THE TRILATERAL COMMISSION
Part II of the Power Elite, Including Bohemian Grove and The Pinay Circle
It was Zbigniew Brzezinski, head of Russian Studies at Columbia University in 1970, who conceived Trilateralism, based on three spheres of the globe: North America, Europe and Japan.
The notion of a Trilateral Commission was actually hatched at a Bilderberg Meeting.
After taking a fancy to Zbig’s Tripartite Studies, David Rockefeller, unofficial chairman-of-the-board of the Power Elite, wrangled an invitation for this ambitious policy wonk with the unpronounceable last name to attend Bilderberg's 1972 pow-wow in Knokke, Belgium.
There, Zbig made his pitch for inviting the Japanese into Bilderberg, on the basis that Japan had, since the end of World War II, acquired a new wealth to be reckoned with and was now an economic powerhouse.
The burghers of Bilderberg decided against integrating the Japanese into their own forum, which by then had been a bilateral success for almost 20 years, having brought European unity to fruition and still going gangbusters in total secrecy.
Instead, the attendees sanctioned a whole new organization: The Trilateral Commission.
Rockefeller, Zbig and George Franklin traveled first to Europe, then Japan, to recruit 75 members from banking, industrial, political and media circles in each sphere. (Franklin was a long-time Rockefeller crony; had even been secretary of the CIA’s American Committee for a Unified Europe. Small world.)
By summer, a Trilateral Planning Group was ready for its first rendezvous, which took place on July 23-24 at a Rockefeller estate—Pocantico Hills—overlooking the Hudson River.
Rockefeller paid for this out of his own pocket. He knew from experience that investing in high-level networking paid huge dividends.
With approval from "the highest political and financial circles" (from an early Trilateral Commission memo), the trio selected appropriately-credentialed chairmen to represent each sphere.
But the Trilateral Commission was a disaster for the Power Elite.
Here's why:
It was a springboard for the presidency and administration of Jimmy Carter.
The peanut farmer, you see, was one of those future leaders who caught Rockefeller the Kingmaker’s eye, after Carter was sworn in as governor of Georgia in January 1971.
Twenty-one months later, in October 1972, Zbig and the Rock hosted Carter for lunch at the Connaught Hotel in London and made him a Trilateral Commissioner.
Soon after, Governor Carter became Rockefeller and Zbig's golden boy for president, and the Trilateral Commission quietly provided him the Power Elite’s financial and mass media support he needed to "arise from nowhere" and take the White House.
The Trilateral Commission was not nowhere. Just nowhere to be found in the newspapers.
Carter became president and Zbig became his national security adviser, the job he’d coveted from the beginning.
Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, was also a Trilateral Commission member, as were Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal. Oh, and Andrew Young, Ambassador to the UN. And also Warren Christopher, Deputy Secretary of State. And Richard Holbrooke, Deputy Secretary of State for East Asian & Pacific Affairs. Oh, and Richard Cooper, Under Secretary of State fort Economic Affairs. Add Graham Allison, Assistant Secretary of State for Planning. Oh, and Paul Volker, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Along with 14 others from the Commission appointed to senior policy jobs.
Again, small world. Very small.
It was as if the Trilateral Commission had taken over the U.S. government!
Carter's troupe of Trilateralists screwed things up real good: Soaring inflation, interest rates at 20 percent; the world chess board, a horrible mess. (Maybe that was the plan?)
Or maybe Rockefeller got double-crossed by the peanut farmer.
Miles Copeland, Jr., a former CIA official with close ties to the Carter White House, explained the situation to me when I interviewed him for Penthouse magazine in 1979:
“Carter and his Georgia Mafia—Ham Jordan, Jody Powell and Stu Eizenstadt—they all sit around the Oval Office through the day, feet up on the coffee table. One-by-one, Cy Vance, Harold Brown and Blumenthal arrive and formally try to advise the president what to do about this and that. After they leave, Ham, Jody and Stu decide policy between themselves. That’s who Carter listens to.”
Carter likened governance and statecraft to church-work. Statecraft is many things. Church-work is not one of them.
Carter's waffling and poor judgment caused confusion among our allies, laughter in the Soviet Union and led, ultimately, to the hostage crisis in Teheran.
It confirmed that, left to their own devices, the Power Elite (fronted at that time by David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger) was fully capable of causing another world war, just like their predecessors much earlier in the century. (It was Rockefeller and Kissinger who pushed Carter into allowing the Shah of Iran to seek refuge in the USA—against Jimmy’s better judgement—and precipitated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard siege of the U.S. embassy.)
Another affect of the Carter presidency was CIA having to endure Admiral Stansfield Turner as its director.
"The Admiral," as he liked to be called, was more concerned about intelligence officers abroad immorally engaging in extra-marital affairs than Iran imploding from within. He apparently mistook CIA for a missionary group and found human intelligence (HUMINT) distasteful. Many seasoned intelligence officers from the clandestine service departed the agency during that period.
Rockefeller quietly bailed, putting his money behind another horse from the Trilateral stable (again, small world): George Bush, a privileged preppie who’d moved to Texas from Greenwich, Connecticut to prove his manhood in the oil biz.
When I interviewed George Bush at his Jefferson Hotel suite in Washington, late 1979, he became visibly and vocally agitated when I asked about his membership in the Trilateral Commission, which at that time was completely unknown.
Enter Ronald Reagan to turn things around.
Reagan wasn't one to sit through conferences held by Bilderberg and Trilateral. Too damn boring.
No, Reagan was all about the Big Picture, not the system's nuts and bolts, upon which the Power Elite both depends and manipulates.
Reagan even took a few jabs at Trilateral "elitists" during his campaign to woo voters away from Bush in New Hampshire, where Trilateral membership became a significant issue thanks to “conspiracy theorists” at the Union Leader, Manchester NH’s largest newspaper—based partly on my reporting.
Reagan’s victory in the New Hampshire primary sealed the nomination for him.
For his Power Elite outings, log-chopper Dutch preferred...
Bohemian Grove.
Unknown (except to those in-the-know) as the "greatest men's club in the world" (President Herbert Hoover's words), Bohemian Grove occupies 2700 acres of Californian redwoods along the Russian River, 65 miles north of San Francisco.
The bigwigs come mostly for a good ol' time—an annual fraternity party for men of middle-to-old-age from mid-July through early August.
To set the stage, they even enact an opening ritual for unburdening themselves of everyday concerns.
"Be-gone Dull Care!" grown men chant around a bonfire. "Midsummer sets us free!"
Then they toss an effigy named “Dull Care” upon the fire to symbolize their freedom.
After that, powerbrokers (including David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, of course) consider themselves free to quaff martinis at ten in the morning and walk around in pyjamas or bath robes all day long.
If they need to take a whiz, they are encouraged to pee on a tree.
The grove is divided into 128 small camps of 20-30 members—camps with names like Wild Oats, Woof and Toyland.
One camp, Poison Oak, throws an annual bulls balls luncheon, courtesy of a cattle baron who brings a stash of choice testicles.
Those Bohemians who can still get it up "cross the river," a secret code for leaving the compound and taking their love to town. There are two such nearby towns where lustful release from dull care awaits: Guerneville and Monte Rio. The inns and motels of both swell with high-class hookers from Nevada and elsewhere for the midsummer trade.
Something about the air in the redwoods. Or the guarded privacy. Or the bulls balls. Or maybe all three combined.
The Bohemian brotherhood is about bonding (especially for those who cross the river).
Even Tricky Dick Nixon, who couldn't bond with anyone, bonded with the Bohemians.
He, like every other Republican president of the 20th century, confided his upcoming candidacy for president to the Bohemians before going public.
Back to Ronald Reagan, who surrounded himself at the White House with the Brotherhood Boys: George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, James Baker, Donald Regan and Bill Casey.
These were scrappers. The turf battles began almost immediately.
Casey was a tough old bastard. Not only did he get appointed Director of Central Intelligence, he got it turned into a cabinet position—and didn't give a crap about the pant-loads in Congress.
With Reagan's blessing, and Casey's encouragement, the CIA picked up the broken pieces left behind by clergymen Carter and Turner, super-glued everything back together and dipped the whole shebang in gold.
Some say they even started serving bulls balls in Langley's seventh floor executive dining room.
CERCLE DE PINAY
Antoine Pinay, the former French prime minister, was not satisfied with his Bilderberg experience.
He wanted something a little smaller; something more conspiratorial in nature; something that would engage in a spot of direct-action.
So he created a hush-hush band of like-minded rightists.
It was Pinay's perception that Soviet subversion was everywhere. He wished to counter this pervasive threat.
Although the Circle bears Pinay's name, its chief architect was Jean Violet, a shady French lawyer in the employ of both the French SDECE and German BND during the 1960s.
Violet cultivated numerous contacts in the spook world, then attached himself to the former French premier. And ss Pinay went senile, Violet took command of the rogue Circle.
At the Circle's core, Violet assembled....
* Florimand Damman, Belgian Secretary-General of the Academie Europeene de Science Politique in Brussels, which took the view that Europe was already under attack by a new Soviet imperialism.
* Archduke Otto de Habsbourg, founder of an anti-communist think-tank called Centre Europeene de Documentation et d'Information. Hapsbourg's family once owned an empire in Europe so this guy knew imperialism when he saw it—and lamented the good old days when it was engineered and managed by his own ancestors.
* Manuel Fraga Iribarne, fomer Franco minister in Spain, later president of the right-wing Alianza Popular party.
* Franz Josef Strauss, defense minister, later, president of Germany.
* Count Alexandre de Marenches, former director of SDECE, the French intelligence service.
* Nicholas Elliot, a senior British Intelligence officer who never got over Philby's betrayal and henceforth (like his friend, the CIA’s James Angleton) saw subversion everywhere.
* Didier Franks, a British Intelligence chief.
* A one-time Italian minister of finance named Pandolphi.
* A General Fraser of South Africa.
* Brian Crozier, a pompous stooge who credited himself for winning the Cold War single-handedly. CIA foolishly funded Crozier's (London-based) Institute for the Study of Conflict. When no one took Crozier seriously (for good reason), he leaked CIA's sponsorship to bolster his own self-importance and gain undeserved recognition.
* Julian Amery, British minister for aviation.
* Edwin Feulner, head of the Heritage Foundation. (Egghead playing super-spook.)
* Donald "Jamie" Jamieson, a former CIA official who never forgave the KGB for infecting him with polio.
* General Richard Stilwell, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The ubiquitous David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger put in cameos, but ultimately decided, sensibly, it wasn't their cup of tea. (This pair preferred a more decorous, subtle approach to global manipulation.)
Toss in at least one right-wing general from Portugal (Spinola), and a couple of Swiss Intelligence types (Richard Lowenthal and the ominous-sounding Dr. Kux).
At a meeting in Washington, D.C.'s Madison Hotel on December 1st, 1979, the Circle tried in vain to engage former CIA director William Colby and Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. (I know this directly from Colby.)
The Pinay Circlers were the (self) chosen few, whose job it was to fight the Cold War because nobody else was doing it well enough by their standards.
As rogue cold warriors, these guys designed a program not dissimilar from CIA's that included:
* Planting stories in the media by well-known journalists to champion their various campaigns. (Brian Crozier was one of their "well-known" journalists. So much for that element of their plan.)
* Lobbying decision-makers. (Crozier's report on European Security and the Soviet Problem was personally presented to French President Georges Pompidou by Antoine Pinay.)
* Organizing mass demonstrations.
* Creating slush-funds and using them to elect like-minded politicians. (Franz Strauss, Fraga Iribarne and Margaret Thatcher all benefited from such funds.)
* Organize undercover offices in London, Washington, Paris, Madrid and Munich to coordinate the above activities.
They created, by design, their own intelligence service, and used it for the purpose of swapping information with the established intelligence agencies of Europe and the US.
Surprisingly, they were quite active during their heyday in the 1970s.
Through Flammand Damman's academy, the Circle sponsored a Freedom of Movement campaign, aimed at embarrassing the Soviets at the first SALT talks in Helsinki.
This was followed by a Freedom for Political Prisoners campaign in 1976.
The Circle helped elect Thatcher in Britain (1979) and Strauss in Germany (1980).
Through Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki, the Circle constructed a powerful radio transmitter in Saudi that emitted radio programs promoting Islam in Soviet Russia.
(A humdinger of an idea. Yes, the anti-Soviets of yesteryear attempted to cure a mild headache by helping to create what has become a migraine for the world.)
The Circle deplored the way CIA handled Soviet defectors, believing that CIA did not take seriously enough the defectors’ invariable message that the sky was falling; that Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was just a big trap designed to suck us in before nuking us into oblivion.
Since CIA wasn't buying it, the Circle created the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. whose aim, under Jamie Jamieson's direction, was to debrief defectors independent of CIA then disseminate their gospel to the media.
Eventually, Jean Violet retired to the Cote d'Azur to tell his grandchildren how he and Brian Crozier saved the West.