Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  Nelson Rockefeller cast a long shadow over his siblings’ lives. Now, at the end of David’s life, it is to the extraordinary influence of Nelson’s life that we now turn.

  —Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Burlington, Vermont, September 2017

  * * *

  1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PePhZyxNfrM This is a compilation of clips from various sources about David Rockefeller and the building of the World Trade Center. The scene of him describing how he watched the towers fall shows a credit to ABC, but no date is provided.

  2 Charlie Rose show, October 12, 2002.

  3 Rockefeller Archives Center Newsletter, Fall 2001.

  4 The four brothers’ investments diversified well beyond these basic fields. For example, in the obituary of Laurance S. Rockefeller (1910–2004), the Rockefeller Archives stated that Laurance “became well known as an investor of risk capital in young enterprises whose future was based primarily on scientific and technological developments. Over the years his investment interests included the fields of aviation, aerospace, electronics, high temperature physics, composite materials, optics, lasers, data processing, thermionics, instrumentation and nuclear power. Beginning in August 1969, his venture capital investments in these areas were made through a venture capital group, Venrock, formed by members of the Rockefeller family.” Thy Will be Done (at page 373) has a chart entitled “Rockefeller Investments in the Military Industrial Complex” that would surprise many readers, especially regarding the extent of the family’s investments in nuclear power. Young Justin Rockefeller’s involvement in promoting data-mining technology at Silicon Valley and stewarding the wealth of billionaires is outdistanced easily by Steven Rockefeller Jr.’s investments in Russian oil and gas and Chinese real estate developments.

  5 Amy Davidson, “A Hostage to Christie in Hobokine,” The New Yorker, January 20, 2014. See also “Re-Investment Firm Pays $11 million for Newark mixed-use space,” December 12, 2013. https://www.law360.com/articles/495289/re-investment-firm-pays-11m-for-newark-mixed-use-space

  6 Roswell L. Gilpatric, interview, Columbia University Oral History Project, 83.

  7 David Rockefeller, Memoirs, (New York: Random House, 2002), 427.

  8 Ibid.

  9 The Nation, February 27, 1967.

  10 “The Big Business of Wycliffe Bible Translators,” Forbes, March 6, 2013.

  11 Ibid.

  12 Who the top donors are of Wycliffe Associates is undisclosed in its annual report and its 990 IRS filings.

  Wycliffe Translators Foundation applies the same lack of disclosure about its corporate holdings. Wycliffe Translators Foundation reported in 2014 investments worth $23.6 million; of that, 5.4 million was invested in undisclosed corporate common stock, $1.3 million in undisclosed corporate bonds and $13 million in undisclosed mutual funds. In addition, $4.9 million more was deposited with RIA Charitable Investment Funds (RIAC II), an investment fund set up at SIL International’s Dallas headquarters as a pool for Wycliffe Global Alliance members and sister organizations, which reported assets of $75.5 million in 2014. RIA Charitable Investments describes itself a religious fundraising organization that brings in $58.3 million in annual income and, according to its website, is “one of the largest organizations of its kind.” Its stock holdings also were undisclosed in its 990 IRS report in 2015, but it did reveal the structure of Wycliffe International’s corporate shells: the Wycliffe Seed Company and the Wycliffe Bible Translators International, Inc., which is in turn a voting member of Wycliffe Bible Translators International (Wycliffe International).

  13 Maps and charts describing this process in Latin America appear in Thy Will Be Done.

  14 Thirty percent of Ghana’s population are Muslim. WBT/SIL has been criticized by fellow evangelists and mainstream Protestants for omitting the words “God the Father” and “Son of God” from their Bible translations to avoid offending Muslims, who view Christ as a great prophet but not the son of God. Beginning in 2012, the Presbyterian Church of America rebuked the WBT for its waywardness and recommended that its local churches withdraw financial support unless the translations were corrected to conform with traditional Christian theology. See, e.g., Michael Ross, “The Son of God and Muslim Idiom Translations,” The Christian Research Institute 2013, http://www.equip.org/article/the-son-of-god-and-muslim-idiom-translations and Ruth Moon, “Will New Guidelines Solve Wycliffe’s Two-Year Bible Translation Controversy?” Christianity Today, May 10, 2013. Notes Moon: “The translation tension also points to the broader challenge of communicating the gospel with Muslim cultures. … The Christian gospel directly contradicts Muslim teaching by saying that Jesus is also God, and there’s no way to avoid that teaching without losing the gospel message.”

  15 Oliver Bach, “Big Men: The New Film about the Meeting of Ghana, Oil and Wall Street,” The Guardian, April 2, 2014.

  16 “Chevron, Shell and Exxon Mobil express interest in Ghana’s oil,” JoyOnline, May 6, 2014. http://www.myjoyonline.com/business/2014/June-5th/chevron-shell-and-exxon-mobil-express-interest-in-ghanas-oil.php

  17 www.nasdaq.com/quotes/instituional-portfolio/Rockefeller-Financial-Servces. September 30, 2016.

  18 David admitted to discussions among his friend Augustin Edwards, publisher of Chile’s leading newspaper, El Mercurio, and Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger, leading to an increase in “clandestine financial subsidies” by the Nixon administration “to groups opposing Allende.” When CIA efforts failed to stop the ascension to power of Allende, the Chilean leader made good on his promises to nationalize large scale industries and banks. He expropriated American corporate holdings and carried out seizures of land, including Edwards’ property, for redistribution to landless peasants. David gave the expropriated Edwards family shelter and support in the United States. What happened next David summarized in one short paragraph: The Chilean middle class became alienated, the military under General Ugarte revolted and stormed the presidential palace, and Allende “committed suicide.” Rockefeller, Memoirs, 433.

  In 2011, the state-run Chilean TV network, TVN, reported uncovering a secret military report that indicated that Allende did not kill himself but instead was assassinated. “Chile TV: Secret military report on Allende’s death raises doubts about suicide,” The Washington Post, May 31, 2011.

  19 Charlotte Dennett, “The Hostage Families, Suffering in Silence,” The Nation, December 13, 1980. David Rockefeller, for his part, devotes a chapter to his relationship with the Shah in his Memoirs and states that President Carter’s “freeze” of official Iranian assets, “protected our position, but no one at Chase played a role in convincing the administration to institute it.”

  20 Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, “75 Years Later, Today’s Zapatistas Still Fight the Rockefeller Legacy,” The Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1995.

  21 For more on the involvement of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in the Iran Nuclear Deal, see Peter Waldman’s article in Bloomberg, July 2, 20, “How Freelance Diplomacy Bankrolled by Rockefellers Has Paved the Way for an Iran Deal.”

  22 Rockefeller, Memoirs, 405.

  23 Ibid., 418. Carter would title his 1975 autobiography Why Not the Best?, acknowledging that the Trilateralists provided him a splendid learning opportunity.

  24 Winthrop started Winrock International as an Arkansas cattle ranch. It supplied prize breeding cattle to Nelson’s ranches in Brazil and Venezuela. Bill Clinton would be the keynote speaker at Winrock’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Hillary Clinton had served on Winthrop’s foundation board. Winrock went on to form an International Institute for Agricultural Development. It is heavily involved in Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and the newly created (2013), oil-rich South Sudan. Winrock also gets funds from the US Department of Ag
riculture for conservation, commodity credit, and rural housing, economic development, and utilities (usually in association with hydroelectric projects using dams). US AID is also tied to Winrock projects in Vietnam, Cambodia, the Caucuses, Bangledesh, and Guatemala.

  25 Obama, upon taking office, filled many cabinet positions with Rockefeller associates: most notably, for secretary of state, he chose Hillary Clinton, whose husband, Bill, supported the passage of NAFTA and who herself would call the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, the gold standard of “free trade” agreements until challenged by presidential contenders Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders. For national security advisor, Obama chose four star Marine Corps General James L. Jones, bringing him out of retirement from his leadership of the Institute of 21st Century Energy and his board membership at Chevron Oil (formally the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of California). Jones, who has admitted to taking “daily orders” from Henry Kissinger, has been dubbed Washington’s “New Kissinger.” For economic stability at home and abroad Obama chose as his treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, whose curriculum vitae includes a partnership in Kissinger Associates and positions at the International Monetary Fund and the Council on Foreign Relations. See Charlotte Dennett, The People v Bush (White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2010), 200.

  26 Henry Kissinger quoted on MSNBC, January 6, 2009.

  27 The oil giant’s propaganda campaign shattered Neva’s faith in ExxonMobil’s future value. “A prime reason,” she claimed, “is that Exxon’s valuation is based largely on the immense untapped reserves of oil and gas it owns. And yet if future generations are to inherit a livable world, most of those reserves must stay in the ground. … The company bases its growth and stability projection on increasing its sale of fossil fuels to developing countries. And yet those are the places that will be hurt worse by climate change. Indeed, many are already suffering the effects. As those nations confront ecological harm and consequent economic damage—in some cases even economic collapse—will they really provide ExxonMobil with the growth it forecasts? … I thought the company was being foolish. But we now know it was worse: it was being deceitful, in a way that is almost unimaginably heartless to future generations.” She found out that internal reports by the company’s scientists warned about dire implications of climate change, but the information was withheld from the public and investors by ExxonMobil’s management. Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, “Why I lost faith in ExxonMobil and donated my shares,” The Los Angeles Times, February 13, 2016.

  28 The largest of these spills were in Brooklyn, New York’s Greenpoint area and the Newtown Creek (by Standard Oil of New York’s refinery for over one hundred years); in Mayflower, Arkansas, with a spill of over 3,500 barrels of crude oil; in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, by ExxonMobil’s refinery releasing 28,688 pounds of benzene, 10,882 pounds of toluene, 1,100 pounds of cyclohexane, 1,564 pounds of hexane, and 12,605 pounds of additional volatile organic compounds, reportedly impacting people in neighboring communities with breathing problems and severe headaches; and in Alaska, with the infamous 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spilling eleven million gallons of crude oil off the Alaskan coast, killing off much of Prince Edward Sound’s herring fish industry and an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 250 American bald eagles, 300 harbor seals, 22 whales, and 20,000 seals. Sued, Exxon lost in a trial by jury, which awarded the plaintiffs $5 billion in damages. “The 13 Largest Oil Spills in History,” MNN-Mother Nature Network https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/the-13-largest-oil-spills-in-history. “Alaska Fishermen Still Struggling 21 Years after Exxon spill,” CNN, May 7, 2010. “Twenty Years Later, Impacts of the Exxon Valdez Linger,” Doug Strunck, Yale Environment 360. http://e360.yale.edu/features/twenty_years_later_impacts__of_the_exxon_valdez_linger

  29 The signers of the shareholder proposal submitted to ExxonMobil were Neva Rockefeller Goodwin. Legal & General Assurance (Pensions Management) Limited, Steven C. Rockefeller, Theodore Spencer, John de Cuevas, Stuart A. Rockefeller, Justin Rockefeller, Laura Thorn, Richard G. Rockefeller, David Rockefeller Jr., Charles Rockefeller, Ann Rockefeller Roberts, Peter M. O’Neil, Abby M. O’Neil, Jennifer Rockefeller Nolan, Mary Rockefeller Morgan, Alida Rockefeller Messinger, Eileen Rockefeller Growald, Abby O’Neill Caulkins, Margaret Dulany, and Abby A. Rockefeller. Letter with attachments, Heather L. Maples, Senior Special Counsel, Division of Corporation Finance, United States Securities Exchange Commission, to Amy Goodman of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, cc: Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, c/o Farha-Joyce Haboucha, Rockefeller & Co., Inc., March 19, 2010. Laura Thorn, now deceased, was the daughter of Marilyn Milton Simpson (sister of Abby Rockefeller Milton O’Neil) and cousin of Peter and George O’Neill.

  30 Allen Shecter, “After 146 Years, Rockefeller family is exiting the oil business,” CBS Moneywatch, March 24, 2016.

  In a press conference held at the offices of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund at 475 Riverside Drive in upper Manhattan, Neva Rockefeller Goodwin and Peter O’Neill represented this branch of the fourth and fifth “cousins generation” of the Rockefeller family who had succeeded to the helm of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) and the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF) which the Cousins had created in 1967 to fund their more liberal causes. In a prepared statement, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund charged that ExxonMobil was engaged in “morally reprehensible conduct … Evidence appears to suggest that the company worked since the 1980s to confuse the public about climate change’s march, while simultaneously spending millions to fortify its own infrastructure against climate change’s destructive consequences and track new exploration opportunities as the ice receded.”

  31 The Washington Post, January 11, 2017.

  32 Edward Mead Earle, “The Turkish Petroleum Company: A Study in Oleaginous Deplomacy,” Political Science Quarterly, 39 (June, 1924), 265–279.

  33 In 2015, ExxonMobil’s holdings were staggering. ExxonMobil held 5.4 million acres in Canada, including 700,00 acres of oil sands in the Kearl Oil Sands Project, 4.9 million acres in Germany; .4 million acres in offshore Norway; 1.5 million acres in the Netherlands; .6 million acres in the United Kingdom; .9 million acres in Argentina; 1.7 million acres in Australia; and, north of Australia, 1.1 million acres in of oil in Australia’s former colony, Papua New Guinea. In Africa, it held .8 million acres in offshore Nigeria; .4 million acres in offshore Angola; .1 million acres in offshore Equatorial Guinea, 46,000 acres in Chad and plans to begin exploration drilling in offshore Ivory Coast and Liberia. In the United States, it held 14.6 million acres (including 1.5 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico) and operated gas development projects through fracking in the Marcelles Shale, the Utica Shale, the Barnett Shale, the Fayetteville Shale and the Haynesville Shale. In Southeast Asia, Exxon Mobil held 1.7 million acres in Indonesia; 65,000 acres in Malaysia, and 21,000 acres in Thailand.

  In the Middle East, it held 81,000 acres in Abu Dhabi, 65,000 acres in Qatar, 10,000 acres in war-torn Yemen, and 300,000 acres in war-torn Iraq. Despite Iraq being its biggest holding in the Middle East, Tillerson entered into a development agreement in northern Iraq with the Kurds, who have long sought independence from Iraq, Turkey and Iran. To the north of Iran, ExxonMobil holds 300,000 acres in Kazakhstan and 8,000 acres in Azerbaijan. That leaves the biggest oil prize in the region, Iran, its oil formerly controlled by Mobil and British Petroleum (BP), untouched by foreign hands since the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the CIA-installed Shah.

  34 Esra Klein, “ExxonMobil Signs Russian Oil Pact,” The Washington Post, August 30, 2011.

  35 Isabel Ordonez and Victoria Stilwell, “Exxon Expands Rosneft Alliance to Siberian Shale,” The Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2012.

  36 Kathleen Calderwood, “Exxon in Russia: Sanctions Halt Roneft Partnership After Massive Oil Discovery,” International Business Times, September 29, 2014.

  37 Meanwhile, the $4 billion Rockefe
ller Foundation and Rockefeller Financial Services—corporate institutions much larger than the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund—continue to invest in fossil fuel corporations. The Rockefeller Trust Company, which controls hundreds of Rockefeller family trusts, also has huge holdings in energy and fossil fuel companies, its largest holdings include $84.5 million in ExxonMobil and $43.7 million in Chevron. Rockefeller Trust Company, Report for quarter ending 3/31/16, Form 13F, Securities and Exchange Commission, http://www.sec.gov/archives/edgar/data/866988/000031512316000.