Conspiracies Unlimited
From the Illuminati to Kennedy
by Greg Guma
SPECIAL REPORT (Originally published in Upstart Magazine, February 1998)
Uncovering a secret plot can quickly become a dead-end trip, guided by the researcher's
paranoid half-fantasies and the eerie vibration that everything is under hidden control.
Yet you don't have to be paranoid to realize that history isn't only what scholars write,
and that newspapers often edit -- and sometimes even alter -- the facts that they report.
Secret societies do exist, conspiracies both above and below ground; so do groups with
manipulative and often deadly game plans. But not all of them are bent on control: some
are aimed at altruistic goals, and others are just plain stupid. No one group as yet has
humanity under its thumb. On the other hand, conspiracies are quite real and not to be
underestimated.
I. THE BILDERBERGERS
A top secret group with the name Bilderberg is hard enough to swallow. But if you add that
it used to meet annually, with no press coverage, and make major international policy
decisions, the usual reaction is an arched eyebrow. "Poor guy," friends will
likely say. "He's finally gone off the deep end. Bilderbergers? Pretty weird."
The name actually came from the hotel in Oosterbeek, Holland used for the first session in
1954. After that, meetings were held around the globe, including a 1971 gathering in
Woodstock, Vermont. "The purpose of the conference," said Prince Bernhard, the
Dutch aristocrat who promoted the group and chaired meetings for more than 30 years,
"is that eminent persons in every field get the opportunity to speak freely without
being hindered by the knowledge that their words and ideas will be analyzed, commented
upon and eventually criticized in the press." At the time, Bernhard, who had married
Holland's Princess Juliana, was a spokesman for NATO as well as Dutch interests in South
America.
Nevertheless, U.S. Senator James Buckley wrote in 1974 that, "I don't subscribe to
the theory that there exists an organization of international bankers called the
Bilderbergers." A strange reaction since his brother, William F. Buckley, was on the
guest list that year.
Or consider this oddity. In response to an inquiry in 1975 a U.S. Justice Department
official said the White House knew nothing about the Bilderbergers. Yet President Ford
attended meetings of the group throughout the 1960s, and Donald Rumsfeld, then the
president's assistant, knew the group as "an open forum for the exchange of
ideas."
After the Woodstock session, a hotel employee put it succinctly: "They get together
once a year to talk about what is going to happen in the world."
Officially, the meeting in Woodstock, convening April 23, 1971, was billed as "an
international peace conference." U.S. State Department officials had conferred about
security arrangements with Vermont State Police. The state supplied 30 men in plain
clothes to support a private, armed security force, the FBI and Secret Service, even
though Vermont officials said they knew nothing about the event. One-hundred-fifty guards
and officers blanketed the sleepy town of 1,600, sealing off Laurence Rockefeller's hotel
and estate. Everything was set for the arrival of 85 leaders from around the world.
Limousines brought them from Lebanon, New Hampshire, where an air shuttle from Boston had
been arranged.
Although Bernhard issued a terse press statement when his plane touched ground at Boston's
Logan Airport, one participant, Francois Duchene of the London Institute of Strategic
Studies, who attended with then British Defense Minister Denis Healey, later explained
that, "America must face a Western Europe and Japan that are more independent."
That fit, since one scheduled topic was, "A change in the U.S. role in the
world."
To Major Glenn Davis of the Vermont State Police it was "a hairy scene. No one seemed
to know just who was in charge of what." But in the conference room, once all
employees had been cleared from the building, order reigned. Seating was arranged
alphabetically with Bernhard at the head of the table. Remarks were normally limited to
five minutes, with two "working papers" as discussion foci.
Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's National Security Advisor, missed the first session, but
became the main event when he delivered a briefing on U.S. plans. Months later, he was
charged by conservatives with "leaking" plans for Nixon's China trip and a
devaluation of the dollar. After the 1971 Bilderberg conference banks and major
corporations shifted capital out of the U.S., mainly to West Germany. Nixon's China
initiative eventually became public information. And in December, the dollar was devalued,
resulting in gains for people who had already converted to European currency. A
"change in the U.S. role" was under way, and the Bilderbergers may have helped
make it happen.
Private groups like the Bilderbergers, which have helped to build our current system of de
facto global management, don't actually discuss peace. Rather, their concern is managing
the world economy. Originally, Bilderberg meetings served to strengthen the Atlantic
alliance, and gradually became an "open conspiracy" to develop consensus among
political and business leaders beyond the power of nation-states. In the early 1950s,
Prince Bernhard brought the idea to the CIA, and with its assistance nabbed support from
the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. The money flowed through the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, whose director, Joseph Johnson, coordinated U.S. Bilderberg
activities.
Over the years the group became a model for transnational diplomacy, lending support to
European integration and oil company policies. Its steering committee was virtually a
who's who of international finance; David Rockefeller, Gabriel Hauge (Manufacturer's
Hanover Trust), Emilio Collado (Standard Oil, later Exxon) international lawyers such as
Arthur Dean and George Ball. All U.S. steering committee members were also members of the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which has dominated US foreign policy planning since
World War II.
Take George Ball, for example. A long-time CFR member, director of the Trilateral
Commission, Undersecretary of State, and lawyer with Lehman Brothers. Or Arthur Dean. CFR
member, partner in Sullivan and Cromwell law firm, whose partners included John Foster and
Allen Dulles. Before World War II Sullivan and Cromwell worked with German chemical and
steel monopolies. By the time the Bilderbergers began to meet, attorney Allen Dulles had
become CIA director. Small world, isn't it?
II. WAR AND PEACE WITH THE CIA
Evidence of conspiracy can begin with questions like this: What group has financial ties
to the megabuck empires of Rockefeller, Rothschild and Morgan, philosophical roots in
Fabian Socialism, and was instrumental in creating the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund? If you haven't guessed, it also publishes a monthly journal called Foreign
Affairs. Its resident members and "international citizens" form an aristocracy
of financiers, academics, lawyers, journalists and public officials which has planned US
foreign policy since the 1940s.
Columnist Joseph Kraft, a member himself, oncecalled this semi- secret elite a
"school for statesmen." If you haven't figured it out yet, the answer is the
Council on Foreign Relations, or CFR. And its objective for half a century has been
nothing less than to "create a new international order." To most leftists that
reads like US imperialism; to right-wingers it translates roughly as world government. You
know, the invisible government. The establishment. The men who brought us the the Vietnam
War and such offsprings as the Trilateral Commission, all in the name of
"peace."
The CFR began rolling at the Majestic Hotel in Paris, May 19, 1919, just as the World War
I peace talks were winding down. The meeting to create an international planning group was
called by "Colonel" Edward Mandell House, Texas oil man, power broker and
presidential advisor, whom Wilson called his "alter ego." The Colonel's Paris
conference was geared to generate support from finance czars (the gold-dollars alliance of
Rothschild and Rockefeller) and liberal internationalists. And so it did.
By 1950 the CFR controlled most American cabinet posts, and its members were a new
nobility: Nelson Rockefeller, Averill Harriman, Dean Rusk, Walter Lippman, and Allen
Dulles, to name but a few.
The Hitler Connection
When Allen Dulles died in 1969, President Nixon said, "In the nature of his task, his
achievements were known to only a few." Dulles' task from the '40s on was
intelligence gathering, disinformation and covert operations. Dulles viewed it as a craft,
and managed to elevate espionage to "professional" status. As much the architect
as the prosecutor of the Cold War in the '50s, he handled the CFR's "dirty
tricks."
Back in 1919 Dulles had attended the Paris talks with Colonel House, then joined the U.S.
State Department. By the late 1920s he'd become a partner in the Wall Street law firm of
Sullivan and Cromwell, which worked with Adolph Hitler's financial agent to acquire the
largest German monopolies, steel and chemicals, as clients. Dulles joined the board of the
Henry Schroeder Trust banking group in the '30s, while Schroeder bankrolled the Nazis.
But allegiances changed when the war began. Dulles left the firm and began spying at a
high level in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a new U.S. intelligence and
subversion network. In 1944 the spymaster got to work on two covert missions: liquidating
the Fuhrer and working out peace terms with other Nazis without letting Russia find out.
A Network of Agents
Espionage is the business of secrecy, manipulation and deception. It breeds conspiracies,
including hidden networks of mercenaries that transcend national interests. In the summer
of '44 such a network blanketed Europe as the Allies broke into German territory.
One spy on the job was George deMohrenschildt, a career agent who knew German intelligence
well from work with the Abwehr 2 (Nazi spies within the U.S.) before the war. In the '40s
he shot film in Poland, built ties with French and German agents, and scouted for oil
interests.
Allen Dulles was running OSS operations in Switzerland, while another agent, Joseph
Retinger, promoted Polish liberation from Germany. Like deMohrenschildt, Retinger also had
oil contacts; his were Mexican, dating back to the '20s. He had worked in London with the
exiled Polish government. In August 1944, at age 58, he parachuted into Nazi territory
near Warsaw just before liberation, bringing big money to Polish nationalists.
Meanwhile, Allen Dulles, who had urged U.S. entry into the war on grounds of
"enlightened selfishness," was handling other parts of the plan. With German
Abwehr and diplomats he tried to assassinate Hitler, and although the plots fizzled,
Hitler soon died -- presumably a suicide. A year later, following Retinger's lead, Dulles
sparked the Cold War by scheming to cut Russia out of the surrender negotiations.
What's the point of recounting all this cloak-and-dagger stuff? Simply that the old
networks never die, and this one led to President Kennedy's death and beyond. The daring
Joseph Retinger went on to become the philosophical father of a united Europe, as well as
the man who urged Prince Bernhard to launch the Bilderberg conferences. Allen Dulles, of
course, went well beyond the OSS, which amassed a $75 million budget and developed a
worldwide network by the time Truman disbanded it. Dulles attended Bilderberg sessions,
drafted the master plan for the CIA, and ran the agency for nine years, beating back
legislative drives to crack the web of secrecy. His friends said he had a "zest for
conspiracy." Be that as it may, he believed that, "We cannot safely limit our
response to the Communist strategy of take-over solely to those cases where we are invited
in by a government still in power."
Dulles felt so strongly about taking the initiative that the CIA overthrew a leftist
regime in Guatemala in 1954. But five years later the CIA saw new trouble: Fidel Castro.
And that's where deMohrenschildt fits in. After the war, he had resettled in Dallas,
renewing his ties with other anti-Communist Russians. He worked on contract with both the
CIA and oil companies, his cover occupation "petroleum geologist." His walking
tour from Dallas to Panama in 1961 landed him in Guatemala City, where he made contact
with anti-Castro Cubans and mercenaries revving up for an invasion called the Bay of Pigs.
Two years later, working with money from right-wing Dallas oil baron H.L. Hunt, a core of
CIA agents unhappy with Kennedy's crackdown on "the company," and some bitter
Bay of Pigs survivors, deMohrenschildt had found a new mission: helping to arrange the
assassination of a president. Coordinating things for him locally was an FBI informer --
Jack Ruby.
III. CONSPIRACIES ILLUMINATED
When John Kennedy visited Dallas in November, 1963 the American dream was shattered and
Camelot died. Ever since then we've been looking for the how and why of his assassination.
Was it Oswald alone, or a conspiracy? Was Cuba involved, and what role did Jack Ruby and
others play?
Ex-agent Robert Morrow told his version to the House Assassination Committee in 1976. The
assassination team, he said, combined CIA agents and anti-Castro Cubans with whom he had
worked on schemes to run guns and pump bogus money into Cuba. On November 22, 1963,
according to Morrow, it went this way:
Three teams were in place by 12:30, linked via walkie-talkie to Guy Bannister, a former
Chicago FBI chief who subsequently handled anti-Castro operations in New Orleans. Two men
were stationed behind a stockade fence near the grassy knoll, with another two inside the
county court building overlooking Dealey Plaza -- one of them Jack Ruby.
Ruby had also worked in Chicago in the '50s, a mafia "soldier" accused at the
time of murdering the treasurer of the Waste Handlers Union. In Dallas Ruby built ties
with police while running a bar, and ran guns to Cuban exiles under orders from CIA agent
Clay Shaw. Ruby also worked with George deMohrenschildt, the veteran spy with ties to H.L.
Hunt.
Lee Oswald, the fall guy, was in the Texas Book Depository that day, according to Morrow,
but probably on the second floor -- while a "second Oswald" fired from the
sixth-floor window.
Ruby's police contacts came in handy after the job. In The Assassination Tapes, researcher
George O'Toole reveals that Ruby knew Sgt. Gerry Hill, who not only found the rifle shells
but had arrived early at the shooting of Officer Tippit and helped to arrest Oswald. He
may have arranged evidence to implicate Oswald before the investigation began.
The coverup was almost instinctive. Hoover and the FBI were embarrassed at having used
Oswald as an informer. The CIA was directly implicated, since several conspirators had
worked on covert Cuban projects -- even after the Bay of Pigs. False trails threw
investigators off the scent, the most insidious of these promoted by a newsman, Lonnie
Hudkins, shortly after Kennedy's death. Hudkins said that the President was killed in
retaliation by Cuban agents, including Oswald, when they learned about US plots to
assassinate Castro. But Hudkins was a friend of Jack Ruby's, working with him in gun
smuggling days. He was also a former employee of both the CIA and H.L. Hunt.
Morrow claims that it wasn't Cubans, but a group within the CIA that wanted to stop
Kennedy's drive to subordinate "the company" to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
They and Cuban exiles also held a specific grudge -- namely, that Kennedy had held back on
naval support during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Oil interests and organized crime also had
much to gain: a "liberated" Cuba open to investments and an independent CIA.
Since the '60s many conspiracy "theories" have been advanced. One that has
received favorable press coverage over the year was the work of Edward Epstein, He nabbed
$500,000 from Reader's Digest for his tale of Oswald the Marxist, who gave U-2 spy plane
secrets to Russia and then worked through the FBI to kill Kennedy. But it was Lonnie
Hudkins' story all over again.
In the 60s, when New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison was starting to break open the conspiracy,
Epstein had attacked Garrison in print. That drew praise from CIA honcho Richard Helms, a
friend of Shaw's, who circulated the writing as a model debunking of the conspiracy
theory. While Epstein prepared his book, Legend, in the late 70s, several important
sources died suddenly, either shortly before or after meeting him. In March 1977,
deMohrenschildt talked with Epstein, and within minutes was found dead of gunshot wounds.
The old spy had just agreed to testify on his part in Kennedy's death.
Kerry Thornley, who was in the Marines with Oswald and later founded the
"Discordian" religion, developed another theory. He believed the culprits were
the Bavarian Illuminati, a 200-year-old secret society. Oddly enough, Jim Garrison thought
for awhile that Thornley was the "second Oswald." In time, Thornley came to
think that Garrison, and even his own friends, were Illuminati agents.
"All conspiracy buffs are persecuted eventually," writes Robert Anton Wilson,
author of the ultimate conspiracy story, Illuminatus. Wilson knew Thornley and watched his
obsession consume him; yet Wilson managed to transcend paranoia, transforming the strange,
divergent theories surrounding Kennedy's death -- and other conspiracies -- into satire.
In Illuminatus the death of Kennedy is part of a fact-and-speculation history which begins
in Atlantis and extends into politics, mythology, and the realm of the occult. The central
mystery is the true identity of the Illuminati: Are they defunct, as the Encyclopedia
Brittanica notes, a secret society founded in 1776 and suppressed by the Bavarian
government within 10 years? Was the eye-in-the-Pyramid an Illuminati symbol given to
Thomas Jefferson by a stranger in a black cloak? Is the Council on Foreign Relations the
latest manifestation of the original Illuminati? Are they controlled by bankers or
anarchists, Jesuits or Satanists? Were they revived by the nazis, or are they, rather,
extraterrestrial visitors who want to help humanity evolve?
Wilson argues the world has room for many competing conspiracies, the sacred and profane.
And he has the good sense to joke about them all.
Pursuit of hidden knowledge leads naturally to one conspiracy or another. Personally, I've
concluded that world chaos, being generated by some conspirators in their quest for
political and economic power, is merely a prologue to man's next evolutionary step. This
doesn't lessen the pain or the oppressive power of elites, but it can help to point the
way. If men are to reach higher intelligence, conspiracy must be broken at its roots --
the ethic of secrecy and deception. This calls for trust and positive energy to combat the
negativity inherent in the lust for power.
"Positive energy is as real as gravity," notes Wilson. If so, the antidote to
negativity -- and conspiracy -- is to "come back with all the positive energy you
have." He calls that the final secret of the Illuminati.
Greg Guma is the Editor of Toward Freedom, a world affairs magazine based
in Burlington, and writes a weekly column for The Vermont Times.
All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their respective owner.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains
copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material
available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental,
political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social
justice issues, and for the general purpose of criticism, comment, news reporting,
teaching, research and / or educational purposes only. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any
such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the
material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for
research and educational purposes. If you wish to use this material for purposes other than provided by law. You must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/index.html,