it must have come from someone right at Hitler’s side: Bormann. If Bormann was Werther it makes it natural that Stalin would have given him sanctuary after the war – hence the sightings of him in the USSR.
There is, however, strong forensic evidence that Bormann died during the battle of Berlin in 1945. In 1972 construction workers at Lehrter Banhof dug up two bodies, one of which was identified as Bormann’s by his wartime dentist Dr Hugo Blaschke. (The other body belonged to SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger.) The bodies were found just 40 feet (12m) from where Albert Krumnow, a postal worker, had previously claimed to have buried Bormann and Stumpfegger. In 1998 DNA tests on the skull of one of the Lehrter corpses confirmed it as Martin Bormann’s. Traces of glass in the jaws suggested the two men had committed suicide by biting on cyanide capsules.
The positive identification of the Lehrter corpse as Bormann’s holes the “Bormann was Werther” theory – because, if Bormann had been a Soviet spy, presumably events would indeed have followed the scenario Gehlen proposed. So who was Werther? Bernd Ruland, a teleprinter supervisor at Hitler’s wartime radio centre at Zossen, suggested in a 1973 book that Werther was not one but two people: two female teleprinters at Zossen.
Almost inevitably, the forensic identification of Bormann’s corpse has not killed off the conspiracy theories. In Doppelgängers, Hugh Thomas suggested there were forensic indicators that Bormann died later than 1945, notably that the condition of the teeth were those of a man older than 45 (Bormann’s age in 1945) and that there appeared to be dental work in excess of the 1945 record. Moreover, the skull contained traces of a volcanic red clay not found in Berlin but common in Paraguay – where there had been several Bormann sightings. Since DNA testing proved the skull to be Bormann’s, the necessary inference was that Bormann did survive the war and was reburied in Berlin by accomplices to give credence to the story that he fell in 1945.
Old Nazis do eventually die, but the conspiracy theories about them go on for ever.
Martin Bormann survived the Second World War: ALERT LEVEL 8
Further Reading
Reinhard Gehlen, The Service, 1971
Louis Kilzer, Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich, 2000
Hugh Thomas, Doppelgängers, 1995
BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY
Send her victorious,
Happy and Glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God Save the Queen!
From God Save the Queen, the
British national anthem
Long to reign over us? Not a popular sentiment with followers of conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche, who has the eight
y-something Queen of Great Britain fingered as a drugs-runner and her husband Philip as the instigator of the Rwanda genocide, thanks to his private army the World Wildlife Fund (I know, you thought it was about saving pandas), and quite possibly the eliminator of Princess Diana.
According to sometime Marxist and perennial US presidential candidate LaRouche, the Royal Family heads a cabal of around 500 which operates through two agencies: one is a government department, the Overseas Development Office, and the other is a highly secret society called the Club of the Isles. Although the latter is not British-only, having Dutch and Swiss aristocrats and magnates aboard, its aim is a “one-world empire” – a British global empire, that is.
