Looking back on it, the Gulf War - if America's massive assault on Iraq with minimal resistance can really be called a "war" - seems like surreal theater. Few events have so keenly delineated the distance between reality and spectacle. Even more alarming, the war left little question which domain we inhabit. Other than the obvious - yes, Saddam Hussein did invade Kuwait and, yes, that was really, really bad - very little in the predominant government-media view of the situation intersected with anything verifiable.
The U.S. government's actions leading up to, during, and after the war suggest that the inaugural battle of the New World Order was some kind of a manufactured crisis with a hidden agenda.
"The shallow, Nintendo view of the war on TV was false," former Pentagon defense expert Pierre Sprey testified to Congress. "It was created by hand-picked videotapes and shamelessly doctored statistics." "Surgical" air strikes? "About as surgical as operating on a cornea with machetes," as one Washington Post columnist wrote just a month into the bombardment.
"Kuwait will once again be free," predicted George Bush, announcing the start of bombing. "Long martial law hinted by Kuwait," noted a New York Times headline as the war wound down.
George Bush said that Saddam Hussein was in some ways worse than Hitler. His point is arguable, but the fact is that the very same George Bush signed a National Security Directive in 1989 ordering closer ties with Iraq and clearing the way for $500 million in credits to Mr. "Worse-than-Hitler." This is not surprising. Bush had spent nearly a decade in an administration weirdly enamored with Iraq, despite occasional public denunciations of Saddam Hussein's police-state governance.
"Saddam's military machine is partly a creation of the Western powers," reported investigative journalist Murray Waas. Throughout Iraq's eight-year way of attrition with Iran, the governments of France, Britain, and Germany sold the Iraqi strongman everything from fighter places and Exocet missiles to ingredients for brewing nerve gas. The United States - technically - maintained an embargo on arms sales to Iraq, but the Reagan administration let it be circumvented by encouraging third-party munitions sales as well as through direct sales of "dual use" technology: computers, even helicopters, which the Iraqis pledged to use only for "education" or "recreation." Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. According to Waas, when Bush took office as president, Dual-use sales "shifted into a far more alarming area - the prerequisites of weapons of mass destruction."
After the brief Gulf War, inquiries into these arms transactions erupted into a short-lived scandal dubbed Iraqgate. At the center of the storm was a seemingly insignificant Atlanta branch of a multinational Italian bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), which somehow spirited $5 billion to Iraq over two years until raided by the FBI on August 4, 1989. Yet under the Bush administrations, the accused bank managers were not indicted for more than a year. And then, by some coincidence, the indictment was returned one day after Bush declared a cease fire in the Gulf War.
Officials of the tiny BNL branch were portrayed as "rogue operators" by government prosecutors who didn't find it worth their time to ask how $5 billion (yes billion) could find its way from one bank to a "Worse-than-Hitler" dictator without the knowledge of government officials or at least the bank's higher-ups in Italy.
The Reagan and Bush administrations shared not only money and materiel but also intelligence information with Saddam as Iraq battled the forces of the evil Ayatollah in Iran.
"In other words," said former Reagan National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher, "we advised the Iraqis on how to prepare for war with the United States."
Leading up to the invasion of Kuwait, the United States sent Saddam Hussein not only aid but also comfort. Just a week before the August 2, 1990, invasion, Saddam sat down with U.S. ambassador April Glaspie - the now-infamous "green light" meeting. Glaspie was unnervingly blasé given the impending crisis. She even made a point of noting that the United States had "no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." She also told Saddam that none other than Secretary of State James Baker had passed on word that "the issue was not associated with America."
Saddam apparently took Glaspie's remarks as carte blanche, and maybe they were intended that way. Hard to believe, given the administration's later public position, but this laissez-faire attitude was wholly consistent with Bush administration policy. A few days after the Glaspie Hussein confab, and just three days before the invasion, John Kelly, the assistant secretary of state in charge of the Middle East, testified before Congress, where he was asked if in the event of an Iraqi military action, "Is it correct to say that we have no treaty, no commitment, which would oblige us to use American forces?"
"That's exactly right," Kelly replied. Another shining green light.
No one promised the United States would not use force. But if the Bush administration's aim was to prevent war, it was picking an odd way to go about it. if anything, Bush and his buddies were egging the Iraqis on.
The Kuwaiti al-Sabah monarchy, which stood to suffer the most, also exhibited bizarre behavioral symptoms. In a preinvasion summit Iraq demanded $10 billion from Kuwait as compensation for singlehandedly fending off the forces of Islamic funamentalism for eight years by engaging Iran in a disastrous stalemate war. The demand was not altogether unreasonable, and, in fact, Kuwait agreed to pay. But the al-Sabahs offered only $9 billion - a deliberate slap in the face. Later, after other agreements were reached, Kuwait would alter their terms. At the time, Saddam's troops were massing on the Kuwaiti border. Courage on the al-Sabah's part? Not likely, since they were the first ones out of the country when the tanks rumbled south. They chilled out in a five-star Saudi hotel while Bush's "coalition" fought their battle.
"If Saddam comes across the border, let him come," said Kuwait's foreign minister, Sheikh Sabbah, to Jordan's King Hussein in the midst of the preinvasion non-negotiations. "The Americans will get him out."
He had reason for confidence. When Iraqi troops ransacked the Kuwaiti Foreign Ministry they found a November 22, 1989, memo recording the results of a meeting between Kuwaiti officials and officials of the CIA.
"We agreed with the American side that it was important to take advantage of the deteriorating economic situation in Iraq in order to put pressure on that country's government to delineate our common border. The Central Intelligence Agency gave us its view of appropriate means of pressure. . . . ."
The CIA denounced the document as bogus - but admitted that the meeting took place.
There was another interesting, if somewhat less sinister meeting - this one on April 12, 1990 - with five u/ senators powwowing with the "Butcher of Bagdhad." Republican Alan Simpson sucked up to ol' Butch, telling him that his problems "lie with the Western media and not with the U.S. government. . . . And it is a haughty and pampered press; they all consider themselves political geniuses."
This sentiment was echoed later by Glaspie, who shared with Saddam her opinion that "if the American president had control of the media his job would be much easier."
Ah, but during the Gulf War the American president did have control of the media. As did the military. Herding reporters into "press pools" proved effective - helped along by the journalists' acquiescence.
"If you look at it from the outset, the press was reflecting the view of the government," said Los Angeles Times Washington Bureau chief Jack Nelson, "and it never really changed."
Robert Fisk, Middle East correspondent for the British Independent was one of the few reporters to ignore the pools. When he showed up at one scene where the pool reporters had clustered awaiting the official military handouts, he was met by an NBC reporter who greeted him by saying, "You asshole. You'll prevent us from working. You're not allowed here. Get out."
The vituperative press pooler was Brad Willis, whose version of the incident, as recounted in Harper's publisher, John MacArthur's, book about the Gulf War press, included an extra detail. Fisk, Willis claimed, posed as a pool member and Willis, displaced by Fisk, was then bounced from the scene as a result. If Fisk's gambit succeeded, not only Willis but the whole pool would have been deprived of coverage because the nature of pool reporting was not to compete for the best story but to share the military's prescrubbed version of the story.
"It was a textbook example of the probably deliberate divide-and-conquer strategy of the U.S. military," wrote MacArthur. "Fisk, of course, wanted an uncensored exclusive and would do whatever it took to get it; he didn't want to share. Willis, playing by the Pentagon rules, was angry at the prospect of getting beaten by another reporter who was breaking the rules."
Consequently, with Fisk one of the rare exception, war reporting took on a quasi-Orwellian demeanor. The press-promulgated paradigm of the conflict was Yellow Ribbonsville, U.S.A. versus Satanic Saddam. American reporters, almost to the one, referred to the U.S. military as "we," obviating any remaining distinction between journalist and subject and casting time-honored "objectivity" to the desert winds. Iraqi Scud missiles became "terrorist weapons" and "horrifying machines of death," while U.S. bombs were "smart." When Newsweek put the Stealth bomber on its cover it asked, "How many lives can it save?"
"That was the spin," marvel media critics Martin Lee and Norman Solomon in their book, Unreliable Sources. "American weapons don't destroy lives; they save them!" After all, dead Iraqis did not count as "casualties." They were merely "collateral damage," which in Time magazine's definition meant "dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood."
"Denial was the key to the psychological and political structures supporting the war," Lee and Solomon wrote.
As for the war's motives, the interests of Western-based multinational oil companies and perhaps more important, the Western banks where Kuwaiti and Saudi oil Sheiks stowed their profits were treated with silence.
While Bush administration propaganda was treated as fact, the U.S. media was quick to denounce Iraqi "propaganda," even when it wasn't propaganda - as in the infamous case of the Baby Milk Bombing. A week into the war, CNN's Peter Arnett, the only Western reporter in Bagdhad, drew global condemnation for reporting that an allied bombing raid had destroyed Iraq's only infant-formula factory, leaving the nation's newborns hungry.
The U.S. military pooh-poohed the Iraqi claim. "It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure," said Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell. But the French contractors who built the plant and the New Zealand dairy technicians who visited it regularly swore it was exactly what the Iraqis said it was.
The Macneil/Lehrer News Hour showed a short clip of wounded Iraqi civilians - with the commentary that the scenes were subject to "heavy-handed manipulation" by the Iraqi government. As Lee and Solomon point out, the barely subliminal message was that anyone concerned about Iraqi suffering was a Saddam Hussein dupe.
Late in 1991, former Bob Woodward collaborator Scott Armstrong reported another unstated motivation for the war - though his story in the left-wing Mother Jones magazine met with major media indifference. Armstrong wrote that the previous decade, and at an astronomical cost of $200 billion, the United States and Saudi Arabia had assembled a massive infrastructure of "superbases" in the desert. This was all done without public, or even congressional knowledge. The war protected those bases, and the bases were instrumental in fighting the war.
Bush's star burned bright in the Gulf War glow, but somehow he managed to fritter away his political capital and lose his reelection attempt. But even in defeat, Bush, or at least his kids and pals, got a boon from the Gulf War. According to reporter Seymour Hersh, Neil and Marvin Bush; family friend and Bush's secretary of state, James Baker; and once high-flying chief of staff John Sununu (among others) have all worked hard to strike war-spoils deals with the Kuwaiti government.
Baker represented Enron, America's biggest builder of natural gas pipelines. The Enron exec who dispatched Baker to Kuwait wondered aloud to Hersh: "Is there any reason American companies shouldn't profit from the war in Kuwait?"
American politicians continue to profit. Bush's successor, Bill Clinton, enjoyed a healthy boost in his then-pallid polls when on June 26, 1993 - two and a half years after the Gulf War ended - he ordered another bombing raid on Bagdhad.
Why? The given rationale was that the Iraqis had attempted to assassinate Bush when the ex-president had visited Kuwait a few months earlier. Kuwait arrested seventeen supposed low-level conspirators in the plot, but as Hersh reported, "The American government's case against Iraq - as it has been outlined in public, anyway - is seriously flawed."
The dread Iraqi terrorists hand-picked for the Bush job included a coffee shop owner and a male nurse - the latter was the only source of information about the supposed plot. Most of the aspiring assassins were whiskey smugglers. The Kuwaitis have been known to exaggerate, especially about Iraqi violations of the sovereignty. When a group of Iraqi fishermen unwisely landed on the Kuwaiti island of Bubiyan, the Kuwaiti press release said that an Iraqi naval force had attempted to invade the island only to be defeated by crack Kuwaiti troops.
None of the male nurse's evidence has proved conclusive, or even close. The most solid bit of evidence is the "signature" of an electronic remote control detonator found in the bomb allegedly sent to blow up Bush. But Hersh reports that the piece was a common scrap of circuit board whose signature was anything but dsitinctive.
It is doubtful whether the "real" reason why the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf will ever emerge - and even more doubtful whether there was a single, identifiable motive. Unlike in Vietnam, where the ambiguous outcome elicited natural suspicions, in the Gulf the decisiveness of victory has buried the reality deeper than any Iraqi or American soldier who went to a sandy grave.
Friday, January 19, 2007
The One World Order
During the heady days of the Persian Gulf War, President George Bush dusted off an ancient phrase that immediately set teeth on edge - that is, the grinding teeth of conspiracy trackers.
"I hope history will record that the Gulf Crisis was the crucible of the new world order," Bush intoned in the wake of his greatest triumph, the American-led victory against Iraq. New World Order. The phrase had tripped from the president's lips at least half a dozen other times before and after American smart bombs had transformed the former "wimp" into a short-term war hero.
Of course, the real meaning of the term - bandied about for decades by a phalanx of elite bankers and industrialists - couldn't have been clearer to ultra-right-wingers of the John Birch Society ilk. Simply put, New World Order was code for "one-world government," a megalomaniacal communist plot to enslave the planet. In the words of the late Gay Allen, the prolific Birch Society author, "Communism is an arm of a bigger conspiracy to control the world by power-mad billionaires." Bush, the ultimate establishment insider, was clearly an agent of these crypto-capitalist/communist forces - as had been every sell-out president since FDR.
Lest we dismiss such concerns as the ranting of survivalist kooks, it's important to note that the New World Order is an equal opportunity conspiracy theory. Left-wingers were just as exercised by Bush's words, although progressives tended to see the preppy president more as a champion of capitalism run amok than as a creeping commie.
In fact, right-wing or left, suspicions about the New World Order are actually quite rational. The champions of the "NWO" are indeed a cadre of powerful industrialists, bankers, academics, and politicians who for three quarters of a century have been a gray eminence behind the governance of Britain and America. More to the point, perhaps, they are the governors of the Western world. Call them what you will, they are they "Establishment." Through vastly influential organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, these elites formulate tomorrow's public policy today and staff the ship of state with their own.
If this network is something less than the Red devil depicted in many a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is nonetheless a kind of big business cabal that helps the elite of the private sector, if not "rule the world," then at least run it like a business.
The self-appointed historian of this power brokerage was Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley, a distinguished scholar whom right-wingers regard as a smoking gun personified. In his massive history of the modern era, Tragedy and Hope, the late Professor Quigley wrote that there "does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way that the radical Right believes the Communists act."
Quigley admitted that he "had been close" to this "semisecret organization" of international manipulators - indeed, admired its goals - and had been allowed to examine its "papers and secret records."
According to Quigley, the network's benevolent aim is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole" - thereby assuring peace and prosperity and, of course, profit.
This network grew out of secret political societies hatched by diamond baron/stealth fanatic Cecil Rhodes (Rhodesia, Rhodes scholarships) and a clutch of bleeding-hear imperialists resolved to prevent the sun from setting on the British Empire. By 1908, Rhodes was dead, but his dream and vast wealth lived on to sire the furtive Round Table Groups.
During the early part of this century, the aristocratic Round Tablers - who set up franchises in South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada - yearned to "civilize" native subjects of the British dominion. If properly instilled with liberal Oxford values and presumable an appreciation of cricket, even the most "backward" races could lean to be contented, perhaps "autonomous," citizens of empire. A connected dream was to yoke all of the English-speaking nations (America included) into a confederation of Atlantic states, with the capital in Washington, D.C.! (To Birchers' ears this is an early echo of the dread "one-world government.") If Their grander schemes flopped rather obliquely, the Round Tablers achieved a failure of spectacular proportions when they led the drive to appease Hitler.
In America, the Rhodes groups and J. P. Morgan banking interests incorporated the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1921 as a Round Table "front." According to Quigley, CFR and other Round Table cutouts became "a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy" in both countries. This is the famous "Eastern Establishment" that continues to hold sway over the U.S. government, academia, Wall Street, and major American media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post.
The American arm of the network flourished under the patronage of billionaire benefactors, including the Morgan and Carnegie interests - and of course the ubiquitous Rockefeller family.
Ah, the Rockefellers! Dons of the financial underworld! Godfathers of the commie/capitalist internationale! That, anyway, is what many a right-wing conspiracist believes. In Bircher fulminations, the four R's - Rhodes, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Reds - are demons that turbocharge the dry facts or Professor Quigley.
The radical-right theories were never synthesized more impressively than in Gary Allen's 1971 call to arms, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Mergiing nativist strains of anticommunism, antielitism, and "gold standard" conservatism, Allen argues that the Rockefeller-CFR-Establishment cabal - dubbed the "Insiders" - had toiled for decades to "abolish the United States" and establish an "all powerful world socialist super-state."
Allen wasn't suggesting that supercapitalists like the Rockefellers were sincere Marxists, but rather that they used socialism "as the bait… the excuse to establish the dictatorship." According to Allen, the Rockefellers, the British Rothschild clan, and their carious corporate agents had not only financed Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, but David Rockefeller may have been the "paymaster" who later fired his employee, Soviet premier Krushchev! How did "the Rockefeller Foreign Office" keep unruly Moscow in line? Allen muses that the Insiders might have used "SMERSH, the international Communist murder organization described in testimony before congressional committees and by Ian Fleming in his James Bond Books."
Allen's vision was nothing if not dramatic. In a successful effort early in the century to hijack the American economy and political arena, he repots, the Insiders established a central bank (the Federal Reserve System), lorded over by international bankers; they followed up by saddling citizens with the income tax, thereby fulfilling two key planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto. The Insiders then "scientifically engineered" the stock market crash of 1929. They managed to top that feat by starting World Wars I and II (the latter through their appeasement of Hitler) and the Vietnam debacle, profiteering in all cases by arming both sides. Oh yeah, they also invented the nefarious United (communist) Nations as the keystone of their relentless New World Order.
In a rare instance of giving the Rockefellers a bit of a break, Birchers revived the old right-wing theory that the real powers behind the Insider throne - both communist and "cartel capitalist" - were those standby conspiracy bugaboos, the illuminati, a secret freemasonic society that definitely existed, albeit in eighteenth-century Bavaria.
(In an effort to cast the Illuminati as a "Zionist" cabal, anti-Smites - and Allen wasn't one - often invoke the Jewish Rothschilds and the old lie that the Bolshevik revolution was all a Jewish plot. Allen dismissed that "thinking," and typically had a more interesting angle: The Insiders themselves covertly promoted such anti-Semitic falsehoods in an effort to tar all their critics as racists. Of course, Allen offered no evidence for this theory, but perhaps he was onto something. More than one modern blowhard of the "there-are-no-conspiracies" school has offhandedly broadbrushed conspiracy theorists by yoking them with Holocaust apologists.)
Although the conspiratorial tapestry woven by the Birchers was a bit, well, busy, even the staid Professor Quigley grudgingly acknowledged that it contained "a modicum of truth." For one thing, the so-called Insiders "had no aversion to cooperating with the Communists," per Quigley. After all, big business is big business, and what better way of acquiring access to untapped natural resources than being neighborly? Likewise, the CFR-dominated U.S. Department of State was indeed very influential in midwifing the UN. And the Round Tablers did push for the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
As for the Rockefellers, the family has played a major role in the network since its early days. David Rockefeller, chairman of the CFR board, founded the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s (same Euro-American "internationalists" but with the additional membership of Japanese power players). Another Rockefeller-Insider group arose as the retiring Round Tables passed the torch to the CFR (either that, or went deep under-ground, a hunch of many conspiracy theorists): This was the Bilderberg Group, named for the location of its first annual meeting, the hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.
As we've seen, the CFR-Trilat-Bilderberg membership rolls were brimming with American official and politicians eager to suck up to the power establishment. Even Richard Nixon, whose animus for the Eastern Elite was famous, joined the CFR and later hired Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. (Birchers haven't forgotten that President Nixon invoked the spooky phrase "new world order" during his trip to Red China.) Other U.S. presidents who were Insiders included Gerald Ford (CFR, Bilderberg), Jimmy Carter (CFR, Trilat), George Bush (CFR board director, Trilat), and even Bill Clinton (CFR, Trilat, and Bilderberg).
During the Carter era 284 CFR/Trilats held administration positions. Key Insiders included Vice President Walter Mondale, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (director of the Trilateral Commission), Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. By the end of Reagon's two terms, the number had risen to 313. Reaganite Insiders included Secretaries of State Al Haig (a favorite candidate for Watergate's Deep Throat) and George Shultz (the tenth consecutive CFR alumnus to hold that job) and CIA director William Casey.
Under Bush, "the conspiracy president," the number skyrocketed to 382, including national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and the attorney general, Richard Thornburgh.
As for the Clinton administration, little has changed as far as CFR faces go. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, all five of his undersecretaries, and many of their underlings are CFR-ites. So are Clinton's national security adviser and CIA director, and so is his Republicrat aide, David Gergen.
Gergen is only one point of light in a constellation of media stars absorbed into the CFR. A partial list included the late Walter Lippman (a CFR director in the 1930s), CIA propagandist/Life magazine publisher C. D. Jackson (who helped set up the Bilderberg Group), New York Timesman Leslie Gelv (current CFR president), Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Jum Lehrer, the non-Canadian half of the Macneil/Lehre NewsHour.
Though the CFR/Trilat connection runs deep into the blue veins of the Establishment, predictably its members scoff at the suggestion that they hold excessive influence over American "democracy" and world affairs. David Rockefeller once sniffed at what he called these "foolish attacks on false issues." With perhaps excessive modesty, he assured the skeptics that his Trilateral Commission is just "a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies."
Well, apparently all groups of concerned citizens are not created equal. As journalist Bill Moyers put it in a 1980 TV documentary: "David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. but what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work."
If the New World Order isn't a blueprint for the "world super-state" of Bircher nightmares, it may simply mean a world more "orderly" for transnational big business. The implications are just as ominous, for although Trilats don't aim to raze Capitol Hill to make way for a U.N. high rise, they have made it clear that democracy often hampers their terribly important work. Not only have the Round Table progeny pushed for "limited," strongman "democracy" in third world countries, they have openly complained about the surfeit of liberty for the little people in this country.
A 1975 Trilateral Commission report concluded that the United States was plagued by an "excess of democracy," when "what is needed is a greater degree of moderation in democracy," to improve "governability." Trilat co-founder Brzezinski recommended a study on "Control Over Man's Development and Behavior" to devise "new means of social control," especially "in advanced societies."
In the Coming New World Order, the natives apparently have yet to be civilized.
"I hope history will record that the Gulf Crisis was the crucible of the new world order," Bush intoned in the wake of his greatest triumph, the American-led victory against Iraq. New World Order. The phrase had tripped from the president's lips at least half a dozen other times before and after American smart bombs had transformed the former "wimp" into a short-term war hero.
Of course, the real meaning of the term - bandied about for decades by a phalanx of elite bankers and industrialists - couldn't have been clearer to ultra-right-wingers of the John Birch Society ilk. Simply put, New World Order was code for "one-world government," a megalomaniacal communist plot to enslave the planet. In the words of the late Gay Allen, the prolific Birch Society author, "Communism is an arm of a bigger conspiracy to control the world by power-mad billionaires." Bush, the ultimate establishment insider, was clearly an agent of these crypto-capitalist/communist forces - as had been every sell-out president since FDR.
Lest we dismiss such concerns as the ranting of survivalist kooks, it's important to note that the New World Order is an equal opportunity conspiracy theory. Left-wingers were just as exercised by Bush's words, although progressives tended to see the preppy president more as a champion of capitalism run amok than as a creeping commie.
In fact, right-wing or left, suspicions about the New World Order are actually quite rational. The champions of the "NWO" are indeed a cadre of powerful industrialists, bankers, academics, and politicians who for three quarters of a century have been a gray eminence behind the governance of Britain and America. More to the point, perhaps, they are the governors of the Western world. Call them what you will, they are they "Establishment." Through vastly influential organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, these elites formulate tomorrow's public policy today and staff the ship of state with their own.
If this network is something less than the Red devil depicted in many a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is nonetheless a kind of big business cabal that helps the elite of the private sector, if not "rule the world," then at least run it like a business.
The self-appointed historian of this power brokerage was Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley, a distinguished scholar whom right-wingers regard as a smoking gun personified. In his massive history of the modern era, Tragedy and Hope, the late Professor Quigley wrote that there "does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way that the radical Right believes the Communists act."
Quigley admitted that he "had been close" to this "semisecret organization" of international manipulators - indeed, admired its goals - and had been allowed to examine its "papers and secret records."
According to Quigley, the network's benevolent aim is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole" - thereby assuring peace and prosperity and, of course, profit.
This network grew out of secret political societies hatched by diamond baron/stealth fanatic Cecil Rhodes (Rhodesia, Rhodes scholarships) and a clutch of bleeding-hear imperialists resolved to prevent the sun from setting on the British Empire. By 1908, Rhodes was dead, but his dream and vast wealth lived on to sire the furtive Round Table Groups.
During the early part of this century, the aristocratic Round Tablers - who set up franchises in South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada - yearned to "civilize" native subjects of the British dominion. If properly instilled with liberal Oxford values and presumable an appreciation of cricket, even the most "backward" races could lean to be contented, perhaps "autonomous," citizens of empire. A connected dream was to yoke all of the English-speaking nations (America included) into a confederation of Atlantic states, with the capital in Washington, D.C.! (To Birchers' ears this is an early echo of the dread "one-world government.") If Their grander schemes flopped rather obliquely, the Round Tablers achieved a failure of spectacular proportions when they led the drive to appease Hitler.
In America, the Rhodes groups and J. P. Morgan banking interests incorporated the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1921 as a Round Table "front." According to Quigley, CFR and other Round Table cutouts became "a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy" in both countries. This is the famous "Eastern Establishment" that continues to hold sway over the U.S. government, academia, Wall Street, and major American media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post.
The American arm of the network flourished under the patronage of billionaire benefactors, including the Morgan and Carnegie interests - and of course the ubiquitous Rockefeller family.
Ah, the Rockefellers! Dons of the financial underworld! Godfathers of the commie/capitalist internationale! That, anyway, is what many a right-wing conspiracist believes. In Bircher fulminations, the four R's - Rhodes, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Reds - are demons that turbocharge the dry facts or Professor Quigley.
The radical-right theories were never synthesized more impressively than in Gary Allen's 1971 call to arms, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Mergiing nativist strains of anticommunism, antielitism, and "gold standard" conservatism, Allen argues that the Rockefeller-CFR-Establishment cabal - dubbed the "Insiders" - had toiled for decades to "abolish the United States" and establish an "all powerful world socialist super-state."
Allen wasn't suggesting that supercapitalists like the Rockefellers were sincere Marxists, but rather that they used socialism "as the bait… the excuse to establish the dictatorship." According to Allen, the Rockefellers, the British Rothschild clan, and their carious corporate agents had not only financed Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, but David Rockefeller may have been the "paymaster" who later fired his employee, Soviet premier Krushchev! How did "the Rockefeller Foreign Office" keep unruly Moscow in line? Allen muses that the Insiders might have used "SMERSH, the international Communist murder organization described in testimony before congressional committees and by Ian Fleming in his James Bond Books."
Allen's vision was nothing if not dramatic. In a successful effort early in the century to hijack the American economy and political arena, he repots, the Insiders established a central bank (the Federal Reserve System), lorded over by international bankers; they followed up by saddling citizens with the income tax, thereby fulfilling two key planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto. The Insiders then "scientifically engineered" the stock market crash of 1929. They managed to top that feat by starting World Wars I and II (the latter through their appeasement of Hitler) and the Vietnam debacle, profiteering in all cases by arming both sides. Oh yeah, they also invented the nefarious United (communist) Nations as the keystone of their relentless New World Order.
In a rare instance of giving the Rockefellers a bit of a break, Birchers revived the old right-wing theory that the real powers behind the Insider throne - both communist and "cartel capitalist" - were those standby conspiracy bugaboos, the illuminati, a secret freemasonic society that definitely existed, albeit in eighteenth-century Bavaria.
(In an effort to cast the Illuminati as a "Zionist" cabal, anti-Smites - and Allen wasn't one - often invoke the Jewish Rothschilds and the old lie that the Bolshevik revolution was all a Jewish plot. Allen dismissed that "thinking," and typically had a more interesting angle: The Insiders themselves covertly promoted such anti-Semitic falsehoods in an effort to tar all their critics as racists. Of course, Allen offered no evidence for this theory, but perhaps he was onto something. More than one modern blowhard of the "there-are-no-conspiracies" school has offhandedly broadbrushed conspiracy theorists by yoking them with Holocaust apologists.)
Although the conspiratorial tapestry woven by the Birchers was a bit, well, busy, even the staid Professor Quigley grudgingly acknowledged that it contained "a modicum of truth." For one thing, the so-called Insiders "had no aversion to cooperating with the Communists," per Quigley. After all, big business is big business, and what better way of acquiring access to untapped natural resources than being neighborly? Likewise, the CFR-dominated U.S. Department of State was indeed very influential in midwifing the UN. And the Round Tablers did push for the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
As for the Rockefellers, the family has played a major role in the network since its early days. David Rockefeller, chairman of the CFR board, founded the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s (same Euro-American "internationalists" but with the additional membership of Japanese power players). Another Rockefeller-Insider group arose as the retiring Round Tables passed the torch to the CFR (either that, or went deep under-ground, a hunch of many conspiracy theorists): This was the Bilderberg Group, named for the location of its first annual meeting, the hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.
As we've seen, the CFR-Trilat-Bilderberg membership rolls were brimming with American official and politicians eager to suck up to the power establishment. Even Richard Nixon, whose animus for the Eastern Elite was famous, joined the CFR and later hired Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. (Birchers haven't forgotten that President Nixon invoked the spooky phrase "new world order" during his trip to Red China.) Other U.S. presidents who were Insiders included Gerald Ford (CFR, Bilderberg), Jimmy Carter (CFR, Trilat), George Bush (CFR board director, Trilat), and even Bill Clinton (CFR, Trilat, and Bilderberg).
During the Carter era 284 CFR/Trilats held administration positions. Key Insiders included Vice President Walter Mondale, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (director of the Trilateral Commission), Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. By the end of Reagon's two terms, the number had risen to 313. Reaganite Insiders included Secretaries of State Al Haig (a favorite candidate for Watergate's Deep Throat) and George Shultz (the tenth consecutive CFR alumnus to hold that job) and CIA director William Casey.
Under Bush, "the conspiracy president," the number skyrocketed to 382, including national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and the attorney general, Richard Thornburgh.
As for the Clinton administration, little has changed as far as CFR faces go. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, all five of his undersecretaries, and many of their underlings are CFR-ites. So are Clinton's national security adviser and CIA director, and so is his Republicrat aide, David Gergen.
Gergen is only one point of light in a constellation of media stars absorbed into the CFR. A partial list included the late Walter Lippman (a CFR director in the 1930s), CIA propagandist/Life magazine publisher C. D. Jackson (who helped set up the Bilderberg Group), New York Timesman Leslie Gelv (current CFR president), Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Jum Lehrer, the non-Canadian half of the Macneil/Lehre NewsHour.
Though the CFR/Trilat connection runs deep into the blue veins of the Establishment, predictably its members scoff at the suggestion that they hold excessive influence over American "democracy" and world affairs. David Rockefeller once sniffed at what he called these "foolish attacks on false issues." With perhaps excessive modesty, he assured the skeptics that his Trilateral Commission is just "a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies."
Well, apparently all groups of concerned citizens are not created equal. As journalist Bill Moyers put it in a 1980 TV documentary: "David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. but what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work."
If the New World Order isn't a blueprint for the "world super-state" of Bircher nightmares, it may simply mean a world more "orderly" for transnational big business. The implications are just as ominous, for although Trilats don't aim to raze Capitol Hill to make way for a U.N. high rise, they have made it clear that democracy often hampers their terribly important work. Not only have the Round Table progeny pushed for "limited," strongman "democracy" in third world countries, they have openly complained about the surfeit of liberty for the little people in this country.
A 1975 Trilateral Commission report concluded that the United States was plagued by an "excess of democracy," when "what is needed is a greater degree of moderation in democracy," to improve "governability." Trilat co-founder Brzezinski recommended a study on "Control Over Man's Development and Behavior" to devise "new means of social control," especially "in advanced societies."
In the Coming New World Order, the natives apparently have yet to be civilized.
Roswell
During the heady days of the Persian Gulf War, President George Bush dusted off an ancient phrase that immediately set teeth on edge - that is, the grinding teeth of conspiracy trackers.
"I hope history will record that the Gulf Crisis was the crucible of the new world order," Bush intoned in the wake of his greatest triumph, the American-led victory against Iraq. New World Order. The phrase had tripped from the president's lips at least half a dozen other times before and after American smart bombs had transformed the former "wimp" into a short-term war hero.
Of course, the real meaning of the term - bandied about for decades by a phalanx of elite bankers and industrialists - couldn't have been clearer to ultra-right-wingers of the John Birch Society ilk. Simply put, New World Order was code for "one-world government," a megalomaniacal communist plot to enslave the planet. In the words of the late Gay Allen, the prolific Birch Society author, "Communism is an arm of a bigger conspiracy to control the world by power-mad billionaires." Bush, the ultimate establishment insider, was clearly an agent of these crypto-capitalist/communist forces - as had been every sell-out president since FDR.
Lest we dismiss such concerns as the ranting of survivalist kooks, it's important to note that the New World Order is an equal opportunity conspiracy theory. Left-wingers were just as exercised by Bush's words, although progressives tended to see the preppy president more as a champion of capitalism run amok than as a creeping commie.
In fact, right-wing or left, suspicions about the New World Order are actually quite rational. The champions of the "NWO" are indeed a cadre of powerful industrialists, bankers, academics, and politicians who for three quarters of a century have been a gray eminence behind the governance of Britain and America. More to the point, perhaps, they are the governors of the Western world. Call them what you will, they are they "Establishment." Through vastly influential organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, these elites formulate tomorrow's public policy today and staff the ship of state with their own.
If this network is something less than the Red devil depicted in many a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is nonetheless a kind of big business cabal that helps the elite of the private sector, if not "rule the world," then at least run it like a business.
The self-appointed historian of this power brokerage was Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley, a distinguished scholar whom right-wingers regard as a smoking gun personified. In his massive history of the modern era, Tragedy and Hope, the late Professor Quigley wrote that there "does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way that the radical Right believes the Communists act."
Quigley admitted that he "had been close" to this "semisecret organization" of international manipulators - indeed, admired its goals - and had been allowed to examine its "papers and secret records."
According to Quigley, the network's benevolent aim is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole" - thereby assuring peace and prosperity and, of course, profit.
This network grew out of secret political societies hatched by diamond baron/stealth fanatic Cecil Rhodes (Rhodesia, Rhodes scholarships) and a clutch of bleeding-hear imperialists resolved to prevent the sun from setting on the British Empire. By 1908, Rhodes was dead, but his dream and vast wealth lived on to sire the furtive Round Table Groups.
During the early part of this century, the aristocratic Round Tablers - who set up franchises in South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada - yearned to "civilize" native subjects of the British dominion. If properly instilled with liberal Oxford values and presumable an appreciation of cricket, even the most "backward" races could lean to be contented, perhaps "autonomous," citizens of empire. A connected dream was to yoke all of the English-speaking nations (America included) into a confederation of Atlantic states, with the capital in Washington, D.C.! (To Birchers' ears this is an early echo of the dread "one-world government.") If Their grander schemes flopped rather obliquely, the Round Tablers achieved a failure of spectacular proportions when they led the drive to appease Hitler.
In America, the Rhodes groups and J. P. Morgan banking interests incorporated the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1921 as a Round Table "front." According to Quigley, CFR and other Round Table cutouts became "a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy" in both countries. This is the famous "Eastern Establishment" that continues to hold sway over the U.S. government, academia, Wall Street, and major American media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post.
The American arm of the network flourished under the patronage of billionaire benefactors, including the Morgan and Carnegie interests - and of course the ubiquitous Rockefeller family.
Ah, the Rockefellers! Dons of the financial underworld! Godfathers of the commie/capitalist internationale! That, anyway, is what many a right-wing conspiracist believes. In Bircher fulminations, the four R's - Rhodes, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Reds - are demons that turbocharge the dry facts or Professor Quigley.
The radical-right theories were never synthesized more impressively than in Gary Allen's 1971 call to arms, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Mergiing nativist strains of anticommunism, antielitism, and "gold standard" conservatism, Allen argues that the Rockefeller-CFR-Establishment cabal - dubbed the "Insiders" - had toiled for decades to "abolish the United States" and establish an "all powerful world socialist super-state."
Allen wasn't suggesting that supercapitalists like the Rockefellers were sincere Marxists, but rather that they used socialism "as the bait… the excuse to establish the dictatorship." According to Allen, the Rockefellers, the British Rothschild clan, and their carious corporate agents had not only financed Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, but David Rockefeller may have been the "paymaster" who later fired his employee, Soviet premier Krushchev! How did "the Rockefeller Foreign Office" keep unruly Moscow in line? Allen muses that the Insiders might have used "SMERSH, the international Communist murder organization described in testimony before congressional committees and by Ian Fleming in his James Bond Books."
Allen's vision was nothing if not dramatic. In a successful effort early in the century to hijack the American economy and political arena, he repots, the Insiders established a central bank (the Federal Reserve System), lorded over by international bankers; they followed up by saddling citizens with the income tax, thereby fulfilling two key planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto. The Insiders then "scientifically engineered" the stock market crash of 1929. They managed to top that feat by starting World Wars I and II (the latter through their appeasement of Hitler) and the Vietnam debacle, profiteering in all cases by arming both sides. Oh yeah, they also invented the nefarious United (communist) Nations as the keystone of their relentless New World Order.
In a rare instance of giving the Rockefellers a bit of a break, Birchers revived the old right-wing theory that the real powers behind the Insider throne - both communist and "cartel capitalist" - were those standby conspiracy bugaboos, the illuminati, a secret freemasonic society that definitely existed, albeit in eighteenth-century Bavaria.
(In an effort to cast the Illuminati as a "Zionist" cabal, anti-Smites - and Allen wasn't one - often invoke the Jewish Rothschilds and the old lie that the Bolshevik revolution was all a Jewish plot. Allen dismissed that "thinking," and typically had a more interesting angle: The Insiders themselves covertly promoted such anti-Semitic falsehoods in an effort to tar all their critics as racists. Of course, Allen offered no evidence for this theory, but perhaps he was onto something. More than one modern blowhard of the "there-are-no-conspiracies" school has offhandedly broadbrushed conspiracy theorists by yoking them with Holocaust apologists.)
Although the conspiratorial tapestry woven by the Birchers was a bit, well, busy, even the staid Professor Quigley grudgingly acknowledged that it contained "a modicum of truth." For one thing, the so-called Insiders "had no aversion to cooperating with the Communists," per Quigley. After all, big business is big business, and what better way of acquiring access to untapped natural resources than being neighborly? Likewise, the CFR-dominated U.S. Department of State was indeed very influential in midwifing the UN. And the Round Tablers did push for the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
As for the Rockefellers, the family has played a major role in the network since its early days. David Rockefeller, chairman of the CFR board, founded the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s (same Euro-American "internationalists" but with the additional membership of Japanese power players). Another Rockefeller-Insider group arose as the retiring Round Tables passed the torch to the CFR (either that, or went deep under-ground, a hunch of many conspiracy theorists): This was the Bilderberg Group, named for the location of its first annual meeting, the hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.
As we've seen, the CFR-Trilat-Bilderberg membership rolls were brimming with American official and politicians eager to suck up to the power establishment. Even Richard Nixon, whose animus for the Eastern Elite was famous, joined the CFR and later hired Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. (Birchers haven't forgotten that President Nixon invoked the spooky phrase "new world order" during his trip to Red China.) Other U.S. presidents who were Insiders included Gerald Ford (CFR, Bilderberg), Jimmy Carter (CFR, Trilat), George Bush (CFR board director, Trilat), and even Bill Clinton (CFR, Trilat, and Bilderberg).
During the Carter era 284 CFR/Trilats held administration positions. Key Insiders included Vice President Walter Mondale, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (director of the Trilateral Commission), Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. By the end of Reagon's two terms, the number had risen to 313. Reaganite Insiders included Secretaries of State Al Haig (a favorite candidate for Watergate's Deep Throat) and George Shultz (the tenth consecutive CFR alumnus to hold that job) and CIA director William Casey.
Under Bush, "the conspiracy president," the number skyrocketed to 382, including national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and the attorney general, Richard Thornburgh.
As for the Clinton administration, little has changed as far as CFR faces go. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, all five of his undersecretaries, and many of their underlings are CFR-ites. So are Clinton's national security adviser and CIA director, and so is his Republicrat aide, David Gergen.
Gergen is only one point of light in a constellation of media stars absorbed into the CFR. A partial list included the late Walter Lippman (a CFR director in the 1930s), CIA propagandist/Life magazine publisher C. D. Jackson (who helped set up the Bilderberg Group), New York Timesman Leslie Gelv (current CFR president), Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Jum Lehrer, the non-Canadian half of the Macneil/Lehre NewsHour.
Though the CFR/Trilat connection runs deep into the blue veins of the Establishment, predictably its members scoff at the suggestion that they hold excessive influence over American "democracy" and world affairs. David Rockefeller once sniffed at what he called these "foolish attacks on false issues." With perhaps excessive modesty, he assured the skeptics that his Trilateral Commission is just "a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies."
Well, apparently all groups of concerned citizens are not created equal. As journalist Bill Moyers put it in a 1980 TV documentary: "David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. but what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work."
If the New World Order isn't a blueprint for the "world super-state" of Bircher nightmares, it may simply mean a world more "orderly" for transnational big business. The implications are just as ominous, for although Trilats don't aim to raze Capitol Hill to make way for a U.N. high rise, they have made it clear that democracy often hampers their terribly important work. Not only have the Round Table progeny pushed for "limited," strongman "democracy" in third world countries, they have openly complained about the surfeit of liberty for the little people in this country.
A 1975 Trilateral Commission report concluded that the United States was plagued by an "excess of democracy," when "what is needed is a greater degree of moderation in democracy," to improve "governability." Trilat co-founder Brzezinski recommended a study on "Control Over Man's Development and Behavior" to devise "new means of social control," especially "in advanced societies."
In the Coming New World Order, the natives apparently have yet to be civilized.
"I hope history will record that the Gulf Crisis was the crucible of the new world order," Bush intoned in the wake of his greatest triumph, the American-led victory against Iraq. New World Order. The phrase had tripped from the president's lips at least half a dozen other times before and after American smart bombs had transformed the former "wimp" into a short-term war hero.
Of course, the real meaning of the term - bandied about for decades by a phalanx of elite bankers and industrialists - couldn't have been clearer to ultra-right-wingers of the John Birch Society ilk. Simply put, New World Order was code for "one-world government," a megalomaniacal communist plot to enslave the planet. In the words of the late Gay Allen, the prolific Birch Society author, "Communism is an arm of a bigger conspiracy to control the world by power-mad billionaires." Bush, the ultimate establishment insider, was clearly an agent of these crypto-capitalist/communist forces - as had been every sell-out president since FDR.
Lest we dismiss such concerns as the ranting of survivalist kooks, it's important to note that the New World Order is an equal opportunity conspiracy theory. Left-wingers were just as exercised by Bush's words, although progressives tended to see the preppy president more as a champion of capitalism run amok than as a creeping commie.
In fact, right-wing or left, suspicions about the New World Order are actually quite rational. The champions of the "NWO" are indeed a cadre of powerful industrialists, bankers, academics, and politicians who for three quarters of a century have been a gray eminence behind the governance of Britain and America. More to the point, perhaps, they are the governors of the Western world. Call them what you will, they are they "Establishment." Through vastly influential organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, these elites formulate tomorrow's public policy today and staff the ship of state with their own.
If this network is something less than the Red devil depicted in many a right-wing conspiracy theory, it is nonetheless a kind of big business cabal that helps the elite of the private sector, if not "rule the world," then at least run it like a business.
The self-appointed historian of this power brokerage was Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley, a distinguished scholar whom right-wingers regard as a smoking gun personified. In his massive history of the modern era, Tragedy and Hope, the late Professor Quigley wrote that there "does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way that the radical Right believes the Communists act."
Quigley admitted that he "had been close" to this "semisecret organization" of international manipulators - indeed, admired its goals - and had been allowed to examine its "papers and secret records."
According to Quigley, the network's benevolent aim is "nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole" - thereby assuring peace and prosperity and, of course, profit.
This network grew out of secret political societies hatched by diamond baron/stealth fanatic Cecil Rhodes (Rhodesia, Rhodes scholarships) and a clutch of bleeding-hear imperialists resolved to prevent the sun from setting on the British Empire. By 1908, Rhodes was dead, but his dream and vast wealth lived on to sire the furtive Round Table Groups.
During the early part of this century, the aristocratic Round Tablers - who set up franchises in South Africa, Australia, the United States, and Canada - yearned to "civilize" native subjects of the British dominion. If properly instilled with liberal Oxford values and presumable an appreciation of cricket, even the most "backward" races could lean to be contented, perhaps "autonomous," citizens of empire. A connected dream was to yoke all of the English-speaking nations (America included) into a confederation of Atlantic states, with the capital in Washington, D.C.! (To Birchers' ears this is an early echo of the dread "one-world government.") If Their grander schemes flopped rather obliquely, the Round Tablers achieved a failure of spectacular proportions when they led the drive to appease Hitler.
In America, the Rhodes groups and J. P. Morgan banking interests incorporated the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 1921 as a Round Table "front." According to Quigley, CFR and other Round Table cutouts became "a power structure between London and New York which penetrated deeply into university life, the press, and the practice of foreign policy" in both countries. This is the famous "Eastern Establishment" that continues to hold sway over the U.S. government, academia, Wall Street, and major American media outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post.
The American arm of the network flourished under the patronage of billionaire benefactors, including the Morgan and Carnegie interests - and of course the ubiquitous Rockefeller family.
Ah, the Rockefellers! Dons of the financial underworld! Godfathers of the commie/capitalist internationale! That, anyway, is what many a right-wing conspiracist believes. In Bircher fulminations, the four R's - Rhodes, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, and Reds - are demons that turbocharge the dry facts or Professor Quigley.
The radical-right theories were never synthesized more impressively than in Gary Allen's 1971 call to arms, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Mergiing nativist strains of anticommunism, antielitism, and "gold standard" conservatism, Allen argues that the Rockefeller-CFR-Establishment cabal - dubbed the "Insiders" - had toiled for decades to "abolish the United States" and establish an "all powerful world socialist super-state."
Allen wasn't suggesting that supercapitalists like the Rockefellers were sincere Marxists, but rather that they used socialism "as the bait… the excuse to establish the dictatorship." According to Allen, the Rockefellers, the British Rothschild clan, and their carious corporate agents had not only financed Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution, but David Rockefeller may have been the "paymaster" who later fired his employee, Soviet premier Krushchev! How did "the Rockefeller Foreign Office" keep unruly Moscow in line? Allen muses that the Insiders might have used "SMERSH, the international Communist murder organization described in testimony before congressional committees and by Ian Fleming in his James Bond Books."
Allen's vision was nothing if not dramatic. In a successful effort early in the century to hijack the American economy and political arena, he repots, the Insiders established a central bank (the Federal Reserve System), lorded over by international bankers; they followed up by saddling citizens with the income tax, thereby fulfilling two key planks of Marx's Communist Manifesto. The Insiders then "scientifically engineered" the stock market crash of 1929. They managed to top that feat by starting World Wars I and II (the latter through their appeasement of Hitler) and the Vietnam debacle, profiteering in all cases by arming both sides. Oh yeah, they also invented the nefarious United (communist) Nations as the keystone of their relentless New World Order.
In a rare instance of giving the Rockefellers a bit of a break, Birchers revived the old right-wing theory that the real powers behind the Insider throne - both communist and "cartel capitalist" - were those standby conspiracy bugaboos, the illuminati, a secret freemasonic society that definitely existed, albeit in eighteenth-century Bavaria.
(In an effort to cast the Illuminati as a "Zionist" cabal, anti-Smites - and Allen wasn't one - often invoke the Jewish Rothschilds and the old lie that the Bolshevik revolution was all a Jewish plot. Allen dismissed that "thinking," and typically had a more interesting angle: The Insiders themselves covertly promoted such anti-Semitic falsehoods in an effort to tar all their critics as racists. Of course, Allen offered no evidence for this theory, but perhaps he was onto something. More than one modern blowhard of the "there-are-no-conspiracies" school has offhandedly broadbrushed conspiracy theorists by yoking them with Holocaust apologists.)
Although the conspiratorial tapestry woven by the Birchers was a bit, well, busy, even the staid Professor Quigley grudgingly acknowledged that it contained "a modicum of truth." For one thing, the so-called Insiders "had no aversion to cooperating with the Communists," per Quigley. After all, big business is big business, and what better way of acquiring access to untapped natural resources than being neighborly? Likewise, the CFR-dominated U.S. Department of State was indeed very influential in midwifing the UN. And the Round Tablers did push for the income tax and the Federal Reserve.
As for the Rockefellers, the family has played a major role in the network since its early days. David Rockefeller, chairman of the CFR board, founded the Trilateral Commission in the early 1970s (same Euro-American "internationalists" but with the additional membership of Japanese power players). Another Rockefeller-Insider group arose as the retiring Round Tables passed the torch to the CFR (either that, or went deep under-ground, a hunch of many conspiracy theorists): This was the Bilderberg Group, named for the location of its first annual meeting, the hotel Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.
As we've seen, the CFR-Trilat-Bilderberg membership rolls were brimming with American official and politicians eager to suck up to the power establishment. Even Richard Nixon, whose animus for the Eastern Elite was famous, joined the CFR and later hired Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger. (Birchers haven't forgotten that President Nixon invoked the spooky phrase "new world order" during his trip to Red China.) Other U.S. presidents who were Insiders included Gerald Ford (CFR, Bilderberg), Jimmy Carter (CFR, Trilat), George Bush (CFR board director, Trilat), and even Bill Clinton (CFR, Trilat, and Bilderberg).
During the Carter era 284 CFR/Trilats held administration positions. Key Insiders included Vice President Walter Mondale, national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (director of the Trilateral Commission), Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and CIA Director Stansfield Turner. By the end of Reagon's two terms, the number had risen to 313. Reaganite Insiders included Secretaries of State Al Haig (a favorite candidate for Watergate's Deep Throat) and George Shultz (the tenth consecutive CFR alumnus to hold that job) and CIA director William Casey.
Under Bush, "the conspiracy president," the number skyrocketed to 382, including national security advisor Brent Scowcroft and the attorney general, Richard Thornburgh.
As for the Clinton administration, little has changed as far as CFR faces go. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, all five of his undersecretaries, and many of their underlings are CFR-ites. So are Clinton's national security adviser and CIA director, and so is his Republicrat aide, David Gergen.
Gergen is only one point of light in a constellation of media stars absorbed into the CFR. A partial list included the late Walter Lippman (a CFR director in the 1930s), CIA propagandist/Life magazine publisher C. D. Jackson (who helped set up the Bilderberg Group), New York Timesman Leslie Gelv (current CFR president), Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Jum Lehrer, the non-Canadian half of the Macneil/Lehre NewsHour.
Though the CFR/Trilat connection runs deep into the blue veins of the Establishment, predictably its members scoff at the suggestion that they hold excessive influence over American "democracy" and world affairs. David Rockefeller once sniffed at what he called these "foolish attacks on false issues." With perhaps excessive modesty, he assured the skeptics that his Trilateral Commission is just "a group of concerned citizens interested in fostering greater understanding and cooperation among international allies."
Well, apparently all groups of concerned citizens are not created equal. As journalist Bill Moyers put it in a 1980 TV documentary: "David Rockefeller is the most conspicuous representative today of the ruling class, a multinational fraternity of men who shape the global economy and manage the flow of its capital. Rockefeller was born to it, and he has made the most of it. but what some critics see as a vast international conspiracy, he considers a circumstance of life and just another day's work."
If the New World Order isn't a blueprint for the "world super-state" of Bircher nightmares, it may simply mean a world more "orderly" for transnational big business. The implications are just as ominous, for although Trilats don't aim to raze Capitol Hill to make way for a U.N. high rise, they have made it clear that democracy often hampers their terribly important work. Not only have the Round Table progeny pushed for "limited," strongman "democracy" in third world countries, they have openly complained about the surfeit of liberty for the little people in this country.
A 1975 Trilateral Commission report concluded that the United States was plagued by an "excess of democracy," when "what is needed is a greater degree of moderation in democracy," to improve "governability." Trilat co-founder Brzezinski recommended a study on "Control Over Man's Development and Behavior" to devise "new means of social control," especially "in advanced societies."
In the Coming New World Order, the natives apparently have yet to be civilized.
What crashed in Roswell, New Mexico?
Something large and silvery wobbled through the air and plowed into the desert dirt with a tremendous ka-boom. That much, generally speaking, goes without dispute. The date was July 2, 1947.
In is also a fact-on-record that the government took an immediate interest in . . . well, whatever it was. The air force dispatched a team to scoop up the wreckage - one metallic chunk was about four feet long - and flew some back to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for scrutiny. General Roger Ramey, the officer in charge, order his men not to talk to the press. But before Ramey could clamp a lid on the affair, the base's public information officer issued a press release announcing government acquisition of a "flying disc." An Albuquerque radio station picked up a leak of the story. As it broadcast a report, a wire came through from the FBI.
"Attention Albuquerque: cease transmission. Repeat. Cease transmission. National security item. Do not transmit. Stand by . . ."
A day later, the air force held a press conference and announced that what crashed at Roswell was a balloon.
The UFO saga actually began a few days earlier when businessman and avocational aviator Kenneth Arnold chased a squadron of nine "bobbing and weaving" objects as he flew in his private plane. He described the objects as "saucer shaped." Some pithy way at an AP bureau dropped the phrase "flying saucers" into a wire dispatch and, forever, into the English language. The air force said that Arnold had pursued "a mirage."
There have been innumerable UFO reports since 1947. Some have been captured on film, still and moving (the UFOs and the film). They pop up all over the world, even in outer space. NASA astronauts have reported seeing weird objects, and UFO scribe Sean Morton, coauthor of The Millennium Factor, says that NASA photos of the so-called "dark side" of the moon remain, for some reason, classified.
They myth that UFOs only reveal themselves to corn huskers and residents of trailer parks is easily dispelled. A quick scan of UFO history books shows the air corps of one nation or another pursuing unidentifiable "blips" on a regular basis.
On November 23, 1953, an F-89 interceptor was chasing a UFO over Lake Superior when, according to radar operators, the two blips on the screen seemed to merge into one which then blinked off the screen. The jet and its pilot, Lieutenant Felix Moncla, were gone without a trace. For some reason, the air force file on the vanishing contains just two pages. One of them is a page from a book debunking UFO theories.
Nevertheless, Roswell (which among the UFO-intrigued has achieved one-word status) remains the most important landmark in the UFO coverup because, apparently, it has actually been covered up. There is no mention of the crash in the air force's Project Blue Book files. Blue Book recorded all UFO reports that crossed an air force desk along with their various "scientific" explanations. Generally considered the Warren Report of the UFO phenomenon - a coverup posing as an investigation - Blue Book gives Roswell increased prominence by its omission.
Some might write the whole incident off as unlikely, noting that a spacecraft capable of navigating the firmament and engineered to endure the rigors of interstellar travel is unlikely to crash like so many Cessnas. But then there is Majestic 12 (MJ-12). Among many UFOlogists, there is strong belief in the existence of MJ-12.
A committee of twelve eminent military, intelligence, and academic personages, the group was allegedly charted to manage and conceal the most important event in world history - contact with aliens. Albeit dead ones.
According to the MJ-12 "eyes only" briefing paper prepared for Dwight Eisenhower when he was still president-elect, four "Extraterrestrial biological entities," or EBEs, turned up two miles from the crash site. According to some accounts, two of the aliens were still alive at the time and one put up a struggle. The EBE carcasses are now allegedly kept on ice in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The problem with the Majestic 12 document - the only hard evidence that MJ-12 ever took a meeting - is that it may well be a hoax. No one in a position to do so has ever authenticated it.
There is only one mention of MJ-12 in any other official paper, a November 1980 air force analysis of a UFO film that outlines in minute detail how the government is "still interested" in UFO sightings, which it investigates through "covert cover."
That document, like the original MJ-12 paper, somehow seems to good to be true- the smoking fun that every good conspiracy theory needs and lacks. It would be as if some researcher combing through CIA JFK files suddenly produced a memo reading, "Assassination of president scheduled for 11/22/63, Dallas. After consultation with FBI, director recommends triangulation of crossfire be utilized." It would kind of make you wonder.
Real or not, MJ-12 has spawned no shortage of legends and speculation, primarily that it still exists and is still administering the UFO coverup, coping with each alien abduction and saucer crash as it comes up. "Suicided" journalist Danny Casolaro included MJ-12 as a tentacle in his postulated secret government "Octopus." In some versions of the tale, MJ-12 is in charge of cooperation and negotiation with the alien race among us.
Or should that be "races"? John Lear, a self-described former intelligence agent who is now one of the leading voices on the UFO circuit, charges that the government is aware of a veritable Rainbow Coalition of EBEs.
These range from three types of insecto-humanoid Grays, skinny and eggheaded enemies of all mankind, to the friendly Blonds, who look more like humans but who, despite their general good nature refuse to break the Star Trekkish "universal law of noninterference" to save us from the evil Grays. Also on the roster are the Hairy Dwarves (self-explanatory), the Very Tall Race (also self-explanatory), and the mysterious Men in Black.
The existence of the Robertson Panel, unlike that of MJ-12, is not dubious. Convened by the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1953, this board of scientists issued a report that was not fully declassified until 1975.
Chaired by one Dragna. H. P. Robertson, the panel met secretly in the Pentagon for five days. They looked at the UFO cases that appeared to be the most credible - and dismissed every single one of them.
Merely denying the existence of unexplainable or extraterrestrial UFOs, as the Robertson panel did, hardly constitutes a coverup, except under the most circular logic. The panel, however, moved considerable beyond debunking. It recommended that the government take pains to squelch UFO reports, to the point of promulgating an anti-UFO "education" campaign.
"This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, popular articles," the CIA panel's report said. It went on to suggest using "psychologists familiar with mass psychology" to help assemble the program and even wondered if Walt Disney Studios might be interested in producing anti-UFO cartoons.
The report went on to recommend that UFO enthusiast groups should be placed under surveillance due to "the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes."
None of the Robertson Panel's rather conspiratorial musings prove that the government really has something to hide; deep-frozen aliens, for example. On the other hand, they do give a depressing clue as to how institutions respond to ideas that they deem, in the words of the panel report, "a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic."
Something large and silvery wobbled through the air and plowed into the desert dirt with a tremendous ka-boom. That much, generally speaking, goes without dispute. The date was July 2, 1947.
In is also a fact-on-record that the government took an immediate interest in . . . well, whatever it was. The air force dispatched a team to scoop up the wreckage - one metallic chunk was about four feet long - and flew some back to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for scrutiny. General Roger Ramey, the officer in charge, order his men not to talk to the press. But before Ramey could clamp a lid on the affair, the base's public information officer issued a press release announcing government acquisition of a "flying disc." An Albuquerque radio station picked up a leak of the story. As it broadcast a report, a wire came through from the FBI.
"Attention Albuquerque: cease transmission. Repeat. Cease transmission. National security item. Do not transmit. Stand by . . ."
A day later, the air force held a press conference and announced that what crashed at Roswell was a balloon.
The UFO saga actually began a few days earlier when businessman and avocational aviator Kenneth Arnold chased a squadron of nine "bobbing and weaving" objects as he flew in his private plane. He described the objects as "saucer shaped." Some pithy way at an AP bureau dropped the phrase "flying saucers" into a wire dispatch and, forever, into the English language. The air force said that Arnold had pursued "a mirage."
There have been innumerable UFO reports since 1947. Some have been captured on film, still and moving (the UFOs and the film). They pop up all over the world, even in outer space. NASA astronauts have reported seeing weird objects, and UFO scribe Sean Morton, coauthor of The Millennium Factor, says that NASA photos of the so-called "dark side" of the moon remain, for some reason, classified.
They myth that UFOs only reveal themselves to corn huskers and residents of trailer parks is easily dispelled. A quick scan of UFO history books shows the air corps of one nation or another pursuing unidentifiable "blips" on a regular basis.
On November 23, 1953, an F-89 interceptor was chasing a UFO over Lake Superior when, according to radar operators, the two blips on the screen seemed to merge into one which then blinked off the screen. The jet and its pilot, Lieutenant Felix Moncla, were gone without a trace. For some reason, the air force file on the vanishing contains just two pages. One of them is a page from a book debunking UFO theories.
Nevertheless, Roswell (which among the UFO-intrigued has achieved one-word status) remains the most important landmark in the UFO coverup because, apparently, it has actually been covered up. There is no mention of the crash in the air force's Project Blue Book files. Blue Book recorded all UFO reports that crossed an air force desk along with their various "scientific" explanations. Generally considered the Warren Report of the UFO phenomenon - a coverup posing as an investigation - Blue Book gives Roswell increased prominence by its omission.
Some might write the whole incident off as unlikely, noting that a spacecraft capable of navigating the firmament and engineered to endure the rigors of interstellar travel is unlikely to crash like so many Cessnas. But then there is Majestic 12 (MJ-12). Among many UFOlogists, there is strong belief in the existence of MJ-12.
A committee of twelve eminent military, intelligence, and academic personages, the group was allegedly charted to manage and conceal the most important event in world history - contact with aliens. Albeit dead ones.
According to the MJ-12 "eyes only" briefing paper prepared for Dwight Eisenhower when he was still president-elect, four "Extraterrestrial biological entities," or EBEs, turned up two miles from the crash site. According to some accounts, two of the aliens were still alive at the time and one put up a struggle. The EBE carcasses are now allegedly kept on ice in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
The problem with the Majestic 12 document - the only hard evidence that MJ-12 ever took a meeting - is that it may well be a hoax. No one in a position to do so has ever authenticated it.
There is only one mention of MJ-12 in any other official paper, a November 1980 air force analysis of a UFO film that outlines in minute detail how the government is "still interested" in UFO sightings, which it investigates through "covert cover."
That document, like the original MJ-12 paper, somehow seems to good to be true- the smoking fun that every good conspiracy theory needs and lacks. It would be as if some researcher combing through CIA JFK files suddenly produced a memo reading, "Assassination of president scheduled for 11/22/63, Dallas. After consultation with FBI, director recommends triangulation of crossfire be utilized." It would kind of make you wonder.
Real or not, MJ-12 has spawned no shortage of legends and speculation, primarily that it still exists and is still administering the UFO coverup, coping with each alien abduction and saucer crash as it comes up. "Suicided" journalist Danny Casolaro included MJ-12 as a tentacle in his postulated secret government "Octopus." In some versions of the tale, MJ-12 is in charge of cooperation and negotiation with the alien race among us.
Or should that be "races"? John Lear, a self-described former intelligence agent who is now one of the leading voices on the UFO circuit, charges that the government is aware of a veritable Rainbow Coalition of EBEs.
These range from three types of insecto-humanoid Grays, skinny and eggheaded enemies of all mankind, to the friendly Blonds, who look more like humans but who, despite their general good nature refuse to break the Star Trekkish "universal law of noninterference" to save us from the evil Grays. Also on the roster are the Hairy Dwarves (self-explanatory), the Very Tall Race (also self-explanatory), and the mysterious Men in Black.
The existence of the Robertson Panel, unlike that of MJ-12, is not dubious. Convened by the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1953, this board of scientists issued a report that was not fully declassified until 1975.
Chaired by one Dragna. H. P. Robertson, the panel met secretly in the Pentagon for five days. They looked at the UFO cases that appeared to be the most credible - and dismissed every single one of them.
Merely denying the existence of unexplainable or extraterrestrial UFOs, as the Robertson panel did, hardly constitutes a coverup, except under the most circular logic. The panel, however, moved considerable beyond debunking. It recommended that the government take pains to squelch UFO reports, to the point of promulgating an anti-UFO "education" campaign.
"This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, popular articles," the CIA panel's report said. It went on to suggest using "psychologists familiar with mass psychology" to help assemble the program and even wondered if Walt Disney Studios might be interested in producing anti-UFO cartoons.
The report went on to recommend that UFO enthusiast groups should be placed under surveillance due to "the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes."
None of the Robertson Panel's rather conspiratorial musings prove that the government really has something to hide; deep-frozen aliens, for example. On the other hand, they do give a depressing clue as to how institutions respond to ideas that they deem, in the words of the panel report, "a threat to the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic."
Sexual Blackmail
Judging from Washington's perennial sex scandals, power truly is the ultimate aphrodisiac - to paraphrase that seventies-epoch Casanova, Henry Kissinger, in a slightly different context. For young wonks and old goats alike, political prowess tends to breed hubris and hormones.
Not surprisingly, then, in the nation's pulsing capital, the fine art of sexual blackmail has what you might call "a history."
The pioneering figure of Washington "sexmail" was that creepiest of peeping G-men, J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to his infamous sex files, which contained dirt on just about everyone in Washington short of his shoeshine boy, Hoover managed to dominate the capital (and eight presidents) for nearly half a century.
Not surprisingly, Hoover's busiest period came while John F. Kennedy occupied the White House and its many bedrooms. By several accounts, when rumors were rampant that Kennedy was going to pinkslip the aging, annoying FBI chief, Hoover put his plenary Kennedy files to work, thereby saving his own hide. With an obsession more than verging on the pathological, Hoover had bugged JFK's legion love nests and tapped the princess phones of assorted Kennedy playmates, including mob moll Judith Campbell Exner and superstarlet Marilyn Monroe - whose bedroom was purportedly heavily trafficked by both Kennedy brothers.
The bug-eyed Hoover also glommed onto in-flight tapes of Jack and actress Angie Dickinson summiting in the boudoir of a chartered aircraft. Typically playing both sides against the middle, Hoover leaked info to the tabloid press about an old Kennedy affair with a senate secretary and about Kennedy's rumored former marriage, and then "put Kennedy in his debt by supplying background for the Newsweek rebuttal," according to journalist Anthony Summers.
When it came to recording Jack and Bobby's compromising positions, Hoover had company. The Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa also managed to plant electronic bedroom ears in Marilyn Monroe's inner sanctum, especially at roue actor and Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford's beach house.
Hoover used the same tactics in his vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr., bugging the civil rights leader's tryst spots with assorted paramours, spreading untrue gossip that King was a "switch-hitter," even marshaling surveillance photographs of King in the same room as a known - GASP - homosexual. Transcripts were leaked to the press, but the media didn't bite.
Hoover even had a bimbo file on Richard Nixon, of all the unlikely party animals. As Anthony Simmers reports in his revisionist Hoover biography, Official and Confidential, while Nison was vice president, he met a young Hong Kong travel guide named Marianna Liu. Convinced that Liu was a spy for communist China (a "Chicom"), the CIA had British intelligence train its infrared camera lenses on Nixon's bedroom window during his visits to Hong Kong. Liu and Nixon swore to Summers that there was never any sex, but Hoover was described as reading the Nixon-Chicom file "gleefully" and showing it to Dick before be became president.
Never one to let "evidence" get in the way of salacious innuendo, Hoover later came up with a report claiming that future Watergate boys H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin were homosexual lovers. This was in 1969, before Watergate, and Hoover's source, an unidentified bartender, was claiming that the three were whooping it up at homosexual parties in the Watergate hotel. Of course, it wasn't true, and as Ehrlichman told Summers, "I came to think that Hoover did this to show his claws, or ingratiate himself to Nixon - probably both."
In Washington, what going around come around, and Hoover's actual homosexuality was hardly a secret among his numerous enemies. Mob boss Meyer Lansky liked to boast that he "fixed that son of a bitch" Hoover, purportedly by acquiring graphic photos of Hoover fellating his lifelong companion, Clyde Tolson. According to Summers, by the late 1940s there were also pictures of Hoover vamping as a closet drag queen. Even that quintessential CIA garbologist, counterspy catcher James Jesus Angleton was in on the act, purportedly having his mits on incriminating Hoover sex pics.
Blackmail or not, the mob's sway over Hoover was enormous: Publicly, the all-American, morally unimpeachable lingerie-wearing FBI director refused to admit that the Mafia even existed.
Hoover went to his grave more than two decades ago, taking his voluminous "personal and confidential" sex files with him. Of course they mysteriously vanished, giving rise to assorted conspiracy theories, including the possibility that Hoover loyalists destroyed them, that the CIA snatched them up, and even that Nixon's Watergate Plumbers made a bungled attempts to get their hot little mits on the explosive cache.
So, with Hoover out of the picture, is sexual extortion in Washington merely a historical idiosyncrasy, like Hoover, and the Kennedys, the product of a more reckless era?
Well, sexual blackmail may have a more enduring place in Washington politics than we ten to suspect. More than one vice investigator in Washington believes that mob-controlled call girls, intelligence operatives, and even Washington lobbyists have long run an underground racket aimed at sexually compromising Congress and the administration. Conspiracy researcher Peter Dale Scott calls it "an ongoing, highly organized, and protected operation." Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, goes so far as to suggest that Washington's sex syndicate, exploited by intelligence spooks and the mob, has "driven the major scandals of Washington since at least the beginning of the Cold War."
Apparently, behind every good political scandal is a prostitute. Scott isn't alone in this thinking. According to Scott, "a retired Washington detective, one who played a small but important role in Watergate," believes that mob pimps and bigwig lobbyists use pricey call girls to put the squeeze on key officials. This is apparently a reference to Carl Shoffler, incidentally the arresting police officer who slapped cuffs on the Watergate burglars.
During a 1982 investigation into the use of "drugs and sexual activity to lobby congressmen," Shoffler did indeed advise congressional investigators to look into a male prostitution ring that serviced Capitol Hill. The veteran police detective believed that the sex ring might be linked to a high-flying Washington lobbyist, Robert Keith Cray, who had more than a few connections to CIA folk. According to Peter Dale Scott, some Washington investigators also suspected that the gay sex ring was connected to D.C. crime boss Joe "the Possum" Nesline.
Unfortunately, the congressional probe petered out before it got anywhere. Summing up the untested Libido-gate hypothesis, however, one of the congressional investigators put it this way to author Susan Trento: "If a lobbyist wants to use hookers to influence legislation, there's a pool of talent he draws from. There are certain madams in town that they make connections with. By simple logic, if you're in the business of influencing people with male prostitutes of kids, there has to be that supply chain…. [If] we start to identify some of the clients, it's possible we could find the suppliers for intelligence, organized crime, and lobbyists." In other words, follow the honey.
Former (and fugitive) CIA officer Frank Terpil had no compunction about identifying one such client, his former employer. Terpil told investigative author Jim Hougan that CIA-run sexual blackmail setups were common in Washington during the Watergate years. Terpil fingered his former partner, Ed Wilson, as the facilitator of one such CIA operation. Terpil claimed that Wilson ran the CIA mantrap from Korean agent Tong Sun Park's George Town Club, the Korean intelligence front that figured in the 1970s Koreagate scandal.
"Historically," Terpil explained, "one of Wilson's agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary…. Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasy in the flesh…. A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras."
Of course, we should note the Terpil hasn't offered any proof to back up that claim, and ex-CIA officers - not least of all, ones who have been convicted in absentia for terrorist activities - aren't celebrated for their candor. On the other hand, sexual blackmail was indeed a favorite CIA method of "turning" foreign agents or otherwise compromising them to do Uncle Sam's bidding. Considering all of the Agency's illegal doings on domestic soil during the last four decades, Terpil's story certainly seems plausible. Interestingly, Robert Keith Gray, the omnipresent superlobbyist whose name came up during the 1982 gay sex ring investigation, also pops into the George Town Club-Terpil milieu. Gray, who (coincidentally or not) gravitates toward spy nests, was the club's first overseer and also a director at Terpil's firm, Consultants International, a notorious CIA proprietary front.
And speaking of strange coincidences, it might be nothing more than evidence that networking is key in D.C., but Terpil's and Korean lobbyist Park's names turned up a few years earlier in the trick book of a cathouse madam linked to yet another famous scandal, the biggest scandal of all: Watergate.
The theory that the Watergate affair sprang, unintentionally, from the bosom of a political sex ring was first proposed by journalist Jim Hougan in his book, Secret Agenda.
The madam, Heidi Rikan, worked out of the Washington's posh Columbia Plaza apartment building, located across the street from the Watergate office complex. Hougan suggests that Rikan's call-girl ring may have been "either a CIA operation or the target of a CIA operation."
Briefly, Hougan's hypothesis is this: The Columbia Plaza girls were servicing a very interesting political clientele: Democratic muckamucks who placed their orders for companionship from a phone inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. Discovering this fruitful setup, Nixon's henchmen decided to target the Democratic fornicators. But in doing so, they stood a good chance of exposing the heavy breather already bugging the phone lines: the CIA. Ergo, the CIA's moles in the White House (allegedly superpatriotic conspirators James McCord and E. Howard Hunt) were forced to sabotage the Watergate break-ins in order to protect the CIA's highly illegal sex sting from Nixon's overeager burglars.
An illegal CIA sexpionage gambit unintentionally triggering the downfall of Richard Nixon? Say it ain't so!
Does the sexpionage industry go back even further in history than the babes of Watergate? Conspiracy theorist-emeritus Peter Dale Scott is game enough to hazard an affirmative. Employing the semiotics of conspiracy research - wherein names connect to other names, dates, and misdeeds, creating a tableau of suspicion that is usually intriguing, if not always conclusive - Scott has connected the dots.
Most interestingly, the Watergate madam, Heidi Rikan, was a girlfriend of mobster Joe "the Possum" Nesline, whose alleged connection to the Capitol Hill gay sex scandal a decade late aroused the suspicions of Washington detectives.
Assorted boyfriends and former husbands of both Rikan and her sometime roommate, Mo Biner (who married key Watergate figure John Dean, which makes Mo a pivotal character, according to scandal revisionists), were associated with the Quorum, an early 1960s "swingles" club run by Bobby Baker, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson. Scott surmises that all roads led to Baker's club for a reason: the Quorum functioned a lot like the mob-and-intelligence-infested sex traps of the 1970s.
It was Bobby Baker who introduced President Kennedy to an East German bombshell named Ellen Rometsh, whom JFK, true to form, promptly bedded. Scott speculates that J. Edgar Hoover leaked word of this international indiscretion to the press. Whether or not Hoover was behind the leaks, they nearly ignited a global scandal. That's because JFK's nubile Valkyrie also happened to be sleeping with a Soviet diplomat, a coincidence that, if revealed, wouldn't have served Kennedy well at the height of the Cold War. The threat of a "bimbo eruption" with international implications forced Bobby Kennedy into scandal-kibosh mode.
Scott notes that the JFK-Rometsch peccadillo paralleled the scandalous 1962 affair that toppled British war minister John Profumo. Profumo publicly confessed to romping with Christine Keller, a party doll/prostitute working for sexual procurer Stephen Ward. That scandal proved doubly damaging to Profumo because Keller was simultaneously servicing, yes, a Soviet diplomat. And more recent revelations have disclosed that the British intelligence agency MI5 "had been using the Stephen Ward sex ring for some time to compromise the Soviet agent." Scott wonders, did MI5 set out to compromise Profumo as well? Did the hyperlibidinous JFK blunder into a similar sex trap?
Interestingly, there is a more direct connection between JFK's peccadilloes and the MI5-manipulated Profumo affair. During the summer of 1963, Hoover's porous sex files began leaking again, resulting in press reports that a high U.S. official had slept with two members of Britain's Ward-Keeler sex ring, the very ring that toppled Profumo. That high U.S. official, no surprise, was the prodigious JFK. Scott observes that "MI5, as Britain's counterintelligence agency, maintained direct relations with both Hoover in the FBI" and the CIA. Did the Brits help Hoover set up Kennedy for a fall?
Bobby Baker, catalyst of the JFK-Rometsch affair, later boasted that he had in his possession letters from the east Germain woman that could prove embarrassing to the Kennedys, which per Scott, "strengthens the impression of an ongoing, sophisticated blackmail operation" in this nation's carnal capital.
Perhaps. Or maybe it just proves that in Washington eventually everyone gets screwed.
Not surprisingly, then, in the nation's pulsing capital, the fine art of sexual blackmail has what you might call "a history."
The pioneering figure of Washington "sexmail" was that creepiest of peeping G-men, J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to his infamous sex files, which contained dirt on just about everyone in Washington short of his shoeshine boy, Hoover managed to dominate the capital (and eight presidents) for nearly half a century.
Not surprisingly, Hoover's busiest period came while John F. Kennedy occupied the White House and its many bedrooms. By several accounts, when rumors were rampant that Kennedy was going to pinkslip the aging, annoying FBI chief, Hoover put his plenary Kennedy files to work, thereby saving his own hide. With an obsession more than verging on the pathological, Hoover had bugged JFK's legion love nests and tapped the princess phones of assorted Kennedy playmates, including mob moll Judith Campbell Exner and superstarlet Marilyn Monroe - whose bedroom was purportedly heavily trafficked by both Kennedy brothers.
The bug-eyed Hoover also glommed onto in-flight tapes of Jack and actress Angie Dickinson summiting in the boudoir of a chartered aircraft. Typically playing both sides against the middle, Hoover leaked info to the tabloid press about an old Kennedy affair with a senate secretary and about Kennedy's rumored former marriage, and then "put Kennedy in his debt by supplying background for the Newsweek rebuttal," according to journalist Anthony Summers.
When it came to recording Jack and Bobby's compromising positions, Hoover had company. The Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa also managed to plant electronic bedroom ears in Marilyn Monroe's inner sanctum, especially at roue actor and Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford's beach house.
Hoover used the same tactics in his vendetta against Martin Luther King, Jr., bugging the civil rights leader's tryst spots with assorted paramours, spreading untrue gossip that King was a "switch-hitter," even marshaling surveillance photographs of King in the same room as a known - GASP - homosexual. Transcripts were leaked to the press, but the media didn't bite.
Hoover even had a bimbo file on Richard Nixon, of all the unlikely party animals. As Anthony Simmers reports in his revisionist Hoover biography, Official and Confidential, while Nison was vice president, he met a young Hong Kong travel guide named Marianna Liu. Convinced that Liu was a spy for communist China (a "Chicom"), the CIA had British intelligence train its infrared camera lenses on Nixon's bedroom window during his visits to Hong Kong. Liu and Nixon swore to Summers that there was never any sex, but Hoover was described as reading the Nixon-Chicom file "gleefully" and showing it to Dick before be became president.
Never one to let "evidence" get in the way of salacious innuendo, Hoover later came up with a report claiming that future Watergate boys H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin were homosexual lovers. This was in 1969, before Watergate, and Hoover's source, an unidentified bartender, was claiming that the three were whooping it up at homosexual parties in the Watergate hotel. Of course, it wasn't true, and as Ehrlichman told Summers, "I came to think that Hoover did this to show his claws, or ingratiate himself to Nixon - probably both."
In Washington, what going around come around, and Hoover's actual homosexuality was hardly a secret among his numerous enemies. Mob boss Meyer Lansky liked to boast that he "fixed that son of a bitch" Hoover, purportedly by acquiring graphic photos of Hoover fellating his lifelong companion, Clyde Tolson. According to Summers, by the late 1940s there were also pictures of Hoover vamping as a closet drag queen. Even that quintessential CIA garbologist, counterspy catcher James Jesus Angleton was in on the act, purportedly having his mits on incriminating Hoover sex pics.
Blackmail or not, the mob's sway over Hoover was enormous: Publicly, the all-American, morally unimpeachable lingerie-wearing FBI director refused to admit that the Mafia even existed.
Hoover went to his grave more than two decades ago, taking his voluminous "personal and confidential" sex files with him. Of course they mysteriously vanished, giving rise to assorted conspiracy theories, including the possibility that Hoover loyalists destroyed them, that the CIA snatched them up, and even that Nixon's Watergate Plumbers made a bungled attempts to get their hot little mits on the explosive cache.
So, with Hoover out of the picture, is sexual extortion in Washington merely a historical idiosyncrasy, like Hoover, and the Kennedys, the product of a more reckless era?
Well, sexual blackmail may have a more enduring place in Washington politics than we ten to suspect. More than one vice investigator in Washington believes that mob-controlled call girls, intelligence operatives, and even Washington lobbyists have long run an underground racket aimed at sexually compromising Congress and the administration. Conspiracy researcher Peter Dale Scott calls it "an ongoing, highly organized, and protected operation." Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, goes so far as to suggest that Washington's sex syndicate, exploited by intelligence spooks and the mob, has "driven the major scandals of Washington since at least the beginning of the Cold War."
Apparently, behind every good political scandal is a prostitute. Scott isn't alone in this thinking. According to Scott, "a retired Washington detective, one who played a small but important role in Watergate," believes that mob pimps and bigwig lobbyists use pricey call girls to put the squeeze on key officials. This is apparently a reference to Carl Shoffler, incidentally the arresting police officer who slapped cuffs on the Watergate burglars.
During a 1982 investigation into the use of "drugs and sexual activity to lobby congressmen," Shoffler did indeed advise congressional investigators to look into a male prostitution ring that serviced Capitol Hill. The veteran police detective believed that the sex ring might be linked to a high-flying Washington lobbyist, Robert Keith Cray, who had more than a few connections to CIA folk. According to Peter Dale Scott, some Washington investigators also suspected that the gay sex ring was connected to D.C. crime boss Joe "the Possum" Nesline.
Unfortunately, the congressional probe petered out before it got anywhere. Summing up the untested Libido-gate hypothesis, however, one of the congressional investigators put it this way to author Susan Trento: "If a lobbyist wants to use hookers to influence legislation, there's a pool of talent he draws from. There are certain madams in town that they make connections with. By simple logic, if you're in the business of influencing people with male prostitutes of kids, there has to be that supply chain…. [If] we start to identify some of the clients, it's possible we could find the suppliers for intelligence, organized crime, and lobbyists." In other words, follow the honey.
Former (and fugitive) CIA officer Frank Terpil had no compunction about identifying one such client, his former employer. Terpil told investigative author Jim Hougan that CIA-run sexual blackmail setups were common in Washington during the Watergate years. Terpil fingered his former partner, Ed Wilson, as the facilitator of one such CIA operation. Terpil claimed that Wilson ran the CIA mantrap from Korean agent Tong Sun Park's George Town Club, the Korean intelligence front that figured in the 1970s Koreagate scandal.
"Historically," Terpil explained, "one of Wilson's agency jobs was to subvert members of both houses [of Congress] by any means necessary…. Certain people could be easily coerced by living out their sexual fantasy in the flesh…. A remembrance of these occasions [was] permanently recorded via selected cameras."
Of course, we should note the Terpil hasn't offered any proof to back up that claim, and ex-CIA officers - not least of all, ones who have been convicted in absentia for terrorist activities - aren't celebrated for their candor. On the other hand, sexual blackmail was indeed a favorite CIA method of "turning" foreign agents or otherwise compromising them to do Uncle Sam's bidding. Considering all of the Agency's illegal doings on domestic soil during the last four decades, Terpil's story certainly seems plausible. Interestingly, Robert Keith Gray, the omnipresent superlobbyist whose name came up during the 1982 gay sex ring investigation, also pops into the George Town Club-Terpil milieu. Gray, who (coincidentally or not) gravitates toward spy nests, was the club's first overseer and also a director at Terpil's firm, Consultants International, a notorious CIA proprietary front.
And speaking of strange coincidences, it might be nothing more than evidence that networking is key in D.C., but Terpil's and Korean lobbyist Park's names turned up a few years earlier in the trick book of a cathouse madam linked to yet another famous scandal, the biggest scandal of all: Watergate.
The theory that the Watergate affair sprang, unintentionally, from the bosom of a political sex ring was first proposed by journalist Jim Hougan in his book, Secret Agenda.
The madam, Heidi Rikan, worked out of the Washington's posh Columbia Plaza apartment building, located across the street from the Watergate office complex. Hougan suggests that Rikan's call-girl ring may have been "either a CIA operation or the target of a CIA operation."
Briefly, Hougan's hypothesis is this: The Columbia Plaza girls were servicing a very interesting political clientele: Democratic muckamucks who placed their orders for companionship from a phone inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building. Discovering this fruitful setup, Nixon's henchmen decided to target the Democratic fornicators. But in doing so, they stood a good chance of exposing the heavy breather already bugging the phone lines: the CIA. Ergo, the CIA's moles in the White House (allegedly superpatriotic conspirators James McCord and E. Howard Hunt) were forced to sabotage the Watergate break-ins in order to protect the CIA's highly illegal sex sting from Nixon's overeager burglars.
An illegal CIA sexpionage gambit unintentionally triggering the downfall of Richard Nixon? Say it ain't so!
Does the sexpionage industry go back even further in history than the babes of Watergate? Conspiracy theorist-emeritus Peter Dale Scott is game enough to hazard an affirmative. Employing the semiotics of conspiracy research - wherein names connect to other names, dates, and misdeeds, creating a tableau of suspicion that is usually intriguing, if not always conclusive - Scott has connected the dots.
Most interestingly, the Watergate madam, Heidi Rikan, was a girlfriend of mobster Joe "the Possum" Nesline, whose alleged connection to the Capitol Hill gay sex scandal a decade late aroused the suspicions of Washington detectives.
Assorted boyfriends and former husbands of both Rikan and her sometime roommate, Mo Biner (who married key Watergate figure John Dean, which makes Mo a pivotal character, according to scandal revisionists), were associated with the Quorum, an early 1960s "swingles" club run by Bobby Baker, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson. Scott surmises that all roads led to Baker's club for a reason: the Quorum functioned a lot like the mob-and-intelligence-infested sex traps of the 1970s.
It was Bobby Baker who introduced President Kennedy to an East German bombshell named Ellen Rometsh, whom JFK, true to form, promptly bedded. Scott speculates that J. Edgar Hoover leaked word of this international indiscretion to the press. Whether or not Hoover was behind the leaks, they nearly ignited a global scandal. That's because JFK's nubile Valkyrie also happened to be sleeping with a Soviet diplomat, a coincidence that, if revealed, wouldn't have served Kennedy well at the height of the Cold War. The threat of a "bimbo eruption" with international implications forced Bobby Kennedy into scandal-kibosh mode.
Scott notes that the JFK-Rometsch peccadillo paralleled the scandalous 1962 affair that toppled British war minister John Profumo. Profumo publicly confessed to romping with Christine Keller, a party doll/prostitute working for sexual procurer Stephen Ward. That scandal proved doubly damaging to Profumo because Keller was simultaneously servicing, yes, a Soviet diplomat. And more recent revelations have disclosed that the British intelligence agency MI5 "had been using the Stephen Ward sex ring for some time to compromise the Soviet agent." Scott wonders, did MI5 set out to compromise Profumo as well? Did the hyperlibidinous JFK blunder into a similar sex trap?
Interestingly, there is a more direct connection between JFK's peccadilloes and the MI5-manipulated Profumo affair. During the summer of 1963, Hoover's porous sex files began leaking again, resulting in press reports that a high U.S. official had slept with two members of Britain's Ward-Keeler sex ring, the very ring that toppled Profumo. That high U.S. official, no surprise, was the prodigious JFK. Scott observes that "MI5, as Britain's counterintelligence agency, maintained direct relations with both Hoover in the FBI" and the CIA. Did the Brits help Hoover set up Kennedy for a fall?
Bobby Baker, catalyst of the JFK-Rometsch affair, later boasted that he had in his possession letters from the east Germain woman that could prove embarrassing to the Kennedys, which per Scott, "strengthens the impression of an ongoing, sophisticated blackmail operation" in this nation's carnal capital.
Perhaps. Or maybe it just proves that in Washington eventually everyone gets screwed.
The Jesus Conspiracy
The mysterious French organization known as the Priory of Zion may be a nine-hundred-year-old secret society possessing proof that Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion. What's more, it may also be the repository of Europe's secret history, and indeed the underground annals of all Christendom. Then again, maybe it's just an extremely elaborate hoax. Whichever, it launched a best-selling book, 1982's Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by BBC documentary filmmaker Henry Lincoln and historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.
Lincoln and company set out to write about one of France's most enduring riddles, the legend of Rennes-le-Chateau, an antique village ensconsed in the Pyrenees mountains. Legend has it that somehwhere beneath its cobblestone streets, Rennes-le-Chateau harbors a fabulous treasure. Locals are partial to the theory that the stash belonged to the Cathars, Christian heretics stamped out by the Catholic church in the thirteenth century. New Age pilgrims and occultists trek there to partake of the town's supposed spiritual energy; treasure hunters prowl its windswept perimeters in search of more worldly goods; others tie the source of the town's mustical fascination to UFOs.
Whatever the theory, Rennes-le-Chateau owes its renaissance as a mystical landmark to a nineteenth-century cleric named Berenger Sauniere, and that is where Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh began their quest.
The story opens in 1885, when the Catholic church assigned Sauniere, thirty-three years old, handsome, well-educated - if provincial - to the parish at Rennes-le-Chateau. Sauniere set about restoring the town's tiny church, which sat atop a sacred site dating back to the sixth-century Visigoths. Under the altar stone, inside a hollow Visigothic pillar, the young cure discovers a series of parchments. There were two genealogies dating from 1244a.d. and 1644a.d., as well as more recent documents created by a former parish priest during the 1780s. according to Lincoln and his coauthors, these more recent papers contained a series of ciphers and codes, some of them "fantastically complex, defying even a computer" to unlock their secrets.
Sauniere took his discovery to the bishop in a nearby Carcassonne, who dispatched the priest to Paris, where clerical scholars studied the parchments. One of the simpler ciphers, when translated, read: TO DAGOBERT II KIND AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD.
Whatever it all meant, apparently it became Sauiere's entrée into a new world, with the accent on worldly. For during his short stay in Paris, Sauniere began to mix with the city's cultural elite, many of whom dabbled in the occult arts. Contemporary gossip had it that the country priest had an affair with Emma Calve, the famous opera diva who was also a high priestess of the Parisian esoteric underground. She would later visit him frequently in Rennes-le-Chateau.
When Sauniere returned to his parish, he resumed restoration of the church and discovered an underground crypt, supposedly containing skeletons. At this point, his taste in interior design seems to have taken a turn for the, well, peuliare; among the eccentric fixtures he installed were a holy water basin surmounted by a statue of a sneering red demon and an equally garish wall relief depicting Jesus atop a hill at the base of which is an object resembling a sack of money. The stations of the cross had their oddities too: One, set at night, depicted Jesus being carried into the tomb - or smuggled out of it? Sauniere also installed a series of cipher messages in the fixtures of the church. He spent a fortune refurbishing the town and developed extravagant tastes for rare china, antiques, and other pricey artifacts. Yet how Sauniere acquired this apparent windfall remained a mystery - he stubbornly refused to explain the secret of his success to the church authorities. When he died in 1917, he was supposedly penniless, yet his former housekeeper later spoke of a "secret" that would make its owner not only rich but also "powerful." Unfortunately, she never spilled the beans.
Lincoln and his coauthors found no treasure, though they speculated the Sauniere might have exhumed somebody's loot: Maybe it was the legendary Cathar hoard, or the nest egg of the Visigoths, or perhaps the treasure of the Merovingian kings who ruled the region between the fifth and eighth centuries - the Dagobert II mentioned in the coded parchment was one of them. Maybe it was a combination of all three treasures. Or, if not treasure in the conventional sense, then perhaps Sauniere had discovered some form of forbidden knowledge and had used it to blackmail someone, say, for instance, the church.
At any rate, during their investigation into the legend of Sauniere, what Lincoln and company did discover was less cashable, yet just as mysterious: an unseen hand "discreetly, tantalizingly" directing a low-key publicity effort on behalf of the legend.
At the center of the underground PR campaign they found an enigmatic and very real figure named Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair, apparently the source behind much of the recent literature devoted to the hilltown and its enigmatic priest. Shepherded to Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale, our trio of historical investigators discovered there a provocative genealogy purporting to link Pierre Plantard to King Dagobert II and the Merovingian dynasty. Hardly your tun-of-the-mill blue blood, that Monsieur Plantard, for the Merovingians were considered in their day to be quasi-mystical warrior-kings vested with supernatural powers. Ah, but that was only one item on Plantard's impressive family resume. More on that in a moment.
Throughout these dossiers secrets at Paris's national library were tantalizing historical references to a mysterious and ancient secret society called Prieure de Sion, or Priory of Zion. The word Zion, of course, appeared in various ciphers connected with Rennes-le-Chateau. It also seemed to refer to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, site of the ancient Temple of Solomon.
According to the secret dossiers, the spectral Priory was linked to the famous Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks who defended the European occupation of the Holy Land during the twelfth century. The Templars took their name from the source of their authority and the site of their quarters, built on the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. Of course, this wasn't the first conspiracy theory to cast the Templars as cabalistic bugaboos, yet their supposed connection to the (possibly fictional) Priory of Zion was a new one. Taking a cue from the dossiers, Lincoln and company speculated that the clandestine Priory had hidden behind the Knights Templar, which served as the Priory's armed entourage and public face.
And if these secret dossiers were to be believed, the Priory of Zion was a covert force to be reckoned with. References to well-known historical events suggested that the Priory had been a secret power in Europe ever since the Crusades, a gray eminence manipulating kings and popes in the furtherance of some obscure mission.
According to the musty pamphlets and microfiche in France's national library, throught he ages the Priory's leaders had included such luminaries as Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Radclyffe, Victor Hugo, and the most recent entry on the list, Jean Cocteau, the twentieth-century artist and author. In all, the list named twenty-sex such "grand masters" spanning some seven hundred years!
Could the group have survived into the late twentieth century? Lincoln and company checked with the French authorities and discovered that there was indeed a contemporary organization calling itself Priory of Zion. And who do you think was registered as the group's secretary-general but Pierre Plantard.
When Lincoln finally tracked him down, Plantard turned out to be a wily old aristocrat who had played a small part in the French Resistance. But his deliberate obfuscation seemed intended as much to conceal something as to lure the authors further into the mystery.
Just what was Plantard trying to hide - or reveal in his consciously elipitical way? What was the possible sinister purpose behind the Priory of Zion?
The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed a theory, as tangled and complicated as the dossier secrets, yet entertainingly mounted and surprisingly well argued. Was there a connection, they wondered, between the heretical Cathars of thirteenth-century France, Sauniere'' Rennes-le-Chateau, the Templars, and the omnipresent Priory of Zion?
But of courseand the Templars' treasure of King Solomon. At some point, according to Lincoln et al., the treasure had passed from the Merovingians to the Priory of Zion, whose Templar operative later hustled the precious hoard from the Holy Land to the French Cathars, who, on the eve of their destruction by the church, squirreled the lucre away in the Pyrenees.
But what if the "treasure" was something other than gold? After all, legend had it that the Cathar heretics possessed a valuable, even sacred relic, "which according to a number of legends, was the Holy Grail," itself. During World War II, the Nazis supposedly excavated various sites in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Chareau in their futile search for the Grail (which was dramatized in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).
Was the lost Cathar/Templar/Merovingian/Sauniere treasure, then, the fabled Holy Grail, itself? By suggesting that it was, our trailblazing authors were not suggesting that the ominous Priory revolved around a mere religious relic - and a rusty old goblet at that. Lincoln and company had something more ambitious in mine. Boldly reinterpreting centuries of folklore, they proposed that the Grail of medieval romance might have been a coded reference to something much more controversial: the literal bloodline of Christ.
Here's where Lincoln and company shifted into conspiratorial overdrive. Borrowing the thesis of Hugh J. Schonfield's book, The Passover Plot, and grafting it onto the enigmatic Plantard clues, Lincoln and his coauthors fashioned a, well, daring theory. Stripped of syllogistic elegance, it goes something like this: Christ survived the crucifixion by "faking" his death or otherwise being "fruitful" before Good Friday, either way leaving behind the wife and kids. The "Christs" subsequently legged it to the south of France where they intermarried with the royal Franks to found what eventually became the mystical Merovingian Dynasty. Ergo, the real mission of the Templars and Priory of Zion: to safeguard not just the treasure of the Crusades, but to preserve the Grail, which appeared in medieval texts as "Sangrall" or "Sangreal," and which Lincoln et al. translated to mean sang real, or "royal blood." In other words: the dynastic legacy of Christ, literally.
This, then, might be the stunning secret - and the secret society that evolved through the ages to protect it - that Abbe Sauniere stumbled upon in Rennes-le-Chateau: TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD. Who he? J.C.
Suddenly, the meandering history of Europe develops a dramatic, cohesive plot line: The persecution of the Cathars by the church, the collusion of Rome in the assassination of King Dagobert, the successful conspiracy of the Pope Clement V and Phillipe IV of France to suppress the powerful Templars - all were efforts to "eradicate it, Jesus' bloodline." For "it" constituted nothing less than a rival church with a more direct link to J.C.'s legacy than the Vatican could ever claim.
Whew. Fast forward to the twentieth century, and Plantard's Merovingian pedigree has obvious implications.
Of course, Plantard's response to all this virtuoso theorizing was that enigmatic Mona Lisa smile of his. He wasn't about to walk on water, at least not at the behest of three future best-selling authors.
Curiously, in their followup book, The Messianic Legacy, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh wounded at times almost as if they were proselytizing. Advocating the concept of the lost "priest-king," they argued that a dose of spiritual leadership might not necessarily be a bad thing for rudderless Europe, especially since the historically bickering nations were attempting to unify as an Economic Community anyway. A "theocratic United Sates of Europe" might be just what the doctor ordered, Lincoln and his associated suggested.
Yet their sequel ended on a decidedly down note, for their subsequent research raised doubts about the true nature of the Priory.
In piercing the confounding veil surrounding Plantard and his mysterious organization, Lincoln and company opened a sordid vault of modern conspiracies. Key Priory documents purporting to trace the royal lineage back to J.C., Himself, were said to have been smuggles out of France by British intelligence agents, possibly at the behest of American spooks. Why were these venal forces sullying the uplifting vision of the Lost King? There were other troubling elements lurking in the background, including Italy's crypto-fascist P2 Masonic lodge, which during the 1980s seemed to have reserved seating at every major conspiracy event.
Could Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh have stumbled upon an elaborate, tangles ruse set up for some abstruse objective of spycraft, or perhaps in the service of right-wing European politics? Was Plantard just a clever self-promoter with too much ancien regime leisure time on his hands? Or, if it wasn't a hoax from the get-go, did the Priory of Zion's ancient charter devolve at some point into a club for tweedy intelligence operatives? Was the Grail just a dirty cup filled with slippery spy dust?
During the 1980s, the books struck a ringing chord just about everywhere. The American clergy went ballistic at the suggestion that centuries of Christian dogma amounted to centuries of false dogma. Despite the fact the Holy Blood, Holy Grail restored the underappreciated French to the center of the cosmos (after all, the Messiah doesn't have an English or American accent, does He?), modern Gallic folk tend to be unimpressed with the trio's revisionist scholarship. And some even resent having their cherished national mysteries paraded on the international marketplace, by profiteering foreigners, no less. Of course, American and British book buyers have been much more generous.
By the 1990s, though, even Lincoln had soured on speculating about the Priory of Zion and its maddeningly hermetic chief executive, Pierre Plantard. "In my old age, I've decided to stick to that which can be verified," Lincoln groused when asked for an update on the secret society.
Though disillusioned, he hadn't finished with the mysterious hill town that launched his modern quest for the Holy Grail - not to mention his book-writing career. In his solo 1991 coffee-table book, The Holy Place, Lincoln announced that whatever else it may or may not be, the town called Rennes-le-Chateau is most certainly the "eighth Wonder of the Ancient World," an "immense geometric temple, stretching for miles across the landscape." But sounding like the reformed heretic stung once too often by the critical flail, Lincoln offered a rather modest closing caveat: "This book does not claim to have solved the riddle."
Lincoln and company set out to write about one of France's most enduring riddles, the legend of Rennes-le-Chateau, an antique village ensconsed in the Pyrenees mountains. Legend has it that somehwhere beneath its cobblestone streets, Rennes-le-Chateau harbors a fabulous treasure. Locals are partial to the theory that the stash belonged to the Cathars, Christian heretics stamped out by the Catholic church in the thirteenth century. New Age pilgrims and occultists trek there to partake of the town's supposed spiritual energy; treasure hunters prowl its windswept perimeters in search of more worldly goods; others tie the source of the town's mustical fascination to UFOs.
Whatever the theory, Rennes-le-Chateau owes its renaissance as a mystical landmark to a nineteenth-century cleric named Berenger Sauniere, and that is where Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh began their quest.
The story opens in 1885, when the Catholic church assigned Sauniere, thirty-three years old, handsome, well-educated - if provincial - to the parish at Rennes-le-Chateau. Sauniere set about restoring the town's tiny church, which sat atop a sacred site dating back to the sixth-century Visigoths. Under the altar stone, inside a hollow Visigothic pillar, the young cure discovers a series of parchments. There were two genealogies dating from 1244a.d. and 1644a.d., as well as more recent documents created by a former parish priest during the 1780s. according to Lincoln and his coauthors, these more recent papers contained a series of ciphers and codes, some of them "fantastically complex, defying even a computer" to unlock their secrets.
Sauniere took his discovery to the bishop in a nearby Carcassonne, who dispatched the priest to Paris, where clerical scholars studied the parchments. One of the simpler ciphers, when translated, read: TO DAGOBERT II KIND AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD.
Whatever it all meant, apparently it became Sauiere's entrée into a new world, with the accent on worldly. For during his short stay in Paris, Sauniere began to mix with the city's cultural elite, many of whom dabbled in the occult arts. Contemporary gossip had it that the country priest had an affair with Emma Calve, the famous opera diva who was also a high priestess of the Parisian esoteric underground. She would later visit him frequently in Rennes-le-Chateau.
When Sauniere returned to his parish, he resumed restoration of the church and discovered an underground crypt, supposedly containing skeletons. At this point, his taste in interior design seems to have taken a turn for the, well, peuliare; among the eccentric fixtures he installed were a holy water basin surmounted by a statue of a sneering red demon and an equally garish wall relief depicting Jesus atop a hill at the base of which is an object resembling a sack of money. The stations of the cross had their oddities too: One, set at night, depicted Jesus being carried into the tomb - or smuggled out of it? Sauniere also installed a series of cipher messages in the fixtures of the church. He spent a fortune refurbishing the town and developed extravagant tastes for rare china, antiques, and other pricey artifacts. Yet how Sauniere acquired this apparent windfall remained a mystery - he stubbornly refused to explain the secret of his success to the church authorities. When he died in 1917, he was supposedly penniless, yet his former housekeeper later spoke of a "secret" that would make its owner not only rich but also "powerful." Unfortunately, she never spilled the beans.
Lincoln and his coauthors found no treasure, though they speculated the Sauniere might have exhumed somebody's loot: Maybe it was the legendary Cathar hoard, or the nest egg of the Visigoths, or perhaps the treasure of the Merovingian kings who ruled the region between the fifth and eighth centuries - the Dagobert II mentioned in the coded parchment was one of them. Maybe it was a combination of all three treasures. Or, if not treasure in the conventional sense, then perhaps Sauniere had discovered some form of forbidden knowledge and had used it to blackmail someone, say, for instance, the church.
At any rate, during their investigation into the legend of Sauniere, what Lincoln and company did discover was less cashable, yet just as mysterious: an unseen hand "discreetly, tantalizingly" directing a low-key publicity effort on behalf of the legend.
At the center of the underground PR campaign they found an enigmatic and very real figure named Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair, apparently the source behind much of the recent literature devoted to the hilltown and its enigmatic priest. Shepherded to Paris's Bibliotheque Nationale, our trio of historical investigators discovered there a provocative genealogy purporting to link Pierre Plantard to King Dagobert II and the Merovingian dynasty. Hardly your tun-of-the-mill blue blood, that Monsieur Plantard, for the Merovingians were considered in their day to be quasi-mystical warrior-kings vested with supernatural powers. Ah, but that was only one item on Plantard's impressive family resume. More on that in a moment.
Throughout these dossiers secrets at Paris's national library were tantalizing historical references to a mysterious and ancient secret society called Prieure de Sion, or Priory of Zion. The word Zion, of course, appeared in various ciphers connected with Rennes-le-Chateau. It also seemed to refer to Mount Zion in Jerusalem, site of the ancient Temple of Solomon.
According to the secret dossiers, the spectral Priory was linked to the famous Knights Templar, an order of warrior monks who defended the European occupation of the Holy Land during the twelfth century. The Templars took their name from the source of their authority and the site of their quarters, built on the ruins of the Temple of Solomon. Of course, this wasn't the first conspiracy theory to cast the Templars as cabalistic bugaboos, yet their supposed connection to the (possibly fictional) Priory of Zion was a new one. Taking a cue from the dossiers, Lincoln and company speculated that the clandestine Priory had hidden behind the Knights Templar, which served as the Priory's armed entourage and public face.
And if these secret dossiers were to be believed, the Priory of Zion was a covert force to be reckoned with. References to well-known historical events suggested that the Priory had been a secret power in Europe ever since the Crusades, a gray eminence manipulating kings and popes in the furtherance of some obscure mission.
According to the musty pamphlets and microfiche in France's national library, throught he ages the Priory's leaders had included such luminaries as Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Radclyffe, Victor Hugo, and the most recent entry on the list, Jean Cocteau, the twentieth-century artist and author. In all, the list named twenty-sex such "grand masters" spanning some seven hundred years!
Could the group have survived into the late twentieth century? Lincoln and company checked with the French authorities and discovered that there was indeed a contemporary organization calling itself Priory of Zion. And who do you think was registered as the group's secretary-general but Pierre Plantard.
When Lincoln finally tracked him down, Plantard turned out to be a wily old aristocrat who had played a small part in the French Resistance. But his deliberate obfuscation seemed intended as much to conceal something as to lure the authors further into the mystery.
Just what was Plantard trying to hide - or reveal in his consciously elipitical way? What was the possible sinister purpose behind the Priory of Zion?
The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail proposed a theory, as tangled and complicated as the dossier secrets, yet entertainingly mounted and surprisingly well argued. Was there a connection, they wondered, between the heretical Cathars of thirteenth-century France, Sauniere'' Rennes-le-Chateau, the Templars, and the omnipresent Priory of Zion?
But of courseand the Templars' treasure of King Solomon. At some point, according to Lincoln et al., the treasure had passed from the Merovingians to the Priory of Zion, whose Templar operative later hustled the precious hoard from the Holy Land to the French Cathars, who, on the eve of their destruction by the church, squirreled the lucre away in the Pyrenees.
But what if the "treasure" was something other than gold? After all, legend had it that the Cathar heretics possessed a valuable, even sacred relic, "which according to a number of legends, was the Holy Grail," itself. During World War II, the Nazis supposedly excavated various sites in the vicinity of Rennes-le-Chareau in their futile search for the Grail (which was dramatized in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).
Was the lost Cathar/Templar/Merovingian/Sauniere treasure, then, the fabled Holy Grail, itself? By suggesting that it was, our trailblazing authors were not suggesting that the ominous Priory revolved around a mere religious relic - and a rusty old goblet at that. Lincoln and company had something more ambitious in mine. Boldly reinterpreting centuries of folklore, they proposed that the Grail of medieval romance might have been a coded reference to something much more controversial: the literal bloodline of Christ.
Here's where Lincoln and company shifted into conspiratorial overdrive. Borrowing the thesis of Hugh J. Schonfield's book, The Passover Plot, and grafting it onto the enigmatic Plantard clues, Lincoln and his coauthors fashioned a, well, daring theory. Stripped of syllogistic elegance, it goes something like this: Christ survived the crucifixion by "faking" his death or otherwise being "fruitful" before Good Friday, either way leaving behind the wife and kids. The "Christs" subsequently legged it to the south of France where they intermarried with the royal Franks to found what eventually became the mystical Merovingian Dynasty. Ergo, the real mission of the Templars and Priory of Zion: to safeguard not just the treasure of the Crusades, but to preserve the Grail, which appeared in medieval texts as "Sangrall" or "Sangreal," and which Lincoln et al. translated to mean sang real, or "royal blood." In other words: the dynastic legacy of Christ, literally.
This, then, might be the stunning secret - and the secret society that evolved through the ages to protect it - that Abbe Sauniere stumbled upon in Rennes-le-Chateau: TO DAGOBERT II KING AND TO SION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE DEAD. Who he? J.C.
Suddenly, the meandering history of Europe develops a dramatic, cohesive plot line: The persecution of the Cathars by the church, the collusion of Rome in the assassination of King Dagobert, the successful conspiracy of the Pope Clement V and Phillipe IV of France to suppress the powerful Templars - all were efforts to "eradicate it, Jesus' bloodline." For "it" constituted nothing less than a rival church with a more direct link to J.C.'s legacy than the Vatican could ever claim.
Whew. Fast forward to the twentieth century, and Plantard's Merovingian pedigree has obvious implications.
Of course, Plantard's response to all this virtuoso theorizing was that enigmatic Mona Lisa smile of his. He wasn't about to walk on water, at least not at the behest of three future best-selling authors.
Curiously, in their followup book, The Messianic Legacy, Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh wounded at times almost as if they were proselytizing. Advocating the concept of the lost "priest-king," they argued that a dose of spiritual leadership might not necessarily be a bad thing for rudderless Europe, especially since the historically bickering nations were attempting to unify as an Economic Community anyway. A "theocratic United Sates of Europe" might be just what the doctor ordered, Lincoln and his associated suggested.
Yet their sequel ended on a decidedly down note, for their subsequent research raised doubts about the true nature of the Priory.
In piercing the confounding veil surrounding Plantard and his mysterious organization, Lincoln and company opened a sordid vault of modern conspiracies. Key Priory documents purporting to trace the royal lineage back to J.C., Himself, were said to have been smuggles out of France by British intelligence agents, possibly at the behest of American spooks. Why were these venal forces sullying the uplifting vision of the Lost King? There were other troubling elements lurking in the background, including Italy's crypto-fascist P2 Masonic lodge, which during the 1980s seemed to have reserved seating at every major conspiracy event.
Could Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh have stumbled upon an elaborate, tangles ruse set up for some abstruse objective of spycraft, or perhaps in the service of right-wing European politics? Was Plantard just a clever self-promoter with too much ancien regime leisure time on his hands? Or, if it wasn't a hoax from the get-go, did the Priory of Zion's ancient charter devolve at some point into a club for tweedy intelligence operatives? Was the Grail just a dirty cup filled with slippery spy dust?
During the 1980s, the books struck a ringing chord just about everywhere. The American clergy went ballistic at the suggestion that centuries of Christian dogma amounted to centuries of false dogma. Despite the fact the Holy Blood, Holy Grail restored the underappreciated French to the center of the cosmos (after all, the Messiah doesn't have an English or American accent, does He?), modern Gallic folk tend to be unimpressed with the trio's revisionist scholarship. And some even resent having their cherished national mysteries paraded on the international marketplace, by profiteering foreigners, no less. Of course, American and British book buyers have been much more generous.
By the 1990s, though, even Lincoln had soured on speculating about the Priory of Zion and its maddeningly hermetic chief executive, Pierre Plantard. "In my old age, I've decided to stick to that which can be verified," Lincoln groused when asked for an update on the secret society.
Though disillusioned, he hadn't finished with the mysterious hill town that launched his modern quest for the Holy Grail - not to mention his book-writing career. In his solo 1991 coffee-table book, The Holy Place, Lincoln announced that whatever else it may or may not be, the town called Rennes-le-Chateau is most certainly the "eighth Wonder of the Ancient World," an "immense geometric temple, stretching for miles across the landscape." But sounding like the reformed heretic stung once too often by the critical flail, Lincoln offered a rather modest closing caveat: "This book does not claim to have solved the riddle."
The Nazis had a Moon Base
Esoteric Hitlerists and conspiracy theorists interested in Nazi mysticism and World War II have speculated that the Germans landed on the Moon as early as 1942.
According to other theories it is believed that the Nazis had made contact with 'half a dozen' alien races.
The front page of the November 2 1966 edition of The Washington Post read: “Six Mysterious Statuesque Shadows Photographed on the Moon by Orbiter”. The Lunar Orbiter 2 had photographed a lunar area of approximately 30 by 50 kilometres. The photo apparently showed six or seven towers, appearing in a specific geometric pattern, rising from the Mare Tranquilis. Their pointed shadow indicated that they were either conical or pyramid-shaped. One of the towers measured an impressive 213 metres. NASA countered that the photographs did not show anything of any interest... whatsoever.
"The Castle", one of the structures identified in lunar photographs, identified by Richard Hoagland
According to other theories it is believed that the Nazis had made contact with 'half a dozen' alien races.
The front page of the November 2 1966 edition of The Washington Post read: “Six Mysterious Statuesque Shadows Photographed on the Moon by Orbiter”. The Lunar Orbiter 2 had photographed a lunar area of approximately 30 by 50 kilometres. The photo apparently showed six or seven towers, appearing in a specific geometric pattern, rising from the Mare Tranquilis. Their pointed shadow indicated that they were either conical or pyramid-shaped. One of the towers measured an impressive 213 metres. NASA countered that the photographs did not show anything of any interest... whatsoever.
"The Castle", one of the structures identified in lunar photographs, identified by Richard Hoagland
U.S. military caused tsunami in Indian Ocean 2004
Popular Arab news services claim the U.S. and Indian militaries deliberately caused the Indian Ocean tsunamis with electromagnetic pulse technology.
Another type of theory bases its claims on oil and gas interests. Others also reason that the technology is at least feasible if not highly probable since research into such technology has been conducted by the military as far back as World War II.
Another type of theory bases its claims on oil and gas interests. Others also reason that the technology is at least feasible if not highly probable since research into such technology has been conducted by the military as far back as World War II.
Microsofts Wingdings font
The Wingdings font included with Windows has a history of controversy. In 1992, only days after the release of Windows 3.1, it was discovered that the character sequence "NYC" in Wingdings was rendered as skull and crossbones symbol, Star of David, and thumbs up gesture. This could be interpreted as a message of approval of killing Jews, especially those from New York City.
Microsoft strongly denied this was intentional, and insisted that the final arrangement of the glyphs in the font was largely random. Various other combinations of Wingings characters are alleged to have special significance by conspiracy theorists, but these results are likely purely coincidental.
Microsoft strongly denied this was intentional, and insisted that the final arrangement of the glyphs in the font was largely random. Various other combinations of Wingings characters are alleged to have special significance by conspiracy theorists, but these results are likely purely coincidental.
AREA 51: the truth is out there
AREA 51 is probably the most known secret location on the Earth.
The secretive nature of AREA 51 and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led AREA 51 to become a centerpiece of modern UFO and conspiracy theory folklore. Some of the unconventional activities claimed to be underway at AREA 51 include:
- the storage, examination, and reverse engineering of crashed alien spacecraft (including material supposedly recovered at Roswell), the study of their occupants (living and dead), and the manufacture of aircraft based on alien technology
- the development of exotic energy weapons (for SDI applications or otherwise) or means of weather control
- activities related to a supposed shadowy world government
- meetings or joint undertakings with extraterrestrials
The secretive nature of AREA 51 and undoubted connection to classified aircraft research, together with reports of unusual phenomena, have led AREA 51 to become a centerpiece of modern UFO and conspiracy theory folklore. Some of the unconventional activities claimed to be underway at AREA 51 include:
- the storage, examination, and reverse engineering of crashed alien spacecraft (including material supposedly recovered at Roswell), the study of their occupants (living and dead), and the manufacture of aircraft based on alien technology
- the development of exotic energy weapons (for SDI applications or otherwise) or means of weather control
- activities related to a supposed shadowy world government
- meetings or joint undertakings with extraterrestrials
Barcodes are intended to control people
Some conspiracy theorists have proposed that barcodes are really intended to serve as means of control by a putative world government, or that they are Satanic in intent.
Mary Stewart Relfe claims in "The New Money System 666" that barcodes secretly encode the number 666 - the Biblical "Number of the Beast".
This theory has been adopted by other fringe figures such as the "oracle" Sollog, who refuses to label any of his books with barcodes on the grounds that "any type of computer numbering systems MANDATED by any government or business is part of the PROPHECY of the BEAST controlling you."
Mary Stewart Relfe claims in "The New Money System 666" that barcodes secretly encode the number 666 - the Biblical "Number of the Beast".
This theory has been adopted by other fringe figures such as the "oracle" Sollog, who refuses to label any of his books with barcodes on the grounds that "any type of computer numbering systems MANDATED by any government or business is part of the PROPHECY of the BEAST controlling you."
Aliens are dominating the World
Christine Fitzgerald, a confidante of Diana, Princess of Wales, claims that Diana told her that the Royal Family were aliens, and that they could shapeshift.
David Icke's --BBC reporter-- claims that humanity is actually under the control of aliens who must consume human blood to maintain their human appearance.
"Evidence" goes from Sumerian tablets describing the "Anunnaki" (which he translates as "those who from heaven to earth came"), to the serpent in the Biblical Garden of Eden, to child abuse, fluoridation, and the genealogical connections between the Bush family and the House of Windsor.
Icke theorizes that the aliens came here from the constellation Draco. Like most conspiracy theories, falsification of Icke's hypotheses is nearly impossible, but Icke continues to sell books and give speaking engagements based on concepts ranging from the New Age to his political opinions.
David Icke's --BBC reporter-- claims that humanity is actually under the control of aliens who must consume human blood to maintain their human appearance.
"Evidence" goes from Sumerian tablets describing the "Anunnaki" (which he translates as "those who from heaven to earth came"), to the serpent in the Biblical Garden of Eden, to child abuse, fluoridation, and the genealogical connections between the Bush family and the House of Windsor.
Icke theorizes that the aliens came here from the constellation Draco. Like most conspiracy theories, falsification of Icke's hypotheses is nearly impossible, but Icke continues to sell books and give speaking engagements based on concepts ranging from the New Age to his political opinions.
September 11th - U.S. government conspiracy
A number of conspiracy theories have been formulated to explain the events of September 11th:
- the Twin Towers fell straight down, at close to free-fall speed. This is a similar characteristic of a controlled demolition. The dust cloud and its make up are considered un-characteristic of a gravity driven collapse
- it is often pointed out that no steel building before or since the 9-11 attack has collapsed as the result of fire
- the rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered for weeks after the collapse. This claim is meant to point out that steel could only have smoldered as a result of pre-placed explosives
- some consider photographic evidence of the plane lying on the grounds of the Pentagon to be ambiguous and unconvincing, citing a visual lack of burnt metal, human remains, passenger's luggage or seats
- the Pentagon was struck in a newly renovated, reinforced section. Some speculate this location, the west side of the complex, to be indicative of government involvement, noting it as an attempt to reduce casualties
- flight 77 was able to fly in the direction of the DC and Pentagon area for approximately 40 minutes without interception. This is thought to be unusual given the Pentagon's close proximity to Andrews Air Force Base
- there are claims that anti-missile batteries at the Pentagon should have intercepted Flight 77
- the FBI confiscated a video, which may have captured the impact, from a nearby gas station attended by Jose Velasquez. This video has not yet been released
- the Twin Towers fell straight down, at close to free-fall speed. This is a similar characteristic of a controlled demolition. The dust cloud and its make up are considered un-characteristic of a gravity driven collapse
- it is often pointed out that no steel building before or since the 9-11 attack has collapsed as the result of fire
- the rubble of the Twin Towers smoldered for weeks after the collapse. This claim is meant to point out that steel could only have smoldered as a result of pre-placed explosives
- some consider photographic evidence of the plane lying on the grounds of the Pentagon to be ambiguous and unconvincing, citing a visual lack of burnt metal, human remains, passenger's luggage or seats
- the Pentagon was struck in a newly renovated, reinforced section. Some speculate this location, the west side of the complex, to be indicative of government involvement, noting it as an attempt to reduce casualties
- flight 77 was able to fly in the direction of the DC and Pentagon area for approximately 40 minutes without interception. This is thought to be unusual given the Pentagon's close proximity to Andrews Air Force Base
- there are claims that anti-missile batteries at the Pentagon should have intercepted Flight 77
- the FBI confiscated a video, which may have captured the impact, from a nearby gas station attended by Jose Velasquez. This video has not yet been released
Apollo 11 Moon landings
Proponents of the Apollo Moon landing hoax accusations allege that the Apollo Moon landings never took place, and were faked by NASA with possible CIA support. Fanatics of this theory claim that:
- the flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon
- the launch rocket produced no visible flame
- no blast crater appeared from the landing
- the Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted
- identical backgrounds in photos that are listed as taken miles apart
- there are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows
- the quality of the photographs is impossible high
- the photos were altered - the crosshairs on some photos appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be
- the astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation
- the flag placed on the surface by the astronauts flapped despite there being no wind on the Moon
- the launch rocket produced no visible flame
- no blast crater appeared from the landing
- the Moon's surface during the daytime is so hot that camera film would have melted
- identical backgrounds in photos that are listed as taken miles apart
- there are no stars in any of the photos, and astronauts never report seeing any stars from the capsule windows
- the quality of the photographs is impossible high
- the photos were altered - the crosshairs on some photos appear to be behind objects, rather than in front of them where they should be
- the astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation
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