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The Bilderberg meetingis an annual conferenceestablished in 1954 to foster dialogue between Europe and North America. The group’s agenda, originally to prevent another world war, is now defined as bolstering a consensus around free marketWestern capitalism and its interests around the globe. Participants include political leaders, expertsfrom industry, finance, academia, and the media, numbering between 120 and 150. Attendees are entitled to use information gained at meetings, but not attribute it to a named speaker. This is to encourage candid debate, while maintaining privacy - a provision that has fed conspiracy theories from both left and right.
Meetings were chaired by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlandsuntil 1976. The current Chairman is Henri de Castries.
Origin [ edit ]
The first conference was held at the Hotel de Bilderbergin Oosterbeek, Netherlands, from 29 to 31 May 1954. [1] It was initiated by several people, including Polishpolitician-in-exile Józef Retingerwho, concerned about the growth of anti-Americanismin Western Europe, proposed an international conference at which leaders from European countries and the United States would be brought together with the aim of promoting Atlanticism—better understanding between the cultures of the United States and Western Europe to foster cooperation on political, economic, and defense issues. [2] [3]
Retinger approached Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands [4] who agreed to promote the idea, together with former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland, and the then-head of Unilever, Paul Rijkens. Bernhard in turn contacted Walter Bedell Smith, the then-head of the CIA, who asked Eisenhoweradviser Charles Douglas Jacksonto deal with the suggestion. [5] The guest list was to be drawn up by inviting two attendees from each nation, one of each to represent "conservative" and "liberal" points of view. [3] Fifty delegates from 11 countries in Western Europe attended the first conference, along with 11 Americans. [6]
The success of the meeting led the organizers to arrange an annual conference. A permanent steering committee was established with Retinger appointed as permanent secretary. As well as organizing the conference, the steering committee also maintained a register of attendee names and contact details with the aim of creating an informal network of individuals who could call upon one another in a private capacity. [7] Conferences were held in France, Germany, and Denmarkover the following three years. In 1957, the first U.S. conference was held on St. Simons Island, Georgia, with $30,000 from the Ford Foundation. The foundation also supplied funding for the 1959 and 1963 conferences. [5]
Participants [ edit ]
The participants are between 120 and 150 people, including political leaders, expertsfrom industry, finance, academiaand the media. [2] About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politicsand governmentand the rest from other fields. [2] [1] Historically, attendee lists have been weighted toward bankers, politicians, directors of large businesses [8] and board members from large publicly traded corporations, including IBM, Xerox, Royal Dutch Shell, Nokiaand Daimler. [9] Heads of state, including former King Juan Carlos I of Spainand former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, have attended meetings. [9] [10] A source connected to the group told The Daily Telegraph in 2013 that other individuals, whose names are not publicly issued, sometimes turn up "just for the day" at the group's meetings. [11]
Meetings [ edit ]
Activities and goals [ edit ]
The group's original goal of promoting Atlanticism, of strengthening U.S.–European relations and preventing another world war has grown; according to Andrew Kakabadse the Bilderberg Group's theme is to "bolster a consensus around free market Western capitalismand its interests around the globe". [1] In 2001, Denis Healey, a Bilderberg group founder and a steering committee member for 30 years, said, "To say we were striving for a one-world governmentis exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn't go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing." [12]
According to the web page of the group, the meetings are conducted under the Chatham House Rule, allowing the participants to use any information they gained during the meeting, but not to disclose the names of the speakers or any other participants. According to former chairman Étienne Davignonin 2011, a major attraction of Bilderberg group meetings is that they provide an opportunity for participants to speak and debate candidly and to find out what major figures really think, without the risk of off-the-cuff comments becoming fodder for controversy in the media. [13] A 2008 press release from the "American Friends of Bilderberg" stated that "Bilderberg's only activity is its annual Conference and that at the meetings, no resolutions were proposed, no votes taken, and no policy statements issued." [14] However, in November 2009, the group hosted a dinner meeting at the Château of Val-Duchessein Brussels outside its annual conference to promote the candidacy of Herman Van Rompuyfor President of the European Council. [15]
The Bilderberg meetings are also unofficially called the "Bilderberg Group", "Bilderberg conference" or "Bilderberg Club".
Organizational structure [ edit ]
Meetings are organized by a steering committee with two members from each of approximately 18 nations. [16] Official posts include a chairman and an Honorary Secretary General. [9] The group's rules do not contain a membership category but former participants receive the annual conference reports. [17] The only category that exists is "member of the steering committee." [18] Besides the committee, there is a separate advisory group with overlapping membership. [19]
Dutch economist Ernst van der Beugelbecame permanent secretary in 1960, upon Retinger's death. Prince Bernhard continued to serve as the meeting's chairman until 1976, the year of his involvement in the Lockheed affair. The position of Honorary American Secretary General has been held successively by Joseph E. Johnsonof the Carnegie Endowment, William Bundyof Princeton, Theodore L. Eliot Jr., former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, and Casimir A. Yostof Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. [20]
According to James A. Bill, the "steering committee usually met twice a year to plan programs and to discuss the participant list." [21]
In 2002 in Them: Adventures with Extremists, author Jon Ronsonwrote that the group has a small central office in Holland [sic] which each year decides what country will host the forthcoming meeting. The host country then has to book an entire hotel for four days, plus arrange catering, transport and security. To fund this, the host solicits donations from sympathetic corporations such as Barclays, Fiat Automobiles, GlaxoSmithKline, Heinz, Nokiaand Xerox. [22]
Chairmen of the Steering Committee [ edit ]
Criticisms and conspiracy theories [ edit ]
Partly because of its working methods to ensure strict privacy and secrecy, [31] the Bilderberg Group has been criticised for its lack of transparency and accountability. [32] The undisclosed nature of the proceedings has given rise to several conspiracy theories. [33] [13] [34] This outlook has been popular on both extremes of the political spectrum, even if they disagree about the exact nature of the group's intentions. Some on the left accuse the Bilderberg group of conspiring to impose capitalist domination, [35] while some on the right have accused the group of conspiring to impose a world governmentand planned economy. [36]
In 2005, Davignon discussed accusations of the group striving for a one-world government with the BBC: "It is unavoidable and it doesn't matter. There will always be people who believe in conspiracies but things happen in a much more incoherent fashion. ... When people say this is a secret government of the world I say that if we were a secret government of the world we should be bloody ashamed of ourselves." [34]
One of the most concise academic papers critical of Bilderberg's ' Deep State' role in influencing geopolitical events out of the public spotlight was written in 1996 by Mike Peters of Leeds Metropolitan Universityand published in Lobster . Entitled "The Bilderberg Group and the Project for European Unification", Peters expresses incredulity that so few academics have examined the Bilderberg Group's international financial and political lobbyingclout but closely examines links between the post-war effort for a united Europe and specific individuals connected with the Bilderberg Group.
To anticipate what will be said later, I believe that one of the key assumptions often made by structural Marxists, namely that the capitalist class is always divided into competing fractions which have no mechanisms for co-ordination other than the state, is not empirically sustainable. Part of this misconception, it could be said, derives from an over-literal understanding of the concept of the 'market' as constituting the only social relation amongst different fractions of capital. At least as far as the very large, and above all, the international (or as we would say in today's jargon, the 'global') corporations are concerned, this is definitely not the case: very sophisticated organs do exist whereby these capitalist interests can and do hammer out common lines of strategy. Bilderberg is one of these mechanisms. [37]
In a 1994 report Right Woos Left, published by the Political Research Associates, investigative journalist Chip Berletargued that right-wing populistconspiracy theories about the Bilderberg group date back as early as 1964 and can be found in Phyllis Schlafly's self-published book A Choice, Not an Echo, [38] which promoted a conspiracy theoryin which the Republican Partywas secretly controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the Bilderberg group, whose internationalistpolicies would pave the way for world communism. [39]
In August 2010, former Cuban president Fidel Castrowrote a controversial article for the Cuban Communist Party newspaper Granma in which he cited Daniel Estulin's 2006 book The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club, [40] which, as quoted by Castro, describes "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self." [35]
Proponents of Bilderberg conspiracy theories in the United States include individuals and groups such as the John Birch Society, [36] [41] political activist Phyllis Schlafly, [41] writer Jim Tucker, [42] political activist Lyndon LaRouche, [43] conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, [1] [44] [45] and politician Jesse Ventura, who made the Bilderberg group a topic of a 2009 episode of his TruTVseries Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura . [46] Non-American proponents include Lithuanian writer Daniel Estulin [47] and British politician Nigel Farage. [48]
Concerns about lobbyinghave arisen. [49] [50] Ian Richardson sees Bilderberg as the transnational power elite, "an integral, and to some extent critical, part of the existing system of global governance", that is "not acting in the interests of the whole". [51] An article in The Guardian in June 2017 criticized the world view expressed in an agenda published by the Bilderberg group. [52]
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Cutting a nuclear deal with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be the easy part for President Obama, who must then persuade both houses of Congress to sign off on the pact. Republicans and many Democrats abhor the idea of lifting sanctions and readmitting oil-rich Iran to the global economy until it disavows all nuclear research and stops meddling through proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
Advocating for an Iran truce is a loose coalition of peace groups, think tanks, and former high-ranking U.S. diplomats bound together by millions of dollars given by the Rockefeller family through its $870 millionRockefeller Brothers Fund. The philanthropy, which is run by a board split between family members and outsiders, has spent $4.3 millionsince 2003 promoting a nuclear pact with Iran, chiefly through the New York-based Iran Project, a nonprofit led by former U.S. diplomats. For more than a decade they’ve conducted a dialogue with well-placed Iranians, including Mohammad Javad Zarif, now Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator. The Americans routinely briefed officials in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, including William Burns, Obama’s former deputy secretary of state. Burns hammered out much of an interim nuclear agreement in secret 2013 talks with his Iranian counterparts that paved the way for the current summit in Vienna, where Secretary of State John Kerry leads the U.S. delegation.
The Rockefellers’ Iran foray began in late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks. Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, convened a board retreat at the Rockefellers’ Pocantico Center in Westchester, just north of New York City, to consider new approaches to the Islamic world at a time when the U.S. was focused on the threat from al-Qaeda. One invited speaker was Seyyed Hossein Nasr, an Iranian-American professor at George Washington University. “He got me thinking more and more about Iran, its geostrategic importance and its relationship to the Sunni world,” says Heintz.
The Rockefeller fund decided to create the Iran Project in cooperation with the United Nations Association of the U.S., a nonprofit that promotes the UN’s work then headed by William Luers, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia. Luers made contact with Zarif through Iran’s mission to the UN in New York. He also recruited career diplomats Thomas Pickering, who served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Israel and George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the UN, and Frank G. Wisner, who served as Reagan’s ambassador to Egypt and whose father was a high-ranking officer in the Office of Strategic Services and then in the CIA. “Each of us came from a special place on the compass,” Wisner says.
With encouragement from the Bush administration, says Heintz, the trio developed a relationship with Zarif, who was stationed in New York representing Iran at the UN. In early 2002, the Iran Project set up a meeting with Iranians affiliated with the Institute for Political and International Studies in Tehran, a think tank with close government ties. It was hosted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute at a small hotel outside Stockholm. The Iranians came armed with talking points, Heintz says, and the meetings were stiff and unproductive. The initial goal of developing a road map to restoring relations between Washington and Tehran, along the lines of Nixon’s 1972 Shanghai Communique preceding U.S.-China relations, proved elusive, according to Pickering. After every meeting, Heintz says, Iran Project leaders would brief staffers at the State Department or White House, including Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice, his secretary of state. “As we had no contacts at all with Iran at the time, their insights were very valuable,” says R. Nicholas Burns, who served as under secretary of state for political affairs under Bush.
The secret meetings in European capitals were suspended after Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won Iran’s presidency in 2005. But the group’s relationship with Zarif proved key in helping to jump-start negotiations after he was made foreign minister in 2013 by Rouhani, the newly elected president. A State Department official says the administration welcomes back-channel efforts like the Iran Project’s because “it proves useful both to have knowledgeable former officials and country experts engaging with their counterparts and in reinforcing our own messages when possible.”
The Iran Project kept an eye on public opinion from the start. Among those invited to its events in New York was Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, who found them “helpful in framing ideas for a workable nuclear treaty,” he says. The ideas floated at the meetings included letting the Iranians keep a limited capacity for enriching uranium to save face. “But everyone knew that a huge amount depended on how far the Iranians would go.” Silvers published multiple essays detailing the proposals by Pickering and Jessica Mathews, another Iran Project participant who preceded William Burns as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The Iran Project’s briefing papers have provided a counterweight to criticism from pro-Israel groups, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, opposed to a deal.
For Wisner, breaking bread with Iranians exorcised a few ghosts. He was on Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s senior staff during the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis in 1979 and knew diplomats held at the embassy. “I lived that,” he says. He also remembers listening to his dad planning the military coup that removed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, from power in 1953 and replaced him with the U.S.-backed shah, Reza Pahlavi. “They don’t trust us, and we don’t trust them,” says Wisner. He says his father’s role in the Mosaddegh coup didn’t come up in any of the Iran Project meetings. “The Iranians, like us, have made a major political decision to engage,” he says.
The Rockefeller fund has given about $3.3 millionto the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based disarmament group that has spent $4 millionsince 2010 to promote a deal with Iran and shepherded the peace groups and think tanks it supports to back Obama. “We’re trying to leverage our investments to play on our strengths,” says Joseph Cirincione, its president.
On June 23, when the New York Times ran an op-ed, “The Iran Deal’s Fatal Flaw,” Ploughshares coordinated its grantees’ responses to the claim that the deal would leave Iran capable of producing a nuclear weapon within three months. The Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group established in 1971, published a rebuttal on its daily blog, which other Ploughshares-affiliated groups sent to their contacts in Congress. “The pro-deal side has done a very good job systematically co-opting what used to be the arms control community and transforming it into an absolutist, antiwar movement,” says Omri Ceren, senior adviser for strategy for the Israel Project, a nonprofit that opposes a deal. “Sometimes, if your goal is stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, you have to make the hard decision to take military action, or at least signal you’re willing to.” Cirincione says that mistakes the rationale behind the Iran Project. “Iran is the boulder in the road,” he says. “You have to resolve this issue to get to the rest of the nonproliferation agenda. That’s why we’re doing this.”
This story was updated to clarify that allowing Iran to retain uranium enrichment capacity was among ideas proposed by the Iran Project, not one suggested by Robert Silvers.
CORRECTION: The story has been corrected to reflect that Seyyed Hossein Nasr teaches at George Washington University, not Georgetown.
(Corrects university affiliation of Seyyed Hossein Nasr in third paragraph)
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