Them

by Jon Ronson

  And it is they who would make his death look like a typical Washington mugging.

  ♦

  When I began hearing about the Bilderberg Group – about the notion that a tiny band of insidious and clandestine powermongers meet in a secret room from which they rule the world – I was sceptical. But I kept hearing about them, and I finally decided to try to settle the matter once and for all.

  Which is why I visited Big Jim Tucker. Within anti-Bilderberg circles Big Jim is considered a pioneer, a trail-blazer, risking his life to attempt to locate the geographical whereabouts of the secret room.

  “They exist all right,” said Big Jim, “and they’re not playing pinochle in there.”

  Big Jim Tucker has spent thirty years documenting the facts. He’s been after them since the 1970s when he first got the hunch that they existed. He abandoned a good career in sports journalism on a big city paper. It has been cat and mouse ever since, he said. Good against evil.

  “Those sick luminaries are always on the move,” said Jim. “They never come together in the same place twice, so as to evade detection. They only meet once a year, for a long weekend in May or June.”

  They have been ruling the world in secret since 1954, Jim said, when a man called Joseph Retinger, whose name rarely appears in the history books, decided to create them. One of many mysteries is how Retinger – a Polish immigrant employed as secretary to the novelist Joseph Conrad – had the wherewithal and the contacts to organize such a mighty endeavour.

  Their first meeting took place in the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland, which is why the secret rulers of the world go by the name of the Bilderberg Group.

  ♦

  Big Jim said that I happened to have caught him at a very good time. He was ready to take things further, to turn up the heat and cause some trouble.

  “So you’ve actually managed to obtain the address of the next Bilderberg meeting?” I asked Jim.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “You know exactly where it is?” I asked.

  “Yes I do,” he said.

  Big Jim said he fully intended to thwart their security and barge in unannounced to catch them red-handed going about their covert wickedness. I was welcome to tag along, he said, “Just so long as you don’t step on twigs or fall off walls while we’re on the prowl.”

  ♦

  “The plan is this,” said Jim. “We’ll leave Washington on the last day of May, and we’ll arrive at the target destination on the Sunday morning. We’ll start patrolling that same afternoon. Patrol Sunday and Monday. Develop sources. Waiters, chambermaids…”

  “So they still meet in hotels?” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Jim. “The chambermaids will be gun-shy at first. They’ll know something big and spooky is going on, but they won’t know what. But then they’ll begin to realize that whatever’s happening at their hotel is evil. And that’s when they’ll open up.”

  “So what else will we do on the Sunday and Monday?”

  “Scout around the resort,” said Jim. “Figure out ways to penetrate.”

  “Scout around looking for what?”

  “Where the short wall is,” said Jim. “Where the big drainpipe is.”

  “So we’ll actually be climbing up drainpipes?” I asked.

  “Climbing up drainpipes,” said Jim, “trying not to sneeze or cough or step on twigs. Trying to avoid the guard dogs.”

  “What’s the name of the hotel?”

  “I’ve – uh – got it written down here somewhere,” said Jim. He rifled through his pockets. “Here it is. The Caesar Park golfing resort, Sintra, Portugal.”

  I looked quizzically at Jim.

  “Are you sure about all of this?” I asked.

  “They are evil and their evil occurs in the dark shadows,” said Jim, emphatically. “Behind closed doors. Ruling the world from a room. Imagine that. Let’s get a drink.”

  ♦

  Jim took me to the Men’s Bar upstairs at his club. We drank beers and watched sports on the TV above the bar. Framed front pages of big news stories of days gone by lined the walls.

  ‘War in the Persian Gulf!’

  ‘Thatcher Resigns!’

  Jim said that both acts were orchestrated by Bilderberg.

  “Margaret Thatcher is one of the good guys,” said Jim. “Bilderberg ordered her to dismantle British sovereignty but she said no way, so they had her sacked.”

  Big Jim said he once found himself at a drinks party with Margaret Thatcher and he took the opportunity to sidle up to her.

  “How does it feel to have been denounced by those Bilderberg boys, ma’am?” he growled. She whispered back that she considered it a ‘great tribute to be denounced by Bilderberg’.

  ♦

  I considered the significance of the endeavour we were about to undertake. For the other people I had met, Bilderberg was an inviolable almighty. Big Jim was the first man to have the tenacity to discover the address, and to plan on going in, and damn the consequences. This could change everything.

  Jim wouldn’t tell me how he discovered the room’s whereabouts, but a few moments later as we sat at the bar, a tall man with a moustache bounded over and cheerfully introduced himself to me as Jim’s mole from inside Bilderberg.

  “I’m an accountant,” he explained. “Some very big clients use our firm. One guy happened to mention to me that he was on his way to somewhere near Lisbon in June for a very private meeting.”

  Jim appeared a little annoyed by his mole’s instantaneous candour, but then he shrugged and joined in with the story.

  “We know,” said Jim, “that the Bilderberg Group always meet in May or June.”

  “So Jim,” said the mole, “started telephoning every five-star hotel near Lisbon.”

  “They always meet at a five-star hotel with golfing facilities,” explained Jim.

  “Always golfing facilities?” I asked.

  Jim picked up on my subtext at once.

  “Believe me,” he said, “they’re not there to play golf. They’re too busy starting wars.”

  “They may play golf when they’re there,” clarified the mole, “but they’re not there to play golf.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “So,” said Jim, “I finally got around to calling a hotel up in the hills, and I said to the receptionist, ‘I’ve been invited to the Bilderberg conference in June but I’m afraid I’ve been very silly and lost my invitation. Could you confirm that this is the correct venue?’ And she said, ‘Why of course, sir. Oh yes, sir. This is exactly where you’re supposed to be, and we’re very much looking forward to serving you.’”

  Jim and his mole laughed. A nearby barfly heard their laughter and he came over to join us. Jim and his mole stopped laughing. They turned their backs on the new guy and myself. There was a moment’s awkwardness.

  “So what’s all this about?” asked the new guy.

  “Well,” I whispered, “that big old man in the trilby has tracked down the tiny group of people who rule the world in secret. Anyway, the two of us are going to Portugal next week to confront them.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. He seemed unimpressed. “What do they do, these secret rulers of the world?”

  I shrugged. “Everything, I guess,” I said. “They’re called the Bilderberg Group.”

  “Can’t say I’ve heard of them,” he said.

  “Jim’s dedicated his life to exposing them,” I said.

  “It’s not so surprising that I’ve never heard of them,” said the new guy. He scanned the room. Every bar stool was occupied this afternoon. Retired newsmen in suits stared into their beer glasses. The Men’s Bar seemed to be where the Washington press corps went when there were no more deadlines, no stories left to file.

  “It’s not so surprising,” he said. “Pretty much everyone here has dedicated his life to something or other that nobody’s ever heard of.”

  ♦

  The next morning, Jim took me to the office of his newspaper,
The Spotlight, which is just around the corner from Capitol Hill. It is pristine from the outside, gleaming white, on a lovely tree-lined street. But it is dark and dusty on the inside, and there are boxes everywhere. He introduced me to Andy, his editor. We sat in the courtyard and drank iced tea.

  “Jon,” said Jim to Andy, “thinks those Bilderberg boys are just playing pinochle in there.”

  “Well, first off,” said Andy, impatiently, “you get a lot of people, including newspaper editors, who say there is no Bilderberg Group, that it doesn’t even exist.”

  “They’ve kept the vow of silence like they’re going to nun school,” said Jim.

  “This is after you’ve had Prince Charles attend,” said Andy. “This is after you’ve had Bill Clinton attend. And still people say it doesn’t exist. Not that it’s just a social meeting, but that it doesn’t exist.”

  “If they’re just going to play golf and swap lies and chase girls,” said Jim, “why the armed guards? Know what I’m saying?”

  “They exist all right,” said Andy.

  “Prince Charles and Bill Clinton,” explained Jim, “are small-fry. The rulers of the world are the ones who do the inviting. The steering committee. Clinton was just a small-fry from somewhere called Arkansas when he got his invitation back in ‘91. Yeah, they had big plans for that boy.”

  “You be careful,” said Andy. “You’re dealing with dangerous forces.”

  ♦

  “Mother,” said Big Jim Tucker, “your dutiful son is playing hunt the macaroon at the Paris Hotel, Portugal, Monday morning, 10.30 a.m., thank you.”

  It was a week later, and our first working day in Portugal. Our plan was to scout the target five-star golfing resort situated six miles north, develop sources and look for the short wall and the big drainpipe in preparation for the midnight penetration later in the week.

  Jim placed the telephone back on its receiver and he lay back on his bed. Our hotel had been built on a busy roundabout. The ocean glistened in the distance, beyond a railway track and a couple of main roads. Even up here on the sixth floor you could hear the never-ending roar of the traffic.

  “Unlike the Bilderberg luminaries,” said Jim, ruefully, scanning the dirty walls of this bad hotel, “some of us are working on a tight budget.”

  Jim lit an unfiltered Camel. He is a large, elderly man, and I am not athletic. Our agility levels were impeded by our smoking habits and we wheezed in the Portuguese heat. I was unsure as to how successful the two of us would be in climbing up drainpipes. I pictured slapstick scenarios that would be hilarious to onlookers but not to us.

  Jim was acting breezily, but I could sense his nervousness.

  “I’m a quarterback,” he said, “gearing up for the Super-bowl. Apprehension? Yes. You don’t know what you’re going to get with those Bilderberg boys. But am I so nervous as to want to take a spare pair of underpinnings in case of leakage? No.”

  By Jim’s reckoning, the Bilderberg Group was not scheduled to arrive in Portugal until Wednesday night. He said he had heard reports that their private security guards had already set up camp at the Caesar Park and were planning to operate a shoot-to-kill policy for all penetrators. This somewhat diminished the potential for slapstick hilarity. I was not feeling cocksure.

  We had that morning fruitlessly scanned the newsstands for references to the meeting.

  “Surprise, surprise,” growled Jim. “Media black-out.”

  There was, however, one notable exception, buried away in the special-interest sections. The Weekly News, a tiny English-language parish newspaper for Algarve tourist workers and regular English visitors such as Sir Cliff Richard, circulation 8,000, had gone big on the story. Very big.

  AS SPECULATION ON THE INTERNET RUNS RIFE, THE NEWS CHECKS IT OUT AND IT DOES SEEM THAT…SECRET WORLD GOVERNMENT GROUP IS MEETING HERE!

  The Weekly News made me feel less vulnerable down here on the ground. Jim said he wanted to touch base with their editorial team later in the week.

  “If the Weekly News boys can help us expose those Bilderberg jackasses,” he said, “I’m all for pooling information.”

  ♦

  I had rented a car from Budget. We drove into the mountains, away from the boisterous good-time package-tour Estoril, towards the more serene and ancient pastures of Sintra, seven miles up the road. On the way, we discussed cover stories in case we incurred suspicion while we were on our covert patrol. We elected to be holidaymakers, getting a drink at the poolside bar because we’d heard so many good things about the resort, which was undoubtedly the finest around.

  The Caesar Park is situated three miles from the main Estoril-Sintra road – two and a half miles down a narrow country lane, through the wilderness of a national park, followed by another half-mile private driveway.

  It became evident, as we approached the big peach gates that led into the resort, that the midnight penetration would be an even more formidable task than we had anticipated. The hotel is surrounded on all sides by dense undergrowth and sheer mountains. Jim silently pondered these obstacles from the passenger seat. He photographed the mountains. We drove through the gates (the gatekeeper let us in with a wave) and down the half-mile long driveway. And then the hotel appeared – a modern peach-coloured five-star resort of purpose-built luxury.

  “The civilians haven’t been shifted out yet,” muttered Jim, as we left the car and wandered towards the colossal marble reception area. The civilians were the holiday-makers. Jim whipped out his camera and photographed the tourists. These photographs would later appear in The Spotlight as ‘unaware civilians’.

  We were not inconspicuous, Jim and I, strolling around the Caesar Park in our open-necked shirts. We were, in fact, an unlikely holidaymaking duo. At a very big push, Jim could resemble a benevolent wealthy southern sugar daddy and I his gawky early-thirties toy-boy. But I doubted the persuasiveness of the scenario.

  “I don’t think,” I murmured, as we wandered out to the swimming pool, “that the holidaymaking cover is a convincing one. I think we should think of something else.”

  “We’re salesmen,” said Jim. “We’re just salesmen getting lunch.”

  “What do we sell?” I asked.

  “We don’t like to talk business when we’re having lunch,” said Jim.

  “Surely every undercover journalist claims to be a salesman,” I said. “It’s like calling yourself Mr Jones.”

  “Calm yourself,” said Jim.

  We sat on stools at the poolside bar. Unaware young women sunbathed in bikinis.

  “Ma’am,” said Jim to a young passing waitress, bowing slightly, his newshound trilby now replaced by a tourist’s straw sun hat, “I’m a little confused. I tried to book a room here for Thursday and they told me that the whole hotel had been closed down for some big meeting. Must be a pretty damn big important meeting if you ask me…”

  The waitress shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She smiled slightly and left us. Jim got out his notepad. He wrote notes and then he read them out to me:

  Dateline Portugal.

  Tension filled the air inside the posh Caesar Park resort on Monday. At the poolside bar, the pretty barmaid’s face filled with tension when asked to speculate on the big important meeting taking place from Thursday. She shrugged her shoulders and feigned ignorance, but the tension on her face spoke volumes.

  Jim put down his notepad.

  “Is that accurate?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to confirm.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” I said. “We may be imbuing her with our own feelings of tension.”

  “Still,” said Jim, finishing his iced tea, “now we know what the drinks of the rich taste like.”

  We paid and patrolled the resort some more. I was disappointed with the Caesar Park, its Eurotrashy aircraft-hangar spaces, its cold approximation of luxury. It was a neo-palace. The lobby shops have names such as ‘Fashionable’. I would have assumed
that Bilderberg would meet somewhere classier. I told Jim my thoughts on this matter, and he explained that I still hadn’t quite got it. They are not there for classy holidaying. They are there to start wars.

  Also, Jim said, there is a finite number of international hotels that can transform themselves into walled fortresses, that have their own helicopter pads and nearby military air bases. And, for reasons of security, Bilderberg never meet in the same place twice, so their choices of location must be running out.

  Jim and I split up. I looked at the prints on the wall of the lobby outside the upstairs bar. A half-hour passed. I wandered aimlessly through the lobbies and the bars. There were other aimless wanderers too, a woman in a red dress and a man in his thirties wearing a tweed jacket.

  It struck me that we all seemed to be wandering aimlessly in some kind of unison, but it didn’t cross my mind – right up until the moment that the man in the tweed jacket marched across the room and began questioning me in an angry whisper – that I was being tailed.

  “We’ve watched you for an hour. I’m the hotel manager. You take pictures. You ask questions about some big important meeting. Who are you?”

  “I…” I paused. Then I clumsily announced, “I’m from England.”

  It was the only thing I could think of. This works of course in other circumstances abroad. But it didn’t work here.

  “What do you want?”

  I stared blankly at him.

  “What is your business here?”

  I continued to stare blankly. And then another man appeared.

  This new man was older, with a tan, and he spoke with a smooth European accent.

  “It’s OK!” he laughed. “Everything’s fine! There’s no problem!”

  He gave the hotel manager’s shoulder a little squeeze.

  “I am your servant,” he said to me. “If there’s anything you’d like, please be my guest. Think of this hotel as your home. If I can be of any service to you, any service whatsoever, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  I glanced over with anxiety at the hotel manager who was now standing a little way off; overruled, slighted, and silent.

  “I mean,” he smiled, “what could you possibly be doing here that could cause any harm to anybody?”