Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Nor did anyone know that President John F. Kennedy—who once admired and even relied on counterinsurgency strategies developed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Panel on National Security Studies chaired by Henry Kissinger (a protégé of Nelson)—later came to fear the Rockefellers. “I never saw more concentrated attention given to any political subject,” said Kennedy appointee and friend, Roswell Gilpatric”6—and for good reason: Gov. Nelson Rockefeller soon became the first Republican candidate to challenge Kennedy for the presidency shortly before Kennedy’s assassination.

  All of this and much more was documented in Thy Will be Done in 1995, but David Rockefeller’s Memoirs gives an entirely different slant to some of the events described above, or ignores them entirely.

  David’s Memoirs ignores the Kennedy Administration’s curtailment of Nelson’s ambitious plans for developing Brazil’s interior. He reinterprets Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, with its emphasis on providing government-to-government loans to Latin American countries rather than going through private banks like Chase, as a mere difference of opinion. Writes Rockefeller, “I strongly supported the President’s initiative [for the Alliance for Progress] not the least because it meant there would be an energetic response to the threat presented by Castro’s Marxist regime in Cuba and Communist subversions in other parts of the hemisphere. However, I felt the Alliance had to be a public-private partnership if it was to be successful, while its U.S. architect had a decided preference for state-directed economic development.”7

  Following the murder of President Kennedy in November 1963 and the overthrow of Brazilian president Goulart four months later, the conquest of the Amazon by American corporations began in earnest. Yet, some forty years later, while writing his memoirs, these details have escaped David’s memory. He characterizes this transitional period as essentially uneventful: “Kennedy’s death cut short the promise of the Alliance for Progress. … [The] Johnson White House, preoccupied with its own War on Poverty in the United States and the real war in Vietnam, lost interest in Latin America.”8

  As recounted in Thy Will Be Done, this was not the case with the CIA, American corporations, and American evangelical missionaries known as the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT) in the US and the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) abroad. Shortly after the coup, SIL conducted a survey for the Brazilian military dictatorship, describing “potentially hostile tribes” in Brazil and pinpointing their locations on maps. The missionary linguists reported their findings in an English-language book published in 1967 by the CIA-connected Institute for Cross Cultural Research9 entitled Indians of Brazil in the Twentieth Century. The map in Thy Will Be Done entitled “SIL’s Hostile Tribes and Rockefeller Allied Companies in the Brazilian Amazon” confirms the old adage: A picture—or map—is worth a thousand words. As we stated there: “[Indians of Brazil] appeared to be a harmless cataloguing of tribes—their location, their culture, their population size, and their acceptance of Brazilian domination. But it also offered a road map for American penetration into the Brazilian interior, much like that which occurred a century earlier in the American West, including warnings about ‘hostile’ areas.”

  Missionaries and the Methodology of Conquest

  Thy Will be Done has been called “a methodology of conquest”—once understood, it can be applied to many parts of the world. Yet the role of well-funded and, most often, well-intentioned fundamentalist Christian missionaries in aiding and abetting conquest seldom gets mentioned, just as religion itself has escaped the kind of scientific scrutiny that other fields undergo.

  Thy Will be Done began with a conundrum: How could the world’s largest nondenominational Christian missionary organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and its more secular sounding twin, the Summer Institute of Linguists, turn a blind eye to the genocide of more than one hundred thousand Amazon Basin Indians, many of them assigned by governments as their wards during the 1960s and 1970s? It was only by scaling the mountain, that is the heights of Rockefeller power, that the pieces of the puzzle finally began to fall into place some four years into the investigation. The declassified papers of Nelson Rockefeller and Rockefeller mentor Adolf Berle Jr., along with a wealth of family history at the Rockefeller Archives Center in Pocantico, New York, provided that mountaintop panorama, which turned out to be crucial to solving the mystery. The Rockefeller view of the world was spectacular in its reach and depth of political, economic, social, and cultural interrelations. The interactions on the ground revealed WBT/SIL’s missionaries/linguists’ patterns and also those of anthropologists, medical teams, aid workers, NGOs, women’s organizations, government officials, and clandestine operatives who worked among them. Many were well meaning, thinking they were agents of modernization. Most, however, were quite naïve regarding the way their respective spheres of activity helped to enhance and reify the power of the Americas’ wealthy 1 percent. It was the cumulative effects of these actors that supported that 1 percent in their never-ending search for stability through corporate political power and the ever-expanding profits that keep their global system functioning.

  It is no accident that WBT/SIL, in the service of globalization, have expanded beyond their original proving ground in Latin America (where they were challenged for collaboration with the CIA and, in some cases, expelled) to every corner of the so-called “underdeveloped world”—Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—as part of Wycliffe’s “Global Alliance.” Today, according to its official website, Wycliffe’s Global Alliance operates in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei, Cyprus, Democratic People’s Republic of (North) Korea, East Timor, Gaza Strip, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Macao, Malesia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Republic of (South) Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Republic of China (Taiwan), Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, the (Palestinian) West Bank, and Yemen.

  As before, and perhaps even more so, as a result of this book, SIL/WBT is circumspect about naming its large secular supporters in government and business, failing to make such disclosures or those of its stockholdings in their 990 reports to the Internal Revenue Service. But the sheer size and scope of their operations today leaves little doubt that their funding extends far beyond churchgoers’ donations. A writer for Forbes magazine questioned how Bible translating could become a multimillion-dollar operation when he headlined his 2013 story, “The Big Business of Wycliffe Bible Translators and Why They Might Lose Money.”10 He found that Wycliffe International from 2006 to 2010 received over twenty-two million dollars in “public support.” The numbers didn’t make sense. “Wycliffe,” he mused, “is translating 20 Bibles and they have 5,500 staff members. … When you have that much money and that much in staff resources, then why does it take such a long time to translate a Bible?”11 Had he dug deeper, he would have discovered that WBT, SIL, and Wycliffe Global Alliance make up a huge operation12 and that Bible translation, while central to its mission, is a means to an end: literally, the End of the World and Christ’s Second Coming. For the linguist/missionaries, this means reaching every untouched tribe in the world (depicted in WBT’s early days as “2,000 tongues to go”). For multinational developers, it means pacifying millions of tribes in advance of pushing deep into Africa, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia to extract resources and develop markets for the “first” world.13

  Today, SIL/WBT missionaries are at the forefront of the US penetration of Africa, eagerly embarking on Bible translations where oil has been discovered in large quantities. For example, it is working in Ghana among three Ghanaian tribes—the Jwira-Pepesa, Wasa, and Bissa—all of whom live in Southern Ghana, once called the Gold Coast and now called the Black Gold Coast. Many of the African tribes are Muslim, which has created difficulties for the translators.14

&nbs
p; In 2014, the London Guardian described Ghana as “Africa’s newest petro-state” in an article on the film Big Men about the “meeting of Ghana, oil and Wall Street.” Featured below the Guardian headline was a large photo of a banner draped over a shanty town with the words: “National Prayer and Thanksgiving Service for Oil Discovery in Ghana and a Peaceful Half Year … All Are Cordially Invited. Be Aglow for Jesus.”15 Ghana’s huge offhshore oilfield, discovered in 2007, is said to contain up to 1.8 billion barrels of oil.

  In May 2015, ExxonMobil joined fellow oil giants, Chevron and Shell, to negotiate with the Ghanaian government to secure oil blocks in the country. As the CEO of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation, Alex Mould, explained to a local radio station, “They are the big boys. They wait for you to develop the fields, and then they come in when they believe the prospectivity is within their range.”16 Rockefeller Financial Services (which manages investments for wealthy clients and was chaired until recently by David Rockefeller Jr.) has huge stock holdings as of September 2016 in all three companies, owning shares worth over $44.6 million in Chevron, over $90.7 million in ExxonMobil, and over $7 million in Royal Dutch Shell.17

  Such is the pattern of conquest the Rockefellers, with their enormous wealth and power, have utilized throughout the world for decades.

  “Something Had to Be Done”

  As witness and purveyor of global expansion for nearly a century, David Sr. had to face down numerous eruptions around the world in protest against what rural Americans once called “The Great Octopus” with its tentacles of Rockefeller influence. As he often stated when explaining a crisis in his Memoirs, “Something had to be done.”

  To contain the populist upheavals in Latin America beginning in the 1960s, David realized he needed “a concerted effort [by] the private sector,” and in October 1963, he formed the Business Council of Latin America. Two years later, he assumed the chairmanship of the council, which boasted two hundred corporations as members and in 1970 changed its name, dropping the word “business” and creating the Council of the Americas.

  To arrest the spread of electoral socialism in Latin America in 1973, David and Nelson, along with National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, looked forward to the overthrow of Marxist president Salvador Allende of Chile, who had campaigned, according to David, for the presidency “on a platform of radical land reform, the expropriation of all foreign corporations, the nationalization of banks, and other measures that would have put his country firmly on the road to Socialism.”18

  To weaken the Iranian revolution in 1979 which overthrew their close friend and ally, the Shah of Iran, David and Nelson were able to convince President Jimmy Carter to freeze Iran’s petro-dollar deposits in Chase bank in retaliation for the revolutionaries’ taking diplomats and CIA spies hostage, thus preventing Ayatollah Khomeini’s planned withdrawal of millions from Chase’s London branch.19

  To alleviate concerns “in the investment community” following the 1994 Zapatista revolt of indigenous Maya against NAFTA, Chase Manhattan’s Emerging Markets Group circulated an internal memo on January 13, 1995 (subsequently leaked to the press), stating, “The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy.” A subsequent disclaimer by Chase—that the offending passage had originally merely stated the need to eliminate the Zapatista “threat”—did little to quell Zapatistas’ suspicions of attempted US intervention against them.20

  To curtail the spread of “radical” Islamic movements after 9/ll, David created an Iran Working Group made up of former ambassadors to the Middle East; the group ultimately succeeded in negotiating with moderate Iranians the framework for the controversial 2016 nuclear deal.21

  Through every crisis, Rockefeller has never wavered in his belief in a capitalist world to set things right. To achieve his ends, he has joined, and, in some cases formed, international forums where some of the world’s most powerful leaders could congregate to discuss the world’s problems: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission (created by David and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 when the Bilderberg Group refused to admit Japan into its discussions on creating a new world order.)

  Crusaders for a New World Order

  Calling himself “a proud Internationalist,” David, in his Memoirs, debunks the “populist paranoia” of “ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum” who “attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. … Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal … conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”22

  David admitted that the Trilateral Commission has been particularly controversial. Why? The answer lies with the first powerful leader to emerge from the Trilateral Commission: Georgia governor and future president Jimmy Carter. Described by Rockefeller as “an obscure Democratic governor of Georgia,” Carter’s attendance at the first Trilateral meeting would produce “an unintended consequence.” Carter would go on to run for and win the presidency of the United States. He loyally touted free trade during his campaign and gave a Trilateral-sponsored speech in Brazil, but David claims his well-funded election came as a surprise. David’s self-proclaimed astonishment did not end there: “There was a great deal of surprise, then, when he chose 15 members of Trilateral, many of whom had served in previous administrations, for his team, including Vice President Walter Mondale, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, and Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security advisor.” “Predictably,” Rockefeller observes, “I was accused of trying to take control of Carter’s foreign policy.”23

  In fact, the Rockefellers have tried to control, or at least shape, the foreign policies of many US presidents before and after Jimmy Carter. The Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (which David chaired from 1970 to 1985) alienated many career State Department officials during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because CFR officials involved in its secret postwar studies group took over most of State’s postwar planning committees.

  Early in his term, President John F. Kennedy relied on counterinsurgency strategies that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Panel on National Security Studies chaired by Henry Kissinger had developed. A chart in Thy Will be Done reveals the “High Kennedy Appointments from the Rockefeller Network.”

  Bill Clinton, an eager member of the Trilateral Commission whom the Council on Foreign Relations mentored in power and global corporate strategy, owed his rapid rise to governor of Arkansas and, eventually, US president, to the support of followers of former Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller, the wealthiest and one of the most powerful corporate leaders in the state.24

  The Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission similarly mentored Barack Obama. He owed his meteoric rise to the White House largely to financial support from allies of liberal Democratic senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller IV, former governor of West Virginia and son of John D. Rockefeller III. Jay can be seen smiling in photos as he stood behind Barack Obama during the latter’s first inauguration. Jay threw elaborate fundraisers for Obama at his estate near Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC.25

  Another enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama was former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a protégé and advisor of Nelson and David Rockefeller. After Obama’s election, Kissinger enthused on MSNBC in January 2009 that Obama would “give new impetus to American foreign policy, partly because the reception of him is so extraordinary around the world. His task will be to develop an overall strategy for America in this period when, really, a new world order can be created. It’s a great opportunity. It isn’t just a crisis.” 26 As it turned out, Barak Obama was not ab
le to deliver a new world order, due to massive dislocations of populations resulting from endless wars in the Middle East, NAFTA, and the scourge of climate change.

  Reforming ExxonMobil

  It is not without irony that some of David Rockefeller’s children and their cousins have played a major role in acknowledging, rather than denying, the role of fossil fuels in creating global warning. The decision to take on ExxonMobil, the largest of the corporate offspring of their great-grandfather’s illegal Standard Oil Trust, began in 2006 when Sen. Jay Rockefeller, asked ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson to cease financing groups that, against almost all scientific findings, still denied climate change. Jay Rockefeller got nowhere. A decade later, David’s daughter, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, went public against ExxonMobil in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Why I lost faith in Exxon Mobil, and donated my shares.”

  Neva charged that Exxon, in the 1980s, despite an earlier acceptance of climate warming by some of its scientists, “began to finance think tanks and researchers who cast doubt on the reliability of climate science.”27 For years, she and other family members introduced shareholders’ resolutions calling for the corporation to begin the move from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources. They couched their advocacy by heralding their great-great-grandfather’s “genius” in having the foresight to invest in oil in the nineteenth century and build Standard Oil into an unparalleled success. They were troubled that ExxonMobil had become “Public Enemy No. 1” as a result of the company’s lying about the effects of climate change and its disastrous environmental record. This, they reasoned, could affect the company’s bottom line. ExxonMobil had already emerged as one of the worst polluters in US history, responsible for huge oil spills in New York, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alaska.28 But they expressed their concerns in financial rather than moral terms, challenging ExxonMobil to stop lagging behind other oil companies’ (profitable) commitments to transition away from fossil fuels.