Chapter 3
The Secret Network of Power

We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world.1
— Arnold Toynbee, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1931

We shall have world government, whether or not we like it. The question is only whether world government will be achieved by consent or by conquest.2
— James P. Warburg (CFR), testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, 1950

I know of the operations of this network [the international Round Table groups, including the Council on Foreign Relations] because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records.3
— Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University, "mentor" to Bill Clinton, 1966

Over the next 20 to 30 years, we are going to end up with world government. It's inevitable.... [W]e have to empower the United Nations and ... we have to govern and regulate human interaction.4
— Jim Garrison, President of the Gorbachev Foundation/USA, 1995

In Jonathan Swift's adventure parable, the giant Gulliver is bound by the tiny Lilliputians in a single night.

 

Their ropes were mere threads to him, and he could have easily snapped them individually or in small numbers. Yet, once those threads had multiplied to thousands, he would be rendered completely helpless. It was thus absolutely essential, from the standpoint of his little captors, that they complete their project before he awakened. So too, with our situation today. The American giant is fast asleep, completely unaware of the growing danger. In this case, however, the Lilliputians have inside help.

 

They have traitors inside our camp who are slipping the American Gulliver sedatives and tranquilizers.

The strands that are multiplying about the American people and gradually being forged into steel manacles are the work not of a single night but of decades. The network of individuals and organizations leading this effort for global conquest has worked patiently and assiduously to build a worldwide "movement" which, on the surface, appears to be a completely absurd mixture of incongruous and opposing parts.

 

It is a fusion of radical socialists, feminists, pacifists, environmentalists, and communists together with international bankers, industrialists, and corporate CEOs, including some of the world's wealthiest capitalists.

 

Yet the disparate members of this odd alliance chant the one-world mantra in unison:

"Global problems require global solutions."

And global solutions, they assure us, can only be provided by a world government — one with ever-increasing powers.

In this chapter, we are going to briefly examine some of the main groups and individuals in the 20th century who forged the conspiratorial drive for world government. This includes the venerated founders of the United Nations and many well-known and respected leaders in the fields of politics, business, finance, and academia.
 


UN: Creature of the CFR

The United Nations, we learn as schoolchildren, represents mankind's highest aspirations and ideals. According to textbook lore and steady propaganda in the major media, the UN is the world's "last best hope for peace." Following World War II, we are told, the heroic and visionary UN founders came together to save humanity from the certain annihilation that would result if a nuclear war were allowed to occur.

That is a myth, a lie. The UN, as we will show, is completely a creature of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and was created for purposes entirely different from the noble ones usually cited. It was created to accumulate and usurp power so that eventually it could become a vehicle for imposing totalitarian control over our entire planet.

The plans for the United Nations were drafted in 1943 by the Informal Agenda Group (IAG), a secret steering committee set up by FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Besides Hull himself, the IAG was composed of Leo Pasvolsky, Isaiah Bowman, Sumner Welles, Norman Davis, and Morton Taylor.

 

As Professors Lawrence Shoup and William Mintner point out in their critical study of the CFR, with the exception of Hull, all of the secret IAG participants were CFR members.

"They saw Hull regularly to plan, select, and guide the labors of the [State] Department's Advisory Committee. It [the CFR] was, in effect, the coordinating agency for all the State Department postwar planning."5

At the UN's founding San Francisco Conference, 43 of the U.S. delegates — virtually our entire contingent — were, or would later become, members of the CFR, including: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Ralph Bunche, John J. McCloy, Leo Pasvolsky, Nelson Rockefeller, Harold Stassen, Adlai Stevenson, Isaiah Bowman, and John Foster Dulles (the last two being founding members of the CFR).6

 

Of course, the top man at that conference, serving as acting Secretary-General, was Soviet agent Alger Hiss, also a CFR member. Hiss not only ran the UN show at San Francisco and appointed many of the delegates and UN officers, but he also played a key role in drafting the UN Charter.7
 


Secret Shadow Government

From FDR's administration to the present, the CFR's pernicious influence in American society and government has grown dramatically.

 

The CFR has become in effect the secret shadow government of the United States; its members have dominated every administration since World War II. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton were members, as were hundreds of their appointments. (President George W. Bush is not a member, but his vice president, Dick Cheney, is, as are many of the top Bush cabinet picks. See Chapter 9.) No other organization even comes close to exercising this kind of political power in the United States.

Author/journalist Richard Rovere (CFR) has described the Council as "a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation."8 Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (CFR) has termed it a "front organization [for] the heart of the American Establishment."9

 

Newsweek has referred to the Pratt House* one-world coterie as "the foreign policy establishment of the U.S."10 Professors Lawrence Shoup and William Mintner have dubbed the organization "the Imperial Brain Trust."11

 

*The Harold Pratt House in New York City is the headquarters for the Council on Foreign Relations.

 

Author and hard-core radical activist Richard Barnet (CFR) wrote, as far back as 1972, that

"failure to be asked to be a member of the Council has been regarded for a generation as a presumption of unsuitability for high office in the national security bureaucracy."12

In his 1979 memoir With No Apologies, Senator Barry Goldwater noted that despite the heated rhetoric and change in party label from one administration to the next, the same internationalist policies continue unabated:

When a new President comes on board, there is a great turnover in personnel but no change in policy. Example: During the Nixon years Henry Kissinger, CFR member and Nelson Rockefeller's protιgι, was in charge of foreign policy. When Jimmy Carter was elected, Kissinger was replaced by Zbigniew Brzezinski, CFR member and David Rockefeller's protege.13

On October 30, 1993, the Washington Post printed one of the most candid (and rare) admissions against interest by the Establishment: a column by Post writer Richard Harwood, entitled "Ruling Class Journalists." Mr. Harwood openly conceded that the CFR's "members are the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States." 14

To illustrate his claim, Harwood pointed to the Clinton administration.

"The president is a member," Harwood noted. "So is his secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state, all five of the undersecretaries...."15

And on and on he went, through a litany of the CFR membership roster in the Clinton regime.

How can it be that an organization that has gained such incredible influence and power, that has virtually hijacked the American government, is so little known to the American public?

 

The Post's Mr. Harwood provides the answer:

The editorial page editor, deputy editorial page editor, executive editor, managing editor, foreign editor, national affairs editor, business and financial editor and various writers as well as Katharine Graham, the paper's principal owner, represent The Washington Post in the council's membership.16

Ditto for the other media giants: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, US News & World Report, NBC, CBS, ABC, et al.

 

CFR members Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, Diane Sawyer, James Lehrer, Bernard Kalb, Irving R. Levine, David Brinkley, Barbara Walters, and Morton Kondracke, along with hundreds of other influential "journalists" and media executives, serve as propagandists for the Pratt House thought cartel.*

 

* The CFR's 2000 Annual Report states that 386 of its members are "Journalists, Correspondents, and Communications Executives." As in past Annual Reports, it also notes, under the heading, "Rules, Guidelines, and Practices": "Full freedom of expression is encouraged at Council meetings. Participants are assured that they may speak openly, as it is the tradition of the Council that others will not attribute or characterize their statements in public media or forums or knowingly transmit them to persons who will. All participants are expected to honor that commitment." This is the Pratt House equivalent of Omerta, the Mafia "oath of silence."

 

In the words of Harlan Cleveland, they make sure the CFR's subversive operations stay "mostly below the surface of public attention."
 


Bilderberg Group: Power-mad Elitists

David Rockefeller gratefully acknowledged this indispensable "cloaking" service provided by the CFR/TC-dominated media at a meeting of the secretive Bilderberg Group (BG). Gathering at Sand, Germany in June 1991, this coterie of elite one-worlders had important global intrigues to plan and coordinate for the final decade of the millennium. Many top media Insiders were in attendance, but as in years past, they would reveal not a word of what they had heard at the confab to their readers or viewers.

Despite the Bilderbergers' elaborate security precautions, however, the word did leak out in two French publications, Minute and Lectures Francaises.17

 

Hilaire du Berrier, publisher of the authoritative, Monte Carlo-based HduB Reports, was the first to inform Americans of goings-on at the BG conference at Sand. Du Berrier, who has been closely following and chronicling the activities of the New World Order operatives for more than four decades, reported on the conference in his HduB Reports for September 1991.18 His Bilderberg revelations then reached a much larger audience in The New American magazine, where he is a contributor.19

What did David Rockefeller, then the chairman emeritus of the American Establishment, have to say to the assembled aristocracy of the U.S. media? An amazing, stunning mouthful, that's what. We'll let you judge for yourself.

 

This is part of Rockefeller's greeting to his Bilderberg boon companions:

We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years.

 

But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in the past centuries. It is also our duty to inform the press of our convictions as to the historic future of the century.20

Incredible, no?

 

Well, what else would you expect from a cabal of power-mad elitists who consider the whole world to be their own private oyster? These "enlightened ones," these illuminati, have been busily redesigning, reshaping, and "transforming" the world according to their own desires throughout the past century. They intend to be the planetary overlords in the new world order.

 

As Mr. Rockefeller said, it would have been "impossible" for them to have come so far with their super-subversive plot except that their coconspirators in the media kept "the bright lights of publicity" off their dark schemes.

The Post's Richard Harwood noted concerning the CFR media oligarchy:

"They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it."21 (Emphasis added.)

He might also have said that they smother, suppress, censor, quash, and kill much of the real news (and grossly distort the rest) in order to help make "policy." While endlessly, piously prattling about their sacred role as "watchdogs," and "the public's right to know," these criminal hypocrites have been engaged in the biggest cover-up in history.

How did the CFR claque come to acquire so much power? In this compressed study, we can only briefly attempt to answer that question.*
 

* The development of this conspiratorial power network has been extensively examined in such studies as: The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and The American Decline by James Perloff (Western Islands, 1988); Global Tyranny ... Step By Step by William F. Jasper (Western Islands, 1992); None Dare Call It Conspiracy by Gary Allen (Concord Press, 1971); The Insiders, 4th Edition, by John F. McManus (The John Birch Society, 1995); The Wise Men by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 1986); among others.

 


CFR Historian Speaks Out

One of the most informative and penetrating revelations concerning the CFR power network came in 1966 with publication of Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University.

 

A celebrated historian who was sympathetic to the CFR's globalist agenda, Quigley wrote:

I know of the operations of this network [the international Round Table groups, including the Council on Foreign Relations] because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.... In general, my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown.22

And what are the "aims" of this network? According to Dr. Quigley:

"[N]othing 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." 23

The network to which Quigley referred had provided the "brain trust" and the financial impetus behind the drive for the League of Nations, the effort Mr. Cleveland referred to as the "First Try" at world order. Leading that drive for the network was Col. Edward Mandell House, the key advisor and "alter ego" of President Woodrow Wilson. When the League of Nations was thwarted by the U.S. Senate, Col. House and his colleagues determined to continue their struggle by other means.

 

House was part of a cabal called "The Inquiry," a group of 100 "forwardlooking" social engineers who created the Versailles Peace Treaty at the close of World War I.24 This group formed the American nucleus of what was to become the Council on Foreign Relations. The Inquiry's British counterparts created a companion organization - the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA).25

These groups were the product of an earlier secret society formed in February 1891 by Cecil Rhodes, the legendary "diamond king" and "colossus" of Africa, with British journalist William Stead. Rhodes, although famous as "the richest man in the world," was an ardent disciple of socialist Professor John Ruskin, under whom he had studied at Oxford.

 

Dr. Quigley explains:

"In this secret society Rhodes was to be leader; Stead, Brett (Lord Esher), and Milner were to form an executive committee; Arthur (Lord) Balfour, (Sir) Harry Johnston, Lord Rothschild, Albert (Lord) Grey, and others were listed as potential members of a 'Circle of Initiates'; while there was to be an outer circle known as the 'Association of Helpers'(later organized by Milner as the Round Table organization).... Thus the central part of the secret society was established by March 1891."26

The plan developed by Rhodes and his small circle of co-conspirators was one in which "a world system of financial control in private hands" would be used to bring about world government.

"This system," notes Quigley, "was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."27

Professor Quigley explained further:

The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.28

In January 1924, Reginald McKenna, who was then chairman of the board of the Midland Bank (and had been Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1915-16), confirmed that the British system was completely dominated by the conspiratorial monied aristocracy.

"I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can, and do, create money," said McKenna. "And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people."29

On November 11, 1927, the Wall Street Journal called Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, "the currency dictator of Europe."

 

Norman, a strange, furtive intriguer given to wearing disguises, using assumed names, and incessantly flitting about the world on mysterious missions, confirmed the Journal's assertion before the Macmillan Committee on March 26, 1930.30
 


A Higher Power

But as Professor Quigley points out, Norman answered to powers who stood in the shadows.

"It must not be felt that these heads of the world's chief central banks were themselves substantive powers in world finance," writes Quigley. "They were not. Rather, they were the technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers of their own countries, who had raised them up and were perfectly capable of throwing them down."31

Those bankers to whom Quigley refers were members of the Rhodes-Milner network. Their immense power and influence were exercised through the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the CFR, and their many other levers of control in the government, the major political parties, academe, business, and the media.

As Rhodes biographer Sarah Millin put it: "The government of the world was Rhodes' simple desire."32

 

The Rhodes Scholarships, like the Round Table groups, were integral to this global scheme. Part of Rhodes' plan was to bring bright, ambitious young men to Oxford University for indoctrination and recruitment into his grand conspiracy. Co-conspirator William Stead said that Rhodes' own words were that after 30 years there would be,

"between two and three thousand men [mathematically selected] in the prime of life scattered all over the world, each one of whom will have had impressed upon his mind in the most susceptible period of his life the dream of the Founder [Rhodes]."33

What were the qualities looked for in these specially selected "scholars"? According to Rhodes himself:

"smugness, brutality, unctuous rectitude, and tact."34

Which pluperfectly described the ruthless Cecil Rhodes. And just as aptly fit his most famous Rhodes Scholar and one-world acolyte: Bill Clinton.35*

 

* Other American "Rhodies" who have been boosted to pinnacles of power in the fields of politics, business, media, and academia include Harlan Cleveland, George Stephanopolous, Strobe Talbott, Ira Magaziner, Robert Reich, Nicholas Katzenbach, Lloyd Cutler, Erwin Canham, Dean Rusk, Richard N. Gardner, James Hester, Representative Carl Albert, Senator J. William Fulbright, Senator Richard Lugar, Senator Bill Bradley, Senator David L. Boren, Justice Byron White, Justice David Souter, Hedley Donovan, Howard K. Smith, Walt Rostow, Stringfellow Barr, General Bernard Rogers, Admiral Stansfield Turner, James Woolsey, and Joseph Nye.

Over the years, Round Table-style groups parallel to the CFR have been established in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, India, Canada, Japan and dozens of other countries.

 

Rhodes' disciples have thus built a global network of unprecedented power, capable of influencing, manipulating, sabotaging, and controlling political and economic events on a scale previously unimaginable.

"When the influence which the [Royal] Institute wields is combined with that controlled by the Milner Group in other fields — in education, in administration, in newspapers and periodicals — a really terrifying picture begins to emerge," wrote Quigley in The Anglo-American Establishment,36 which was published posthumously in 1981.

He explained:

The picture is terrifying because such power, whatever the goals at which it may be directed, is too much to be entrusted safely to any group.... No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group accomplished in Britain — that is, that a small number of men should be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of the documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.37

Admiral Chester Ward, who was himself a member of the CFR for 16 years, saw that "terrifying picture" up close. Admiral Ward, who resigned in disgust, was not exaggerating when he charged that the CFR agenda is to promote "disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government." 38

 

The leadership of the group, he wrote,

"is composed of the one-world-global-government ideologists — more respectfully referred to as the organized internationalists."

 

Moreover, he charged, the "lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States is pervasive throughout most of the membership.... The majority visualize the Utopian submergence of the United States as a subsidiary administrative unit of a global government...."39

Admiral Ward's shocking charge is more than substantiated by innumerable writings, speeches and actions of CFR members both in and out of government. Even more astounding than this incredible treachery by American leaders to subvert and destroy our liberty is the extensive record of treason showing that these same one-world advocates have been pursuing their evil purpose in concert with the most brutal and murderous totalitarian dictators in the history of our planet.

 

That is the subject of our next chapter.

 

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