Rule by Secrecy PART II

THE FINGERPRINTS Of CONSPIRACY

War is a racket.... War is largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot pay, the President sends Marines to get it. MARINE MAJ. GEN. SMEDLEY D. BUTLER 1881-1940)

REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN

Conspiracy writers have long accused members of the secret societies of using their torch of power and influence to light the fires of war. They have been charged with fomenting the Cold War, two world wars, the American, French, and Russian Revolutions, along with countless other conflicts and revolts. It is also claimed that these hidden hands can be traced directly to the secret organizations of the past.

And a careful study of history indeed reveals the telltale fingerprints of the secret societies throughout the history of warfare.

Of all human activities, war alone offers the greatest potential for profit—both from war materials and from the loans to produce them. And there are deeper rationales, such as the need to distract the public from their domestic troubles as well as the hidden agendas of their rulers.

"American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor, supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements," wrote history professor Howard Zinn.

This view was addressed in detail in a controversial 1966 study of war and peace called the "Report from Iron Mountain»!!

The study that led to the Report from Iron Mountain began in 1961 with Kennedy administration officials such as McGeorge Bundy (CFR, Bilderberger, and Skull and Bones), Robert McNamara (Trilateralist, CFR, and Bilderberger) and Dean Rusk (CFR and Bilderberger). Knowing of Kennedy’s goal of ending the Cold War, these men were concerned that there had been no serious planning for long-term peace.

In early 1963 a special study group was selected to study the hypo-l helical problems of peace just as government think tanks such as the Rand and Hudson Institutes studied war. The fifteen members of this group have never been publicly identified, but it reportedly included highly regarded historians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, scientists, and even an astronomer and industrialist. The group met about once a month at various locations around the nation.

But its principal meetings were at Iron Mountain, a huge underground corporate "nuclear hideout" near Hudson, New York, site of the Hudson Institution, widely regarded as a CFR think tank. Here, in case of nuclear attack, were housed redundant corporate offices of Rockefeller-controlled Standard Oil of New Jersey, the Morgan bank, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Dutch Shell Oil, then headed by Bilderberger founder Prince Bernhard.

A copy of the Report from Iron Mountain was leaked by a man identified only as "John Doe," a Midwestern university professor who claimed to have been a participant. It was published by Dial Press in 1967. John Doe told the publisher that, while he agreed with the findings of the study, he disagreed with the group’s decision to conceal their work from a public "unexposed to the exigencies of higher political or military responsibility." He said he believed the American public, whose tax money paid for the report, had a right to know its disturbing conclusions, while his fellow authors feared "the clear and predictable danger of a crisis in public confidence which untimely publication of the Report might be expected to provoke."

Over the years, the Report from Iron Mountain has received little or no publicity, and certain members of the government and media have attempted to brush it off as a joke or satire. But Dial Press published this work with no such disclaimers, and the serious and erudite tone of this footnoted study along with its global and macro-analytical approach belies the charge of fiction. It is an amazing document, written at the onset of our national experience in Vietnam, and most certainly reflects the elitist views of those who are said to have solicited the study.

John Doe said the "Iron Mountain Boys," as they called themselves, conducted an informal, off-the-books secret study uninhibited by normal government restraints. They submitted their report in March 1966.

According to the report,

"War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today." The report’s authors saw war as both necessary and desirable as "the principal organizing force" as well as "the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies."

They expressed concern that through "ambiguous leadership" the "ruling administrative class" might lose its ability to "rationalize a desired war," leading to the "actual disestablishment of military institutions," an eventuality they viewed as "catastrophic."

Therefore the report writers concluded,

"We must first reply, as strongly as we can, that the war system cannot responsibly be allowed to disappear until (1.) we know exactly what [forms of social control] we plan to put in its place and (2.) we are certain, beyond reasonable doubt, that these substitute institutions will serve their purposes...."

Most significantly, the report states,

"The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state." It added, "The possibility of war provides the sense of external necessity without which no government can long remain in power. . . . The basic authority of a modern state over its people resides in its war powers."

The report goes on to say that war "has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes . . . hewers of wood and drawers of water" and that war functions to control "essential class relationships."

Its authors credited military institutions with providing,

"antisocial elements with an acceptable role in the social structure. ... It is not hard to visualize, for example, the degree of social disruption that might have taken place in the United States during the last two decades if the problem of the socially disaffected of the post-World War II period had not been foreseen and effectively met," noted the report.

"The younger, and more dangerous, of these hostile social groupings have been kept under control by the Selective Service System."

In the past, juvenile delinquents often were given the choice of going to jail or into the Army.

The report suggests what should be done with the "economically or culturally deprived" among us.

"A ... possible surrogate for the control of potential enemies of society is the reintroduction, in some form consistent with modern technology and political process, of slavery. . . . The development of a sophisticated form of slavery may be an absolute prerequisite for social control in a world at peace."

Perhaps this refers to the current growing practice of private businesses utilizing prison labor or to "wage slaves," those so mired in credit that they have lost any option but to continue working for wages in an unfulfilling job.

It is highly intriguing to compare the recommendations of this report with life in the United States today. The Iron Mountain "boys" listed these possible substitutes for the "functions of war":

*

a comprehensive social-welfare program
*

a giant, open-ended space research program aimed at unreachable targets (missions to Jupiter, etc.)
*

a permanent, ritualized, ultraelaborate disarmament inspection system (as in Iraq and Bosnia)
*

an omnipresent, virtually omnipotent international police force (a UN peacekeeping force as in the Persian Gulf War or the Balkans) -an established and recognized extraterrestrial menace (UFOs and alien abductions)
*

massive global environmental pollution
*

fictitious alternate enemies (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Quaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever follows them)
*

programs generally derived from the Peace Corps model (the Job Corps, Volunteers in Service to America)
*

a modern, sophisticated form of slavery (addressed above)
*

new religions or other mythologies (New Age theologies, cults, etc.)
*

socially oriented blood games (the National Football League, World Wrestling Federation)
*

a comprehensive program of applied eugenics (abortion and birth control)

The authors admitted that "alternative enemies" might prove unlikely, but stressed that "one must be found" (emphasis in the original) or, more probably, that "such a threat will have to be invented."

Finally, the Iron Mountain Special Study Group proposed the establishment by presidential order of a permanent and top-secret "War/Peace Research Agency," organized "along the lines of the National Security Council (outside the purview of Congress, the media and the public)," provided with "non-accountable funds" and "responsible solely to the President." The purpose of this agency would be "Peace Research," to include creating the above listed substitutes for the functions of war and the "unlimited right to withhold information on its activities and its clirisions from anyone except the President, whenever it deems such secrecy to be in the public interest."

No one seems to know—or is willing to tell—if such a secret agency was ever considered or created. Regardless if it was or not, the tone of this proposal is certainly conspiratorial and it was hatched by men connected to the secret societies whose class-conscious objectives are reflected in this report. These same men were responsible for the involvement of America in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and their mindset was behind the attempt to foment war in Nicaragua in the 1980s as well as the conflicts of the 1990s in the Middle East and Balkans.

"In human terms, it is an outrageous document," commented Leonard C. Lewin, who arranged for the report’s publication. "And it explains, or certainly appears to explain, aspects of American policy otherwise incomprehensible by the ordinary standards of common sense."

Despite this study of "peace," as the Cold War drew to a close in the early 1990s, there was one more large scale, seemingly "incomprehensible" modern war to further the aims of those secret society men who seek profit from hostilities: war in the Persian Gulf.

PERSIAN GULF

The Allied victory in the Persian Gulf war of 1991 was loudly trumpeted by the American mass media, but the actions leading to this conflict were sparsely reported throughout the coverage. These machinations involved people in secret societies and indicated a very different rationale for the war than the one presented to the public.

No one can argue that the United States military, with some assistance from British, French, and Arab forces, did not perform magnificently during this brief conflict. It took only between January 17 and February 28, 1991, for the coalition of Operation Desert Storm to soundly defeat the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, then representing the fifth largest army in the world. This astounding military success was due primarily to the Allied forces’ superiority in both weaponry and training as opposed to Saddam’s conscripts who, though veterans of combat against Iran, had limited training and low morale.

This disparity created a lopsided war which resulted in more than 300,000 Iraqi casualties, both military and civilian, and 65,000 prisoners, compared to the extraordinary low Allied losses of 234 killed, 470 wounded, and 57 missing.

Primary leader of the war was U.S. President George Bush, a former CFR member, Trilateralist, and Skull and Bonesman.

As with most Middle East conflicts, the primary issue was oil. Both Bush and then Secretary of State James Baker were deeply involved in the oil business. Any Bush policy which increased the price of oil meant more profit to his companies, those of his oilmen supporters and, of course, to the Rockefeller-dominated oil cartel.

An added bonus was that any conflict which divided the Arab world would only strengthen the power of the U.S., Britain, and Israel in the region. A coalition of countries fighting for the United Nations could only advance the globalists’ plan for a one-world military force.

This "battle of the New World Order was some kind of manufactured crisis with a hidden agenda," wrote conspiracy researchers Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen after careful study of the events leading to this conflict.

Bush and Saddam Hussein had had a close relationship for many years. In his role as CIA director, and later as vice president, George Bush had supported Saddam through his eight-year war against Iran following the ouster of the Shah in 1979.

By 1990 Saddam’s Iraq was a primary threat to the balance of power between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but Saddam was strapped for cash due to the Iraq-Iran War and couldn’t pay his bills. Under pressure from the international bankers for slow repayment of loans and from the Organization of Petroleum Producing Countries (OPEC), which refused to allow him to raise oil prices, Saddam turned his eyes to Kuwait as a source of income. At the time it was the third largest producer of oil next to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Kuwait had been carved out of Iraq by Britain, who in 1899 took control of Kuwait’s foreign policy under an agreement with the dictatorial Sabah family. The Sabahs had produced a series of ruling sheikhs since assuming control of the area’s nomad tribes in 1756. Kuwait became a British Protectorate in 1914 when German interest suddenly gave the area strategic importance. British dominance was solidified by sending British troops to the area in 1961 after Iraq sought to reclaim it.

The Pentagon had known that Iraqi troops were massing along the Kuwait border end mid July 1990. On July 25 Saddam sought advice from the United States on his intentions to reclaim Kuwait. He met with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie, who told him,

"I have direct instructions from President Bush to improve our relations with Iraq. We have considerable sympathy for your quest for higher oil prices, the immediate cause of your confrontation with Kuwait....

"I have received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship not confrontation, regarding your intentions: Why are your troops massed so very close to Kuwait’s borders?"

According to transcripts released long after the war, Hussein explained that, while he was ready to negotiate his border dispute with Kuwait, his design was to "keep the whole of Iraq in the shape we wish it to be." This shape, of course, included Kuwait, which Saddam considered still a part of Iraq.

"What is the United States’ opinion on this?" he asked.

"We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, like your dispute with Kuwait," replied Glaspie.

"Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwaiti issue is not associated with America."

"Shortly after this, April Glaspie left Kuwait to take her summer vacation, another signal of elaborate American disinterest in the Kuwait-Iraq crisis," noted authors Tarpley and Chaitkin in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. On July 31 Bush met with GOP congressional leaders but said nothing about the Gulf situation.

The crisis escalated on August 2, when Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait. Bush froze all Iraqi assets in the United States, adding to Saddam’s money woes, which had worsened in 1990 after international bankers refused him further loans. Glaspie was prohibited from speaking out by the State Department, so the American public could not learn of Bush’s duplicity.

In later testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Glaspie pointed out that the July 25 conference was her first and only meeting with Saddam, who had not met with any foreign ambassador since 1984, the midpoint of his war with Iran.

But if Saddam had not met with U.S. diplomats, the same could not IK- said of American businessmen. Economist Paul Adler noted,

"It was known that David Rockefeller met with the Iraqi leader on at least two known occasions after the Chase Manhattan consortium became the lead banker in a number of major Iraqi credit syndications."

It was also reported that Sloga, a vice president of (Henry)-Kissinger Associates met with Iraqi leaders during a two-year period preceding the Gulf conflict.

"Saddam began to realize that he could not get what he wanted from the striped-pants set. He began doing business with the people who mattered to him—foreign businessmen, defense contractors, technologists and scientists, occasionally even visiting newsmen," reported the Washington newspaper, The Spotlight.

Following the money trail of such nondiplomatic contacts which led to the Gulf War, Congressman Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs, discovered that almost $5 billion in loans had been passed to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s through the Atlanta, Georgia, branch of Italy’s government-owned bank, Banca Nazional del Lavoro (BNL). The branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, was finally brought into federal court, where he pleaded guilty to approving this huge cash transfer without the approval of BNL’s head office in Italy. However, the whole investigation was put on hold during the Gulf War.

Most observers disbelieved that Drogoul could have conducted such a massive transaction without the knowledge of his superiors. Bobby Lee Cook, one of Drogoul’s several defense attorneys, argued that his client had been made the patsy in "a scheme orchestrated at the highest levels of the U.S. Government."

In court, BNL official Franz von Wedel testified that his boss Drogoul had acted on the advice of the bank’s consultants, Kissinger Associates.

In both 1989 and 1990 the Bush Justice Department had quashed indictments against the BNL by the Atlanta Attorney General’s office following an FBI raid on the bank on August 4, 1989. Action against the bank managers was held up for more than a year. Indictments were finally handed down one day after Bush declared a cease-fire in the Gulf War.

This scandal—dubbed "Iraq-gate"—prompted Gonzalez to prepare a House resolution calling for the impeachment of Bush Attorney General William Barr for "obstruction of justice in the BNL scandal." House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks called on Barr to appoint a special prosecutor in the case. In a classic case of who-will-watch-the-watch-ers?, Barr said he could find no evidence of wrongdoing on his part and refused to appoint a special prosecutor. It was one of the only times that an attorney general had failed to appoint a special prosecutor when asked to do so by Congress.

WHO PAYS THE TAB?

The clincher of this sordid story of financial scheming and official malfeasance was that not only had most of the $5 billion been used by Saddam to buy weaponry to be used against American servicemen, but the U.S. taxpayers picked up the tab!

Gonzalez said $500 million of the loans to Saddam came through the government-backed Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) and had been intended to purchase grain from U.S. farmers. However, grain shipped through the port of Houston had gone to then-Soviet bloc nations in exchange for weapons, while the remainder of the grain purchase had freed Saddam’s limited cash reserves to buy more military materials. The Bush administration had pledged taxpayer guarantees should Saddam default on the loans, which he did after sending troops to Kuwait. According to at least one public source, more than $360 million in American tax money was paid to the Gulf International Bank in Bahrain which was owned by seven Gulf nations including Iraq. This amount was only the first of an estimated $1 billion to be paid to ten banks by the CCC to cover the $5 billion of Saddam’s defaulted loans.

"The $1 billion commitment, in the form of loan guarantees for the purchase of U.S. farm commodities, enabled Saddam to buy needed food on credit and to spend his scarce hard currency on the arms buildup that brought war to the Persian Gulf," wrote author Russell S. Bowen.

Even after the Iraqi invasion began on August 2, Bush publicly appeared strangely noncommittal. Asked by reporters if he intended any intervention in the Gulf crisis, Bush said, "I’m not contemplating such action. ..."

His attitude apparently changed drastically that same day after meeting with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, a regular attendee of Bilderberg meetings who had been implicated with Bush in both the Iran-Contra and October Surprise scandals.

After meeting with Thatcher, Bush began to describe Saddam as a "new Hitler" and said "the status quo is unacceptable and further expansion [by Iraq] would be even more unacceptable."

Despite assurances from Saddam that Kuwait was his only objective and with no concrete evidence to the contrary, Bush nevertheless personally telephoned the leaders of Saudi Arabia and warned that they would be I he next target of the "new Hitler." Panicked, the Saudis handed over as much as $4 billion to Bush and other world leaders as secret payoffs to protect their kingdom, according to Sabah family member Sheik Fahd Mohammed al-Sabah, chairman of the Kuwait Investment Office.

Long after the Persian Gulf War, when audits found this money had been diverted into a London slush fund, anti-Sabah elements in Saudi Arabia criticized the payoff. They were told by al-Sabah,

"That money was used to buy Kuwait’s liberation. It paid for political support in the West and among Arab leaders—support for Desert Storm, the international force we urgently needed."

Whether this money played any role or not, Bush soon drew a "line in the sand" to block further Iraqi intrusion. It is interesting to note that this line was located between the Iraqi forces and oil interests owned by his son, soon-to-be Texas governor George W. Bush.

Bush, the president’s eldest son, was a $50,000-a-year "consultant" to and a board member of Harken Energy Corp. of Grand Prairie, Texas, near the home of the Texas Rangers baseball team of which the younger Bush was a managing general partner.

In January 1991, just days before Desert Storm was launched, Harken shocked the business world by announcing an oil-production agreement with the small island nation of Bahrain, a former British protectorate and a haven for international bankers just off the coast of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf. Bahrain was listed among the top forty countries of the world with the highest per capita Gross Domestic Product in 1996.

Veteran oilmen wondered aloud how unknown Harken, with no previous drilling experience, obtained such a potentially lucrative deal. Furthermore, it was reported that "Harken’s investments in the area will be protected by a 1990 agreement Bahrain signed with the U.S. allowing American and ’multi-national’ forces to set up permanent bases in that country."

The younger Bush, in October 1990, told Houston Post reporter Peter Brewton that accusations that his father ordered troops to the area to protect Harken drilling rights were "a little far-fetched." He further claimed he sold his Harken stock before the Iraqi invasion, but Brewton could find no record of the sale in the files of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Records of Rush’s Harken stock sale finally turned up in March 1991, eight months after the July 10, 1990, SEC deadline for filing such disclosures. One week alter Saddam’s troops entered Kuwait, Harken stock had dropped to $3.03 a share. The tardy SEC records revealed that by some good fortune, Bush had sold 66 percent of his Harken stock on June 22, 1990—just weeks prior to Iraq’s invasion—for the top-dollar price of $4.00 a share, netting him $848,560. Despite locating productive wells in South America, the drop in oil prices in early 1999 caused Harken stock to remain about $4.00 per share.

Stock purchases, oil and grain deals, arms sales, loans and guarantees, the weakening of the Arabs to benefit Israel, the movement toward a global army and government created a mind-numbing entanglement. "It is doubtful whether the ’real’ reasons why the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf will ever emerge," wrote Vankin and Whaley.

"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."

The duplicity didn’t end with the fighting. Throughout the Clinton administration there have been periodic air forays into Iraq, ostensibly to punish Saddam for preventing UN inspection of his development centers for biological and nuclear weaponry. However, this time there was a big difference—probing questions were raised by both a suspicious public and a few less timid members of the news media.

Following missile and bombing strikes in late 1998, a letter writer to a national news magaline asked, "By using weapons of mass destruction to deter Iraq from manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, would America not be doing the very thing we’re warning Iraq not to do?" Others raised the question of why we attacked Iraq for refusing UN inspection of its sensitive military installations when President Clinton also had refused to allow such inspections in the United States—a refusal greeted with general approval by the public.

Scott Ritter, a member of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) created to locate and eliminate Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons caches, resigned in August of 1998 and accused the U.S. government of using the commission to justify an attack on Iraq. Ritter said that before his resignation he disbelieved Baghdad’s minister of defense when he told him the UNSCOM team was being used to "provoke a crisis," but he slowly came to agree with the charge. Ritter’s superiors scoffed at the allegation, claiming Ritter’s knowledge of the situation was "limited."

However, in early 1999 it was reported that Washington had used UNSCOM to plant electronic bugs in the Ministry of Defense (Iraq’s Pentagon) and other U.S. officials confirmed much of Ritter’s accusations.

"The relationship between the United States and the inspection commission ... has long been a subject of debate," wrote U.S. News reporter Bruce B. Auster.

"The issue is sensitive because UNSCOM is an arm of the UN Security Council, not an agency of the United States, although it does rely on the United States for intelligence and personnel."

On December 15, 1998, after stockpiling cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf during the fall, the U.S. launched a much-delayed air strike against Baghdad.

But with Christmas nearing, most Americans couldn’t get too worked up over civilian casualties halfway around the word. And any doubts about U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf—except among those unfortunates having to deal with Gulf War Syndrome caused by a lethal combination of oil fires, biological agents, and radioactive uranium-tipped artillery and tank shells—had been thrown away, along with the yellow ribbons which had proudly displayed the total support of the uninformed.

VIETNAM

While human connivance to actually create war may seem unbelievable to those unaware of the secret societies’ methods, there is much evidence indicating that the Vietnam War was largely contrived by men of the "Iron Mountain" mindset.

Many conspiracy writers saw the Vietnam War as a classic example of the Hegelian dialectic in action—create a problem (the Viet Cong supported by North Vietnam), offer the solution (ever-increasing aid and troops to South Vietnam) to create synthesis (U.S. hegemony over Southeast Asia).

United States involvement in Vietnam began with the secret agreements of Yalta during World War II. America’s "sphere of influence" in the postwar world was to be the Pacific—we still have a presence in the Philippines and the South Pacific islands—and Southeast Asia. However, after hostilities ended in Europe, France was quick to resume its military control of French Indochina and U.S. plans for the- region were put on hold.

The history of the Vietnam War can be personified in Nguyen That Thanh, the son of a lowly Vietnamese rural educator. This man later changed his name to Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens) and became the driving force behind Indochinese nationalism for three decades. He also can be connected to the same forces which produced the communist movement during the twentieth century.

As a young man during World War I, Ho lived in France where he came into contact with French socialists and their philosophies derived from Illuminati and Freemasonry roots. In 1919 he spoke before the Warburg brothers and the other attendees of the Versailles Peace Conference, calling for expanded rights in Indochina.

In 1930 Ho founded the Vietnamese Communist Party, which later was changed at the urging of Soviet leaders to the Indochinese Communist Party to avoid being perceived as simply a national movement. However, the nationalism of Ho’s party was reaffirmed in 1941, when he and others entered Vietnam and created the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or the Viet Minh.

When the Japanese overran Indochina in 1945, Ho and General Vo Nguyen Giap began working with the American Office of Strategic Services to oust the occupation forces.

Ho continued to receive American aid after the Japanese withdrew from Vietnam following their surrender on August 14, 1945. "We had a trusted agent whom we regularly supplied with weapons, radio equipment, operators and medicine. All of it served to reinforce his position and status," wrote journalist Lloyd Shearer.

France’s Charles de Gaulle realized that Ho intended to create an independent Vietnam which would give his American handlers entree to the area. So in October 1945 de Gaulle ordered French troops into Saigon. Hoping to reclaim Vietnam as a French possession, de Gaulle even promised to return Vietnamese emperor Bao Dai to power, but Ho would settle for nothing less than independence.

After years of fighting, Ho’s Viet Minh, led by his able general Giap, had gained control of most of the countryside and, in May 1954 the French Army was defeated at Dien Bien Phu and forced to leave.

In a subsequent Geneva conference in July to determine Vietnam’s future, Ho’s delegation was met by a rival delegation representing the French backed c’mpcTor Bao Dai. The resulting conflict was reconciled by dividing Vietnam along the Seventeenth Parallel with I lo given control of the north. Ho accepted this division chiefly because the Geneva Accords promised a vote on reunification by both sides and he was confident both would join together under his leadership. The accords were not signed by the United States.

South Vietnam, which contained most of Vietnam’s resources and wealth, ended up in the hands of Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic in a land that was 95 percent Buddhist. Diem had lived in the United States following the French defeat and had met with high-ranking officials and CFR members. A veteran of twenty years of civil service, Diem was supported by Colonel Edward Lansdale, head of the newly arrived U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group. Lansdale’s group was there to aid the 234,000-man Vietnamese National Army, created and financed by the United States.

The Diem government, with the agreement of the United States, postponed indefinitely any reunification elections. "All this suggests that the U.S. conspired against the Geneva terms. ..." wrote journalist Michael McClear. This also virtually guaranteed civil war in Vietnam.

Vietnamese nationalists, largely anti-Catholic Buddhists and veterans of the Viet Minh, aided by a growing number of expatriates returning from the North, began reclaiming areas in the South under the name Viet Cong San or just Viet Cong.

Increasing violence prompted the arrival of American military "advisers" in South Vietnam, a move not totally supported by Congress. "No amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, an ’enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people," warned Senator John F. Kennedy in 1954.

Aid to communist North Vietnam came from Russia and China while South Vietnam grew more and more dependent on American support. The balance of power steadied. The stage was set for war.

JFK OPPOSED GLOBALISTS

By 1963 the biggest obstacle to a wider war in Southeast Asia was President John F. Kennedy, who had already voiced his reservations about U.S. involvement.

Democrat John F. Kennedy upset Eisenhower’s vice-president, Republican Richard Nixon, in the 1960 election and his top advisers came from the secret societies. Special Advisor John Kenneth Galbraith noted, "Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people." The overabundance of CFR members in government even caught the attention of President Kennedy, who remarked, "I’d like to have some new faces here, but all I get is the same old ones."

Immediately after his election, Kennedy was faced with a confrontation in Laos. In a foretaste of Vietnam, this conflict pitted the Pathet Lao communists against CIA-backed General Phoumi Nosavan. Upon entering office, Kennedy was advised by everyone from outgoing President Eisenhower to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send troops to support Nosavan. CFR members Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNa-mara and Walt Rostow, head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Council vocally supported the use of troops. Kennedy declined.

The CFR had been concerned with Vietnam right from the start. In 1951 the CFR, along with the Royal Institute for International Affairs, created a study group funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to study Southeast Asia among other things. The group recommended joint British-American domination of the region in accordance with the agreements at Yalta. During the Eisenhower years, CFR founder and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, along with his brother CFR founder and CIA Director Allen Dulles, oversaw implementation of this policy which grew to include the arrival of U.S. military advisers following the defeat of the French.

In September 1954, just four months after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a founder of the CFR, convened the Manila Conference, which resulted in the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). This action locked the United States, Great Britain (including Australia and New Zealand), France, the Philippines, and others into a mutual defense pact in Indochina.

C. L. Sulzberger of the New York Times in 1966 said,

"Dulles fathered SKATO with the deliberate purpose, as he explained to me, of providing the U.S. President with legal authority to intervene in Indochina. When Congress approved SKATO, it signed the first of a series of blank checks yielding authority over Vietnam policy."

It soon became apparent that Kennedy, unlike his predecessors, was not content to be manipulated by the Eastern Establishment. "In fact the Establishment’s rejection of Kennedy became increasingly intense during his time in office," wrote University of Pittsburgh Professor Donald Gibson in his well-researched 1994 book Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency.

Increasingly, students of the Kennedy assassination are coming to believe that his opposition to the globalists’ agenda may have played a significant factor in his unsolved death.

Described by economist Seymour Harris as "by far the most knowledgeable President of all time in the general area of economics," Kennedy quickly launched a variety of sweeping initiatives to increase both the human and technological potential of the nation.

"What he [tried] to do with everything from global investment patterns to tax breaks for individuals was to reshape laws and policies so that the power of property and the search for profit would not end up destroying rather then creating economic prosperity for the country," explained Gibson.

Kennedy revealed his animosity toward business titans in the spring of 1962 when he forced the major U.S. steel companies to rescind price increases. An agreement not to raise prices in exchange for labor concessions had been suddenly reversed after wage increases had been put on hold. Angered by this betrayal, Kennedy ordered his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to launch a price-fixing investigation, threatened the cancellation of steel contracts by the Defense Department and told the American public that the action by steel was unjustifiable and irresponsible. The steel companies, led by United States Steel, backed down.

Viewing the steel executives’ actions as an attack on his entire proposed economic program, Kennedy told newsmen, "In my opinion, if the rise in prices had been permitted to stand, it would have been extremely difficult to secure passage of the legislation." It should be noted that board members of U.S. Steel, long controlled by Morgan interests, included many members of the CFR and other powerful institutions.

Kennedy’s comptroller of the currency, James J. Saxon, grew increasingly at odds with the powerful Federal Reserve Board by encouraging ! broader investment and lending powers for non-Fed banks. Saxon also ! decided that such banks could underwrite state and local obligation ’ bonds, further weakening the dominant Federal Reserve banks.

In June 1963 Kennedy took the ultimate step against the Fed by aiitlmrizing the issuance of more than $4 billion in "United States Notes" through the U.S. Treasury, not the Federal Reserve.

"Kennedy apparently reasoned that by returning to the Constitution, which states that only Congress shall coin and regulate money, the soaring national debt could be reduced by not paying interest to the bankers of the Federal Reserve System, who print paper money then loan it to the government at interest," noted one conspiracy author.

In his attempt to level the economic playing field, Kennedy took a wide variety of actions, all of which deepened the animosity of Wall Street. As documented by author Gibson, these included:

*

offering tax proposals to redirect the foreign investments of U.S. companies
*

making distinctions in tax reform between productive and nonproductive investment
*

eliminating the tax privileges of U.S-based global investment companies
*

cracking down on foreign tax havens
*

supporting proposals to eliminate tax privileges for the wealthy
*

proposing increased taxes for large oil and mineral companies
*

revising the investment tax credit
*

making a proposal to expand the powers of the president to deal with recession

Kennedy’s economic policies and proposals were publicly attacked by Fortune magazine editor Charles J. V. Murphy, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, and the editors of the Wall Street Journal. Kennedy’s own Treasury Secretary, CFR member Douglas Dillon, voiced agreement with David Rockefeller in his opposition to the president’s policies in 1962, and by 1965 had joined Rockefeller in creating a formal group to promote the war in Vietnam.

In foreign policy, Kennedy displayed marked antagonism toward both colonialism (open control over a country’s political and economic life) and neocolonialism (covert control). "Kennedy’s support for economic development and Third World nationalism and his tolerance for government economic planning, even when it involved expropriation of property owned by interests in the U.S., all led to conflicts between Kennedy and elites within both the U.S. and foreign nations," wrote Gibson.

In Vietnam, Kennedy early on assuaged his hawkish counselors by increasing the number of military advisers until by late 1963, the number had grown to about fifteen thousand. But he was having second thoughts and, following the ill-fated Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961, he had become more and more dubious of the intelligence reports from the military and CIA. On October 11, 1963 Kennedy approved National Security Action Memorandum 263 which approved a possible disengagement in Vietnam by the end of 1965 and even ordered a quiet withdrawal of some military personnel by the end of that year.

He consistently rejected recommendations to introduce U.S. ground troops as he had earlier in Laos.

"In rejecting an expanded military involvement, Kennedy went against the Joint Chiefs and a host of high-level people in his government, including (CFR members) Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge and William Bundy," Gibson noted.

Another key player was Averell Harriman, a CFR man whose connections to secret society manipulation stretched back to World War I and the founding of Soviet Communism. In the fall of 1963 it was Harriman, one of JFK’s inner circle, who advocated the removal of Vietnam President Diem and who sent what became known as the "green light" cable to Saigon. This cable voiced support for a movement against the corrupt Diem government. "It did not deal with the warning about a coup and therefore seemed to countenance one," noted author Michael McClear. On November 2 Diem was assassinated in a coup by his own generals, believed by many to have been inspired by the CIA, and the Vietnam War soon escalated.

"The axis of Lodge [CFR] and Harriman [CFR] was too strong for President Kennedy to thwart or overcome," observed former U.S. Ambassador to Saigon Frederick E. Nolting.

Kennedy knew he had to tread lightly in his opposition to a war supported by such powerful interests. He confided to Senator Mike Mansfield that he had decided on "a complete withdrawal from Vietnam" but said this couldn’t be done until after he was given a mandate in the 1964 election. Corporate America may well have seen Kennedy as the "ambiguous leadership" that so concerned the "Iron Mountain Boys." Although there is every indication that Kennedy planned to end U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, no one will ever know for certain. Gunfire in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, l%3, ended his presidency.

The circumstances of JFK’s assassination remain controversial at best.

It might be noted that the wife of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in 1994 told author A. J. Weberman,

"The answer to the Kennedy assassination is with the Federal Reserve Bank. Don’t underestimate that. It’s wrong to blame it on [CIA official James] Angleton and the CIA per se only. This is only one finger of the same hand. The people who supply the money are above the CIA."

Two more things should be noted here. One is that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968 only after he turned his dynamic oratory and organizing skills to protesting the Vietnam War. Second, the overwhelming evidence of obstruction to a truthful investigation of Kennedy’s death indicates the use of tremendous and lasting force wielded at the highest level of the American power structure—the level controlled by the secret societies and their Wall Street members.

ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ

Kennedy’s successor, Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, the powerful Senate majority leader who had been a member of the House Armed Services Committee, was more attentive to the Joint Chiefs and the CFR crowd.

On December 2, 1963, just days after becoming president, a White House memo from Johnson to General Maxwell Taylor (CFR) only released to the public in 1998, stated,

"The more I look at it, the more it is clear to me that South Vietnam is our most critical military area right now. I hope that you and your colleagues in the Joint Chiefs of Staff will see to it that the very best available officers are assigned to General [Paul] Harkins’ command in all areas and for all purposes. We should put our blue ribbon men on this job at every level."

Even with this reversal of attitude toward Vietnam in Washington, the war needed a provocation to enlist public support along with congressional authority. "In hopes of provoking a North Vietnamese attack, |Johnson] authorized the resumption of destroyer patrols in the Gulf of Tonkin," wrote West Point historian Major H. R. McMaster. This tactic proved successful with the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident.

On August 4, 1964 the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam received a message that the National Security Agency monitored preparations for an attack by North Vietnam gunboats. Defense Secretary McNamara telephoned President Johnson and confirmed an "anticipated" attack.

This came only two days after three small North Vietnamese torpedo boats had made ineffective attack runs on the Maddox in retaliation for raids on the North Vietnam coast by small boats operated jointly by the U.S. Navy and South Vietnamese in an action called Operation Planning (OPLAN) 34-A, a provocative scheme enthusiastically endorsed by McNamara. The destroyer’s crews knew nothing of the OPLAN 34-A raids.

The crews of the destroyers went to full battle stations and for two hours Navy guns roared. When the smoke cleared, no damage or casualties were reported and no gunboats were actually seen. Naval commander Wesley McDonald, whose A-4 jet squadron was circling over the gulf, later reported, "[The destroyer crews] were calling out where they thought the torpedo boats were, but I could never find the damn torpedo boats."

Yet on the basis of this "phantom" attack, Johnson called together congressional leaders and asked for the power to respond militarily. He told them, "We want them [the North Vietnamese] to know we are not going to take it lying down" and that "some of our boys are floating around in the water."

Stampeded in those tense Cold War days, the House voted 416 to 0 to allow Johnson, as Commander in Chief, "to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the [CFR-inspired SEATO] Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom."

The Joint Resolution to Promote the Maintenance of International Peace and Security in Southeast Asia, better known as the "Gulf of Tonkin Resolution," passed 88 to 2 in the Senate. One of the dissenters, Alaskan senator Ernest Gruening warned that the resolution was nothing more than "a predated declaration of war." The other, Oregon’s senator Wayne Morse warned, "I believe that within the next century, future generations will look with dismay and great disappointment upon a Congress which is about to make such a historic mistake."

The resolution neatly bypassed the constitutional requirement that only Congress has the power to declare war. In late January 1965 it was McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy who told President Johnson it was time to end fifteen years of limited U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They said it was time for either direct military intervention or a negotiated end of the conflict. "Bob and I tend to favor the first course," Bundy later wrote. Johnson agreed and one month later a bombing campaign against North Vietnam, code named "Rolling Thunder," began. By July Johnson had ordered in 100,000 combat troops and the Vietnam War was begun in earnest.

Adding strength to this military buildup, U.S. ambassador to Saigon, CFR member Henry Cabot Lodge, was replaced by CFR member and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Maxwell Taylor.

From the perspective of 1984, editors of U.S. News & World Report correctly saw that "the seeds were sown for today’s running conflict between President Reagan and Congress over the use of U.S. military power—from Central America to Lebanon and the Persian Gulf." In 1999, with President Clinton under impeachment for dissembling about a sexual affair, no one in Congress seemed concerned that he carried on this unconstitutional heritage by attacking Iraq and Kosovo on behalf of the United Nations.

A look at members of the Council on Foreign Relations—that creation of Rockefeller-Morgan men connected back to the Rhodes-Milner secret society mentality—appears to be a who’s who of the Vietnam War era: McNamara, Cyrus Vance, Walt Rostow, William and McGeorge Bundy, Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, and Averell Harriman. U.S. ambassadors to Saigon during the war—Henry Cabot Lodge, Maxwell Taylor, and Ellsworth Bunker—all were CFR members and played prominent roles in U.S. policy.

"In fact, many of the most important advocates of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, both within and outside the government, were members of the Board of Directors of the CFR," noted author Donald Gibson.

This would include Allen Dulles, David Rockefeller, John J. McCloy, and Henry M. Wriston (a Morgan associate).

Noting that William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, as a young man was a private agent for J. P. Morgan Jr., author Gibson observed,

"By the early 1960s the Council on Foreign Relations, Morgan and Rockefeller interests, and the intelligence community were so extensively inbred as to be virtually a single entity."

According to CFR researcher James Perloff, Walt Rostow, who became President Johnson’s national security adviser in 1966, not only was ,} Cl’k member but had been rejected three times for employment in the Eisenhower administration for failing security checks. In his 1960 book The United States in the World Arena, Rostow revealed his CFR globalist outlook by calling for an international police force.

"It is a legitimate American national objective to see removed from all nations—including the United States—the right to use substantial military force to pursue their own interests. Since this residual right is the root of national sovereignty ... it is, therefore, an American interest to see an end to nationhood as it has been historically defined," he wrote.

CFR member McNamara added to America’s secret intelligence apparatus on August 1, 1961, by creating the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). By September he and Taylor were pushing for expanded U.S. involvement in Vietnam by recommending the addition of 16,000 troops. Opposition came from Undersecretary of State George Ball who strongly opposed this, warning that such a move would result in the deployment of at least 300,000 American troops within two years. Kennedy acceded to McNamara’s advice.

Later it was McNamara, serving as Secretary of Defense until 1968, who continually cut back on U.S. military capabilities and formulated the polices forbidding strategic air strikes in North Vietnam. In 1978, after the Vietnam War ended with a communist takeover in the South, McNamara became president of the World Bank (a for-profit agency of the United Nations and CFR pet project) and coordinated a $60 million loan for the victors.

William Bundy (The Order, 1939), who joined the CIA in 1951, became a director of the CFR in 1964, the same year he was appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. A major planning force behind U.S. Vietnam policy, Bundy drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, according to the Pentagon Tapers. It was Bundy who also was involved in OPLAN 34-A, the aggressive CIA-run incursions of U.S. gunboats against the North Vietnam coast (possibly in violation of international law) which provoked retaliation on the U.S. Sixth Fleet resulting in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Bundy went on to become editor of the CFR publication Foreign Affairs.

Bundy’s brother, CFR member McGeorge Bundy (The Order, 1940) reportedly was one of the instigators of the Report from Iron Mountain and Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to both Kennedy and Johnson, a post which could be used to screen information to his boss.

Bundy joined the U.S. Army as a private at the start of World War II and suddenly was helping to plan the invasions of Sicily and Normandy. He went on to become Assistant to the Secretary of War at age twenty-seven. He later served as president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979.

"By acting jointly, the Bundy brothers could have controlled absolutely the flow of information relating to Vietnam from Intelligence, State and Department Of Defense," postulated author Anthony C. Sutton.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk, another named as an instigator of the Report from Iron Mountain, had been deputy chief of staff with the Allied Command in Asia during World War II. A Rhodes Scholar, CFR member, and chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, Rusk guided the policies of both Kennedy and his close friend Lyndon Johnson, who told his biographer Doris Kearns he "built his advisory system around Rusk." CFR members Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett had "enthusiastically" recommended Rusk to President Kennedy.

As documented by authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, President Lyndon Johnson met with a select group of fourteen advisers on almost a daily basis. Twelve of these advisers were CFR members, all were bankers or lawyers, and all counseled increased commitment in Vietnam. His six key advisers were Truman’s Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, McCloy, Harriman, Acheson, State Department adviser Charles Bohlen, and former U.S Ambassador to Russia George Kennan—all CFR. Johnson called these close friends his "Wise Men." By 1968 these same advisers suddenly turned against the war.

Johnson was so shocked and disheartened by this betrayal by the foreign policy establishment that he went on television to announce that he would not run for reelection. When asked why Johnson’s advisers had such a change of heart, General Maxwell Taylor could only respond "My Council on Foreign Relations friends were living in the cloud of The New York Times." In other words, these men had awakened from their self-delusions and realized that the United States was tearing itself apart over Vietnam. Even then, the war continued for another seven years.

With newly installed president Richard Nixon heading the war effort, CFR member and Trilateralist Henry Kissinger stepped in as National Security Advisor in early 1969. By the end of that year Kissinger was controlling U.S. policy in Vietnam. Some claim Kissinger was placed there for that reason. Nixon’s Defense Secretary Mclvin Laird admitted, "I would say that in the conceptual view of the world, President Nixon was influenced to a great degree by Kissinger, although he had not been a friend of his and did not know him before December of 1968."

In 1970 Kissinger closeted himself with staffer Winston Lord. According to Lord his boss "wanted to share and debate with his closest aides major policy decisions, so that the popular image of Kissinger as a man who doesn’t like to hear dissent [was shown to be] not true." Lord and other staffers must have approved of Kissinger’s plan to widen the war, since fighting soon spread into Cambodia.

Despite this expansion, the war grew static and began winding down. Kissinger, considered America’s leading diplomat even into the 1990s, prompted Eugene McCarthy to comment, "Henry Kissinger got the Nobel [Peace] Prize for watching the end of a war he’s advocated— and that’s pretty high diplomacy."

In 1971 Louisiana Congressman John R. Rarick was blunt in denouncing the CFR as the instigators of Vietnam. In a circular, Rarick wrote,

"The My Lai massacre, the sentencing of Lt. [William] Galley to life imprisonment, ’The Selling of the Pentagon,’ and the so-called Pentagon Papers are leading examples of attempts to shift all of the blame to the military in the eyes of the people.

"But no one identifies the Council on Foreign Relations—the CFR— a group of some 1,400 Americans which includes as members almost every top level decision and policy maker in the Vietnam War.

"CBS tells the people it wants them to know what is going on and who is to blame. Why doesn’t CBS tell the American people about the CFR and let the people decide whom to blame for the Vietnam fiasco—the planners and top decision makers of a closely knit financial-industrial-intellectual aristocracy or military leaders under civilian control who have had little or no voice in the overall policies and operations and who are forbidden by law to tell the American people their side... Who will tell the people the truth if those who control ’the right to know machinery’ also control the government?"

Since CFR members realized the economic necessity of war but agreed that nuclear war was unthinkable, it was decided that future conflicts would have to be limited in scope. "We must be prepared to fight limited actions ourselves," wrote one contributor to the CFR’s Foreign Affairs in 1957. "Otherwise we shall have made no advance beyond ’massive retaliation’ which tied our hands in conflicts involving less than our survival. And we must be prepared to lose limited actions."

How easy it is to lose conflicts when the military is hamstrung. In 1985 the Congressional Record published the newly declassified "rules of engagement" by which the U.S. military fought in Vietnam. These rules filled twenty-six pages and included restrictions such as repeated refusals to allow Air Force bombing of the most strategic targets as determined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a general order for U.S. troops not to fire on the Viet Cong unless fired upon first, vehicles more than two hundred yards off the Ho Chi Minh Trail were not to be bombed, North Vietnamese fighter planes could not be attacked unless they were in the air and openly hostile, SAM missile sites under construction were off limits, and enemy forces could not be pursued if they crossed into Laos or Cambodia.

The United States publicly assured North Vietnam it would not bomb certain areas, which allowed their antiaircraft batteries to concentrate in areas that could be bombed, greatly increasing U.S. casualties.

In addition to such restrictions, which were totally incomprehensible to trained military officers, vital materials and supplies were allowed to move unhindered through the North Vietnamese port of Haiphong, some 80 percent coming from America’s ostensible enemies—Russia and China.

TRADING WITH THE ENEMY

At the height of the war, trade with the communist nations supplying North Vietnam was actually increased—another goal of the CFR.

As far back as 1961, Trilateral Commission founder Zbigniew Brzezinski had written in Foreign Affairs that the United States should provide economic aid to Eastern Europe. David Rockefeller signaled his approval of such trade by making a trip to Moscow in mid-1964.

"David Rockefeller, president of Chase Manhattan Bank, briefed President Johnson today on his recent meeting with Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev of Russia. Rockefeller told Johnson that during the two-hour talk, the Red leader said the United States and the Soviet Union ’should do more trade.’ Khrushchev, according to Rockefeller, said he would like to see the United States extend long-term credits [loans] to the Russians," reported the Chicago Tribune on September 12.

The Rockefellers had a long history of trade with Russia, dating back to the 1920s when Chase Bank helped create the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce.

On October 13, 1966 the New York Times reported,

"The United States put into effect today one of President Johnson’s proposals for stimulating East-West trade by removing restrictions on the export of more than 400 commodities to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe."

On October 27, less than a month later, the Times reported,

"The Soviet Union and its allies agreed at the conference of their leaders in Moscow last week to grant North Vietnam assistance in material and money amounting to about $1 billion."

In 1967 the Rockefellers joined with Cyrus Eaton, called "the communists’ best capitalist friend" by Parade magazine, in financing aluminum and rubber plants in the Soviet Union. Young Eaton had been dissuaded from becoming a preacher by John D. Rockefeller and instead became the founder of Republic Steel Corporation. In the 1970s it was American technology and financing, primarily through the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank, which resulted in construction of the $5 billion Kama River factory. The factory produced heavy trucks, many of which were converted to military use.

Signing the accords which authorized U.S. funding for the Kama River factory was George Pratt Shultz, who later replaced CFR member Alexander Haig as President Reagan’s secretary of state. Shultz was a CFR director and a relative of Mrs. Harold Pratt, who donated the Pratt House to the council as a headquarters.

So United States troops were fighting North Vietnam while United States goods and financing went to Russia and Eastern Europe, which provided funds and materials to North Vietnam. It is now understandable why college students, many of whom were well aware of the absurdity of this situation and all of whom were susceptible to the draft, began to demonstrate against the war.

Even in the antiwar movement one can find the hand of the secret societies. In 1968 James Simon Kunen, author of an autobiography of his student activist days entitled The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, wrote,

"Also at the (Students for a Democratic Society sponsored First International Students’] convention, men from Business International Roundtables—the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government—tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress [a 1961 Kennedy program designed to generate about $20 billion in loans to 22 Latin American nations for economic and social reform which passed away not long after he did]. They’re the left wing of the ruling class... They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered Esso-Rockefeller-money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left."

Kunen caught the puzzled spirit of the youthful antiwar protesters in an opening to his book when he wrote,

"Isn’t it singular that no one ever goes to jail for waging wars, let alone advocating them? But the jails are filled with those who want peace. Not to kill is to be a criminal. They put you right into jail if all you do is ask them to leave you alone. It strikes me as quite singular."

For those Americans who lived through it—whether against the war or not—the costs of the Vietnam War should remain fresh in their consciences: Nearly 50,000 dead GIs, more than 300,000 physical casualties (many more with mental and emotional problems), and President Johnson’s hopes for a "Great Society" dashed by a divided, hostile public saddled with a faltering economy. The cost to Vietnam was much worse— 250,000 South Vietnamese dead and 600,000 wounded compared to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong who suffered 900,000 killed and 2 million wounded. An additional hundreds of thousands of civilians in both North and South were killed, many in the U.S. bombing campaigns, and the countryside was devastated by bombs, artillery, land mines, and chemical defoliates. Total financial cost of the war has been estimated at more than $200 billion.

After all this, the United States pulled out. It is inconceivable today that anyone can view the U.S. experience in Vietnam as anything but a total defeat—a defeat incomprehensible to the brave men and women who fought there as well as most Americans.

"The Vietnam War is a mystery only if seen through the accumulated myths surrounding it—such as that it resulted from blunders, or from overconfident jingoism," explained author Perloff. "Viewed, however, us an exercise in deliberate mismanagement, it ceases to mystify, for its outcome fulfilled precisely the goals traditional to the CFR."

KOREA

Nowhere has the secret society manipulation of both sides of a conflict been more evident than in Korea in the early 1950s. As in the Persian Gulf and Vietnam, official semantics termed this conflict, which cost almost 34,000 American lives, a mere "police action," not a war.

Much documentation exists to show that the Korean conflict was the result of careful planning by men whose control extended to both the United States and the Soviet Union.

This conflict began with the founding of the United Nations at the end of World War II. The name "United Nations" had been imprinted in the mind of the American public during the war when it referred to the countries allied against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The UN organization was merely an outgrowth of the old League of Nations, that failed attempt at fledgling world government instigated by Woodrow Wilson and members of the Milner-Rhodes secret societies. The concept was resurrected during the distraction of the world war when representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Chiang Kai-shek’s China met at the Dumbarton Oaks estate near Washington, DC, from August 21 to October 7, 1944. A primary mover of this and subsequent actions to establish a United Nations was John Foster Dulles, who had helped found the Council on Foreign Relations. A participant in the 1917 Versailles Peace Conference, Dulles also created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization which provided the legal rationale for the war in Vietnam.

Further details of United Nations operations were worked out during the pivotal Yalta Conference in February 1945. It was secret protocols at Yalta that agreed to partition Korea along the Thirty-eighth Parallel and allowed the Soviet Union and China control over the North.

Such action had been contemplated a year earlier. An April 1944 article in Foreign Affairs called for "a trusteeship for Korea... assumed not by a particular country, but by a group of Powers, say, the United States, Great Britain, China and Russia." The CFR leadership realized that the American public might not agree to war should such a "trusteeship" be challenged and began to develop a rationale for intervention.

An internal 1944 CFR memo stated that the "sovereignty fetish" and the "difficulty... arising from the Constitutional provision that only Congress may declare war" might In- oumim-il willi "the contention treaty would overrule this barrier... our participation in such police action as might be recommended by [an] international security organization need not necessarily be construed as war."

"It is not unreasonable to say that there never would have been a Communist regime in North Korea, nor would there ever have been a Korean War, had American negotiations [led by CFR members] and lend-lease shipments not brought the USSR into the Pacific theater," commented Perloff.

Formal construction of the UN began two months after Yalta at the United Nations Conference on International Organization held in San Francisco. A resulting charter was signed in June and went into effect October 24, 1945, little more than two months after World War II ended. The United Nations was created "essentially by the Council on Foreign Relations," wrote Ralph Epperson. "There were 47 members in the American delegation to the UN conference at San Francisco."

Their "senior adviser" was John Foster Dulles. "Emboldened by his formidable achievements, Dulles viewed his appointment as secretary of state by President Eisenhower, in January, 1953, as a mandate to originate foreign policy, which is normally regarded as the domain of the president," stated The New Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Considering Dulles and the other CFR members behind the creation of the UN, it is no surprise to find that organization today supervising the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (commonly called the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The UN also houses a number of social agencies including the International Labor Organization (ILO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

In 1947, following a breakdown in negotiations over reunification, the matter of Korea was turned over to the United Nations. By 1949 both the United States and the Soviet Union had largely withdrawn wartime occupation troops from the Korean peninsula. The U.S. withdrawal left a mere 16,000 South Koreans armed with mostly small arms to face a North Korean communist army of more than 150,000 armed with up-to-date Russian tanks, planes, and artillery. When General Albert C. Wedemeyer, sent by President Truman to evaluate the situation, reported that the communists represented ë direct threat to the South, he was ignored and his report kept from the public.

In January 1950 North Korean premier Kim Il-sung proclaimed a "year of unification" and began massing troops along the Thirty-eighth Parallel. As in the future Persian Gulf war, the CFR-filled U.S. State Department did nothing. Truman’s secretary of state, CFR member Dean Acheson, stated publicly that Korea was outside the defensive perimeter of the United States. "This gave a clear signal to Kim, who invaded the South that June under Soviet auspices," wrote Perloff.

American leaders professed surprise and anger over the June 25 North Korean assault and called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, then composed of the U.S., Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and Nationalist China.

The council, with the Soviet Union absent and China represented only by anticommunist Chiang Kai-shek, voted for UN intervention in Korea. It has been noted by conspiracy authors that this vote could have been prevented by a Russian veto. But strangely, Soviet delegates had staged a walkout in protest that Communist China had not been recognized by the UN. Soon after this vote for UN-backed conflict, the Soviet delegates returned, even though the People’s Republic of China still had not been recognized.

On June 27, with UN sanction, President Truman ordered American troops to assist the UN "police action" of defending South Korea. Through July and August, the outnumbered and outgunned South Korean Army, along with the four ill-equipped American divisions sent by Truman, were pushed down to the tip of the Korean peninsula. The situation looked bad until mid-September when General Douglas MacArthur launched a brilliant and daring attack on Inchon Harbor, located midway up the peninsula, that broke the North Korean battle line and cut their supply routes.

Badly shattered, the North Koreans pulled back with the UN troops— 90 percent of which were Americans—close behind. As the fight crossed the Thirty-eighth Parallel, China’s Mao Tse-tung warned that any movement to the Yalu River bordering China by UN forces would be unacceptable. MacArthur warned the State Department that Chinese troops were massing north of the Yalu, but his warning was unheeded. On November 25, nearly 200,000 Chinese "volunteers" crossed the Yalu and smashed into the unprepared UN troops. Another 500,000 followed in December.

Again the Americans and their allies were pushed back but managed to regroup and later countiTattacki-d back to the Thirty-eighth Parallel.

The war settled into a series of actions back and forth across the contested parallel.

As in Vietnam, the U.S. military was hamstrung with policy decisions which prevented them from fully prosecuting the Korean conflict. But, unlike in Vietnam, a military leader of considerable standing balked at these restrictions and appealed directly to the American public for support.

General MacArthur, the hero of World War II, ordered the Air Force to bomb the Yalu River bridges, which would have cut China’s supply and communication lines. He appealed to sympathetic congressmen to support his military actions and to allow the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan to launch a second front against China to relieve pressure on Korea.

The official response to MacArthur was swift in coming. MacArthur’s bombing orders were canceled by General George Marshall (father of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II and a CFR member who had been called out of retirement by President Truman to serve as Secretary of Defense). This was the same Marshall who, as Army Chief of Staff, reportedly received advance word of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

MacArthur was ordered not to bomb key Chinese supply bases and to order pilots not to chase fleeing enemy aircraft. Chinese commander General Lin Piao was to say later,

"I never would have made the attack and risked my men and my military reputation if I had not been assured that Washington would restrain General MacArthur from taking adequate retaliatory measures against my lines of supply and communication."

MacArthur’s appeal to the public resulted in his dismissal by President Truman on April 10, 1951. He was replaced by General Matthew B. Ridgeway, who later became a CFR member.

The MacArthur plan for a diversionary attack by Taiwan was never to be. This plan had been blocked by an order from Truman only two days after the North Koreans attacked. According to government documents, Truman said,

"I have ordered the Seventh Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa |now Taiwan]. As a corollary of this action, I am calling upon the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. The Seventh Fleet will see that this is done."

General Marshall also rejected an offer by Chiang Kai-shek to send Nationalist Chinese to aid Americans in Korea.

Added to these incomprehensible orders restricting military options, was the amazing fact that Russian commanders were running the conflict on both sides. Under the agreement at Yalta and due to their supplying North Korea with military hardware and technology, Soviet military officers were largely in control of the war. Author Epperson cited a Pentagon press release which identified two Soviet officers as being in charge of movements across the Thirty-eighth Parallel. One, a General Vasilev, actually was overheard giving the order to attack on June 25,1951.

General Vasilev’s chain of command reached from Korea to Moscow to the UN Undersecretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs. At this same time, General MacArthur’s chain of command went through President Truman to the UN Undersecretary General for Political and Security Council Affairs, an office held at that time by Russian Constantine Zinchenko. This meant that Soviet officers were overseeing the North Korean war strategy while reporting back to a fellow Soviet officer in the same UN office that coordinated the allied war effort.

"In effect, the Communists were directing both sides of the war," wrote author Griffin. What past conspiracy authors failed to consider was the evidence that Communist Russia was financed and controlled from the beginning by the inner circle of America’s modern secret societies.

The war finally settled into a stalemate which ended with an armistice signed on July 27, 1953, six months after General Dwight Eisenhower had become president of the U.S.

MacArthur, noting that for the first time in its military history, the United States had failed to achieve victory, was later to state, "Never before has this nation been engaged in mortal combat with a hostile power without military objective, without policy other than restrictions governing operations, or indeed without even formally recognizing a state of war." This set a precedent in the United States which continues to haunt us to this day.

But was there again a hidden purpose to this seemingly pointless conflict, one that reached into the upper circles of the secret societies? A 1952 Foreign Affairs article explained,

"The meaning of our experience in Korea as I see it, is that we have made historic progress toward the establishment of a viable system of collective security."

So Korea was another step forward in realizing the CFR goals of one-world government backed by a implied military command as with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). CFR member Dean Acheson later admitted, "The only reason I told the President to fight in Korea was to validate NATO."

Both NATO and the United Nations resulted from the most momentous event of the twentieth century—World War II—and once again the diligent researcher finds the unmistakable imprint of the secret societies

RISE OF THE NAZI CULT

As hard to believe as it may be for Americans brought up on wartime propaganda films and publications devoted merely to war technology and battles, World War II was largely the result of infighting between secret occult societies composed of wealthy businessmen that eventually led to international tensions that provoked open warfare.

As in other conflicts, the manipulation and influence of these societies is found in the origins and finances of the war, not on the battlefields. Abundant evidence now exists indicating that World War II was brought about by agents and members of secret societies connected to the Illuminati and Freemasonry in both Germany and Britain. It was in this "good war," that the older mystic societies seeking freedom from both church and state merged with the modern secret societies concerned primarily with wealth, power, and control.

"Sir Winston Churchill himself . . . was insistent that the occultism of the Nazi Party should not under any circumstances be revealed to the general public," wrote author Trevor Ravenscroft, who claimed to have worked closely with Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, a confidential adviser to Churchill.

"The failure of the Nuremberg Trials to identify the nature of the evil at work behind the outer facade of National Socialism convinced him that another three decades must pass before a large enough readership would be present to comprehend the initiation rites and black magic practices of the inner core of Nazi leadership."

This remarkable statement was corroborated by Airey Neave, one of the postwar Nuremberg prosecutors, who said the occult aspect of Nazi activities was ruled inadmissible because the tribunal feared both the psychological and spiritual implications in the Western nations. They also thought that such beliefs, so contrary to public rationalism, might be used to mount an insanity defense for Nazi leaders.

History identifies Adolf Hitler as a dominant figure in the war, so to understand the involvement of the secret societies, one must first understand Hitler and the origins of his Nazi Party. Many books, articles, and even TV specials have been produced documenting the ties between Hitler’s Nazis and occult societies, but few have made it plain that Hitler was their creation.

To fully understand how and why Hitler was created, a close study must be made of the secret groups operating around Hitler as well as their connections to military intelligence services.

Adolf Hitler’s Nazis were far more than simply a political movement. They saw themselves leading a quasi-religious movement born out of secret organizations whose goals were the same as those Jound in the Illuminati and Freemasonry. "They were a cult . . . [and] as with any typical cult, its chief enemies were other cults," noted author Peter Levenda in a well-researched book dealing with Nazis and the occult.

Hitler himself acknowledged this by stating,

"Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a political movement knows almost nothing about it. It is more than religion; it is the determination to create a new man."

This Nazi cult grew from a variety of organizations, theologies and beliefs present in Germany at the end of World War I—all stemming from the mysteries of older groups such as the Bavarian Illuminati, Germanenorden, Freemasonry, and the Teutonic Knights.

A prerequisite for grasping this background is understanding The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, also known as The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, a list of procedures for world domination. This document may have wreaked more havoc than almost any other piece of literature in recent history.

A version of the Protocols first appeared in 1864 in France in a book entitled Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu or the Politics of Machiavelli in the Nineteenth Century by a Contemporary. It was written anonymously by a French lawyer named Maurice Joly and taken as a political satire against the Machiavelli-inspired machinations of Napoleon III. Joly reportedly was a friend of Victor Hugo and both were members of the Order of the Rose-Croix or Rosicru-cians, a secret society that may have influenced his writing. Joly’s identity was discovered, and he received a fifteen-month prison sentence for his impertinence and his book was almost forgotten.

In the mid-1890s Joly’s obscure book was rewritten and augmented with anti-Semitic material on orders of the Russian Ochrana, the czar’s secret police. It was added to the work of a religious writer named Sergei Nilus and published to coincide with the founding of the first Zionist movement (seeking a return to Palestine) at the 1897 World Congress of Jewry in Basel, Switzerland. The Protocols were included as an appendix to Nilus’s book, partially titled The Anti-Christ is Near at Hand.

The objective was to relieve public pressure on the czar by portraying Russian revolutionaries as pawns of an international Jewish conspiracy. The document purported that a clique of Jews and Freemasons would join forces to create a one-world government by means of liberalism and socialism, a conspiratorial theory still alive in some quarters.

The protocols still chills readers with its prophetic description of the methodology for tyranny by a few. Its message fits quite well with the elitist outlooks of men like Cecil Rhodes and the Rothschilds.

"We are the chosen, we are the only true men. Our minds give off the true power of the spirit; the intelligence of the rest of the world is merely instinctive and animal. They can see, but they cannot foresee; their inventions are merely corporeal. Does it not follow that nature herself has predestined us to dominate the whole world?" stated the Protocols.

"Outwardly, however, in our ’official’ utterances, we shall adopt an opposite procedure, and always do our best to appear honorable and cooperative. A statesman’s words do not have to agree with his acts. If we pursue these principles, the governments and peoples which we have thus prepared will take our lOUs for cash. One day they will accept us as benefactors and saviors of the human race. If any State dared to resist us, if its neighbors make common cause with it against us, we will unleash a world war."

The Protocols goes on to explain that the goal of world domination will be accomplished by controlling how the public thinks by controlling what they hear, by creating new conflicts or restoring old orders, by spreading hunger, destitution and plague, by seducing and distracting the youth. "By all these methods we shall so wear down the nations that they will be forced to offer us world domination," they proclaim.

Some of the twenty-four Protocols bear a brief summary. If any part of them are to be believed, they provide a clear connection to Freemasonry and to the Ancient Mysteries as well as an amazing road map for world conquest. Because the Protocols were rewritten and attributed to Jews before World War I with the intent of inciting anti-Jewish sentiment, their use of the term goyim, a demeaning Jewish word for non-Jews, has been substituted with the term "masses."

Pertinent points include:

*

The Protocol plan "will remain invisible until the moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer undermine it."

(Protocol 1)
*

"Wars, so far as possible, should not result in territorial gains."

(Protocol 2)
*

"[The] minds [of the masses] must be diverted toward industry and trade. Thus, all the nations will be swallowed up in the pursuit of gain and.... will not take note of their common foe."

(Protocol 4)
*

"We shall create an intensified centralization of government,"

(Protocol 5)

"... we must develop [a] Super-Government by representing it as the Protector and Benefactor of all those who voluntarily submit... We shall soon begin to establish huge monopolies..."

(Protocol 6)
*

"The intensification of armaments, the increase of police forces... [so that] in all the States of the world, besides ourselves, [there will be] only the masses of the proletariat, a few millionaires devoted to our interests, police, and soldiers."

(Protocol 7)
*

"We shall put [government power] in the hands of persons whose past and reputations are such that between them and the people lies an abyss, persons who, in case of disobedience to our instructions, must face criminal charges..."

(Protocol 8)
*

"We have fooled, bemused and corrupted the youth of the [masses] by rearing them in principles and theories which are known to us to be false..."

(Protocol 9)
*

"We shall destroy among the [masses] the importance of the family and its educational value."

(Protocol 10)
*

"We have invented this whole policy and insinuated it into the minds of the [masses] ... to obtain in a roundabout way what is ... unattainable by the direct road. ... It is this which has served as the basis for our organization of secret masonry which is not known to, and aims which are not even so much as suspected by, these... cattle, attracted by us into the ’Show’ army of Masonic Lodges in order to throw dust in the eyes of their fellows."

(Protocol 11)
*

"What is the part played by the press today? ... It serves selfish ends. ... It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves. We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb... Not a single announcement will reach the public without our control "

(Protocol 12)
*

"The need for daily bread forces the [masses] to keep silent and be our humble servants. ... In order that the masses themselves may not guess what they are about we further distract them with amusements, games, pastimes, passions, people’s palace [no TV at that time]. Soon we shall begin through the press to propose competitions in art, in sport of all kinds. ..."

(Protocol 13)
*

"It will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours. . . . We must therefore sweep away all other forms of belief."

(Protocol 14)

"Freedom of conscience has been declared everywhere, so that now only years divide us from the moment of the complete wrecking of that Christian religion, as to other religions we shall have still less difficulty in dealing with them."

(Protocol 17)
*

"When we at last definitely come into our kingdom by the aid of coups d’etat prepared everywhere for one and the same day... we shall make it our task to see that against us such things as plots shall no longer exist. With this purpose we shall slay with out mercy all who take arms in hand to oppose our coming... Anything like a secret society will also be punishable with death "

(Protocol 15)
*

"In our program one-third of [the masses] will keep the rest under observation from a sense of duty, on the principle of volunteer service to the State. It will be no disgrace to be a spy and informer, but a merit... how else [are] we to... increase... disorders?"

(Protocol 17)

"Sedition-mongering is nothing more than the yapping of a lap-dog at an elephant. ... In order to destroy the prestige of heroism, for political crime we shall send it for trial in the category of thieving, murder and every kind of abominable and filthy crime. Public opinion will then . . . brand it with the same contempt."

(Protocol 19)

"Until they commit some overt act we shall not lay a finger on them but only introduce into their midst observation elements..."

(Protocol 18)

Later Protocols deal with finances. Protocol 20 called for general taxation, "the lawful confiscation of all sums of every kind for the regulation of their circulation in the State." This would be followed by "a progressive tax on property" and then finally a graduated income tax, a "tax increasing in a percentage ratio to capital" as well as taxes on sales, "receipt of money," inheritance, and property transfers. There was a discussion of "the substitution of interest-bearing paper" money since "Economic crises have been produced by us ... by no other means than the withdrawal of money from circulation."

The Protocols also discuss at great length loans, which it states "hang like a sword of Damocles over the heads of rulers, who, instead of taking from their subjects by a temporary tax, come begging with outstretched palm to our ankers."

Whoever produced the Protocols clearly understood the secrets of banking. In a passage which could have been titled "The National Debt of the United States," Protocol 20 stated,

"A loan is an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation [interest] commensurate to the sum of the loaned capital."

It proceeded to explain, "If the loan bears a charge of five percent [hefty interest in those more knowledgeable times] then in 20 years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in 40 years it is paying a double sum, in 60—treble, and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt. ..."

The writer also determined that no one would figure out what was happening.

"We shall so hedge about our system of accounting that neither ruler nor the most insignificant public servant will be in a position to divert even the smallest sum from its destination without detection or to direct it in another direction. ..."

The Protocols also demonstrate a linkage to the Ancient Mysteries, referring to bloodlines such as "the seed of David," "secret mysteries," and even the "Symbolic Snake," an icon of the earliest cults.

Nilus himself was obviously quite captivated by the Protocols. Sounding eerily similar to today’s television evangelists, he wrote in 1905 that he hoped to "put on their guard those who still have ears to hear and eyes to see [and warned| events are precipitated in the world at a terrifying peril: quarrels, wars, rumors, famines, epidemics, earthquakes- everything which even yesterday was impossible, today is an accomplished fact... Secular quarrels and schisms [must] all be forgotten in the imminent need of preparing against the coming of the Antichrist."

Despite their dubious origin, the Protocols were taken seriously by many powerful people, including Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, and American industrialist Henry Ford, who used them to help persuade the U.S. Senate not to join President Wilson’s League of Nations.

The Ochrana’s plan worked a bit too well. A counterrevolution took place and pogroms against Russian Jews were instituted by vigilantes called "The Black Guard," incensed by the Czarist propaganda. Continuing instability and violence finally resulted in the 1905 Russian Revolution, during which the Protocols again were trotted out by pro-czarist elements to inflame the public.

Hitler saw the Protocols as a real proclamation despite the evidence of fabrication. In Mein Kampf he wrote,

"They are supposed to be a ’forgery’ the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and cries out to the world once a week; the best proof that they are genuine after all... But the best criticism applied to them is reality. He who examines the historical development of the past hundred years, from the points of view of this book [the Protocols], will also immediately understand the clamor of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of a people, the Jewish danger is bound to be considered as broken."

Author Konrad Heiden, an anti-Nazi contemporary of Hitler, while denying the authenticity of the Protocols, also saw a certain reality there.

"Today the forgery is incontrovertibly proved, yet something infinitely significant has remained: a textbook of world domination... the great principle of inequality fights to preserve its rule; the ruling class philosophy of a natural hierarchy, of innate differences between men. Once this principle is expressed in the form of historical events, it also soon assumes the aspect of conspiracy.... The spirit of the Protocols, therefore, contains historical truth, though all the facts put forward in them are forgeries."

It is the possibility of "historical truth" which has kept the Protocols in circulation since its inception. Today, modern conspiracy writers see it as a real program predating Nazism or Communism. Some claim Joly simply incorporated in his book concepts he picked up as a secret society member. Author David Icke saw a "remarkable resemblance" between the Protocols and confiscated secret documents of the mysterious Bavarian Illuminati of the late eighteenth century. "I call them the Illuminati Protocols," wrote Icke, with some justification considering the numerous Masonic references in them.

The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail had an even more intriguing take on the Protocols. They noted that the original Nilus edition contained references to a king as well as a "Masonic kingdom," concepts clearly not of Jewish origin. Furthermore, it concluded with the statement, "Signed by the representatives of Sion of the 33rd degree."

These authors argued that Nilus produced a "radically altered text" based on a legitimate original created by "some Masonic organization or Masonically oriented secret society that incorporated the word ’Sion’" and that it may indeed have been a serious blueprint for infiltrating Freemasonry and gaining global domination. They identified one secret society as a prime suspect — the mysterious Priory of Sion of which more will be said later.

The Protocols may indeed reflect a deeper conspiracy beyond its intended use to encourage anti-Semitism, one hidden within the secret upper ranks of the Illuminati and Freemasonry.

In the summer of 1917 a young Estonian Jew named Alfred Rosenberg was a student in Moscow where he was given a copy of the Protocols by a stranger. Following the Russian Revolution the following year, the anti-Bolshevik Rosenberg fled to Germany where he used the book to gain entry to a secret society in Munich, a move which was to have far-reaching effects for the world.

In late 1918 Rosenberg presented the Protocols to an aging Munich newspaper publisher named Dietrich Eckart. A boozing bon vivant and one of Germany’s better known poets at the time, Eckart was enthralled by this plan for world domination. He introduced Rosenberg to fellow members of the Thule Gesellschaft or Thule Society, a "literary discussion" group founded by a Baron Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff. The society proved to be merely a front for a more secret society, the Germanenorden or German Order. Both were anti-Semitic nationalist organizations laced with beliefs in the supernatural. Eckart claimed to be a "Christian mystic" who, according to an article written by Rosenberg after Eckart’s death, was knowledgeable of the ancient Indian lore of Cosmic Consciousness (Atman) and the idea that reality is actually an illusion (Maya).

Sebottendorff, Eckart, and others within the Thule Society were greatly influenced by the beliefs of the most prominent twentieth century occult group—the Theosophical Society.

THEOSOPHISTS, THULISTS, AND OTHER CULTISTS

The term Theosophy is derived from the Greek words theos (god) and sophia (wisdom) and has been interpreted as meaning "divine wisdom."

Theosophy came into usage in 1875 when a Russian-born mystic named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York City. Blavatsky had immigrated to America in 1873 after many years of travel and research in Europe and the Middle East.

Between 1877 and 1888 Blavatsky published occult material including her two most famous books, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Both were intended to present a quasi-scientific underpinning for religion, then in decline due to scientific discoveries and the theories of Charles Darwin.

In 1878 Blavatsky, along with her ardent follower U.S. Army Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, moved the society’s headquarters to Madras, India, where it remains today. Theosophical societies spread throughout the East and into Europe and America, bringing significant attention to Eastern philosophies. This promotion of Buddhism and Hinduism greatly affected several religious-oriented movements including "I Am," the liberal Catholic church, Rosicrucians, the Unity church and, more recently, various "New Age" groups.

Theosophy drew its thinking from the same early philosophers venerated by the secret societies of Freemasonry, the Illuminati and the Round Tables—Plato and Pythagoras as well as the Egyptian Mystery schools. According to author Nesta Webster, it was evident that Blavatsky also drew heavily from the Hebrew Cabala and Talmud, cementing the connection with the Ancient Mysteries.

Writing in 1924, Webster warned,

"The Theosophical Society is not a study group, but essentially a propagandist society which aims at substituting for the pure and simple teaching of Christianity the amazing compound of Eastern superstition, Cabalism and 18th century charlatanism..."

Blavarsky’s society taught the belief in one creator, that there was an underlying universe including all humans, Hint secret meanings are found in all religions, and, most controversial, that "Great Masters" or "Adepts," sometimes called the "Great White Brotherhood," are secretly directing the evolution of humankind.

Blavatsky, in forming the German branch of the Theosophical Society in 1884, brought her belief in channeling, reincarnation, racial superiority, and extraterrestrial visitation to people who later would form the theological basis of Nazism.

"German occultists like Lanz von Liebenfels, Guide von List and Rudolf von Sebottendorff borrowed heavily from [Blavatsky]. They sought to show that the ancient Germans had been keepers of a secret science— which had originated in Eden/Atlantis," wrote author William Henry.

"The rationale behind many later Nazi projects can be traced back... to ideas first popularized by Blavatsky," agreed Levenda, who detailed connections with other European secret organizations. "We have the Theosophical Society, the OTO [Ordo Templi Orientis or Oriental Templars], [Dr. Rudolf Steiner’s] Anthroposophical Society and [the Order of] the Golden Dawn all intertwined in incestuous embrace."

Following World War I, the occult societies began to merge with political activism, particularly in southern Germany.

Munich was flooded with anticommunist Russian refugees and Dietrich Eckart was delighted to find in the Protocols what he saw as the final proof of the long-theorized Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik world conspiracy. He saw to its immediate publication, and the book swiftly spread throughout Germany and Europe and even to America.

"The story of the circulation of The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion would seem to indicate the existence of an international network of secret connections and co-operating forces... described clearly enough in the Protocols themselves," commented author Heiden.

The Protocols was especially well received in Germany, where a distraught and impoverished population was asking why they had been defeated in the war. With no blacks, Hispanics, or Asians at hand, the lot of the scapegoat fell to the Eastern European Jews. The circulation of the Protocols ignited long-smoldering anti-Semitism into a red-hot bonfire of hatred and division.

Political factions fought throughout the nation, with the newly arrived communist philosophy gaining great inroads in ë disillusioned public unaccustomed to self-rule.

To counter this communist threat and the spreading chaos, more than two dozen right-wing nationalist organizations sprang up in Munich alone. Among them was the Thule Society, named after the mythic German homeland of icebound Ultima Thule. The logo of the society was a swastika superimposed over a sword.

Thule, in the minds of German occultists, was a Teutonic Atlantis, a mystical prehistoric island in northern climes believed to be the home of a long-vanished civilization of extraterrestrials who lost awareness of their origins by interbreeding with humans. Eckart, Sebottendorff, and their followers believed that the advanced science of Thule had survived through the centuries, handed down by select initiates into this secret and esoteric wisdom. Thulists were continually seeking this wisdom through rituals designed to contact superior beings.

"The inner core within the Thule Group were all Satanists who practiced Black Magic," wrote Trevor Ravenscroft.

"That is to say, they were solely concerned with raising their consciousness by means of rituals to an awareness of evil and non-human Intelligences in the Universe and with achieving a means of communication with the Intelligences. And the Master-Adept of this circle was Dietrich Eckart."

It is well known that in Munich during those turbulent postwar years, there were several hundred unsolved "political" murders and kidnappings.

"And it was from among these missing persons, most of whom were either Jews or Communists, that we must look to find the ’sacrificial victims’ who were murdered in the rites of ’Astrological Magic’ carried out by Dietrich Eckart and the innermost circle of the Thule Gesellschaft," charged Ravenscroft, who claimed it was a "well-known fact" that the Thulists were a "Society of Assassins."

Assassins or not, it is true that on April 7, 1919, when communist revolutionaries held Munich for a short period proclaiming a Bavarian Soviet Republic, the only people they rounded up and executed as dangerous subversives were Thule Society members, including its young secretary and Prince von Thurn und Taxis. By May 3 army veterans comprising the Frei Korps (Free Corps), with their helmets festooned with the swastika of the Thule Society, rid Munich of the Bolsheviks. It was the last serious threat to Germany by Communism until after World War II.

The monarchists and industrialists of the Thule knew they had to win the support of ilu- rank .uul I’ilc worker to defeat the socialist-laden labor unions. To this end they adopted a two-pronged strategy. While Munich’s business, military, and intellectual leaders plotted at Thule Society meetings in the Four Seasons Hotel, a second, blue-collar, organization was formed—the German Workers Party run by sportswriter Karl Harrer and railroad machinist Anton Drexler. According to Time-Life editors, "The [Thule] society had contacted Drexler because it hoped to foment a workers’ revolution but knew nothing about workers."

The party was created in January 1919 by merging Drexler’s Committee of Independent Workmen with the Harrer-led Political Workers Circle. The Circle had been founded by the Theosophist Sebottendorff, who was also instrumental in creating the secret Germanenorden.

The Germanenorden was an order patterned after the Freemasons, but decidedly anti-Mason and anti-Jewish, with intricate initiations and ceremonies extolling the glories of German mythology and the medieval Teutonic Knights, who were formed through the Knights Templar.

Noted Hitler biographer John Toland described Sebottendorff only as a "man of mystery" and a devotee of Plato. As it turned out, Sebottendorff was actually born Rudolf Glauer, the son of a Dresden railroad engineer. The Count said he had been legally adopted by a Count Heinrich von Sebottendorff and had the right to claim the inherited title. Eckart and others declined to expose his true identity for fear of discrediting their cause.

Widely perceived as subversive, Sebottendorff’s Germanenorden contrived the Thule Society as a cover organization.

"The original conception of the modern Thulists was extremely crude and nai’ve," wrote Ravenscroft.

"The more sophisticated versions of the legend of Thule only gradually developed in the hands of Dietrich Eckart and General Karl Haushofer, and were later refined and extended under the direction of Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who terrorized a large section of the German academic world into lending a professional hand at perpetuating the myth of German racial superiority."

According to William Bramley, Haushofer was a member of the "Vril," another secret society based on a book by British Rosicrucian Lord Bulward Litton about the visit of an Aryan "super race" to Earth in the distant past. Haushofer was a mentor to both Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess. Himmler was another notable member of the Vril. Haushofer had traveled extensively in the Far Fast before becoming a general in the Kaiser’s army.
"His early associations with influential Japanese businessmen and statesmen were crucial in forming the German-Japanese alliance of World War II," wrote Levenda.

"He was also the first high-ranking Nazi to form important relationships with South American governments in anticipation of military and political action against the United States, relationships that would eventually be exploited by war criminals—and Nazi cultists—fleeing the reach of the Nuremberg prosecutors."

Haushofer, as a professor at the University of Munich, worked out Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum, "living space" for a hemmed-in Germany.

Backed by the violent thugs of Army Captain Ernst Roehm’s Brown-shirts and incited by anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik diatribes, the fledgling German Workers Party joined the growing opposition to the unstable Weimer government.

Eckart, who carried dual membership in both the fledgling party and the Thule Society, realized the German Workers Party needed a leader.

"We need a fellow at the head who can stand the sound of a machine gun. The rabble need to get fear into their pants. We can’t use an officer because the people don’t respect them anymore. The best would be a worker who knows how to talk... He doesn’t need much brains. He must be a bachelor, then we’ll get the women," he told members during a meeting in 1919.

THE LEADER ARRIVES

Eckart found his leader in the form of an Army intelligence agent sent to infiltrate the Party—a failed Austrian-born painter named Adolf Hitler, once described as a "child of Illuminism."

It has been well documented how Hitler shared Eckart’s interest in the supernatural and occult. As a child in Austria, he thrived on heroic folk tales of the Germanic Teutonic Knights.

As a destitute artist in Vienna before World War I, Hitler haunted libraries and old bookstores filling his mind with esoteric lore and anti-Jewish propaganda. An admirer of Hegel and his philosophies, he also studied ancient history, Eastern religions, Yoga, occultism, hypnotism, Theosophy, and astrology.

According to Ravenscroft, he even sought enlightenment -1460s style by ingesting hallucinogenic drugs.

"It was in the small back office of the bookshop in the old quarter of the city that Ernst Pretzsche [the shop owner] unveiled for Hitler the secrets hidden behind the astrological and alchemical symbolism of the search for the Grail," he wrote.

"It was here too that the sinister hunchback handed to his monstrous pupil the drug which evoked the clairvoyant vision of the Aztecs, the magic Peyotl [Peyote] venerated like a deity."

Ravenscroft, a former British commando officer, reported that while in Vienna Hitler became obsessed with the so-called "Spear of Destiny," reportedly the spear of a Roman soldier named Gaius Cassius who became known as Longinus. By legend, Longinus used the spear to pierce the side of Jesus on the cross, not as punishment, but to mercifully shorten his agony. What claims to be the same spear is still exhibited in the Hofburg Museum in Vienna.

It was here, according to Ravenscroft, that young Hitler learned of the legend that whoever possesses the Heilige Lance, or Holy Spear, controls the destiny of the world. In his book The Spear of Destiny, Ravenscroft weaves a rich tapestry of Germanic history and folklore, tying Hitler and the spear to a detailed background of magic, occultism, and secret societies.

Ravenscroft attributed his knowledge of both the spear and Hitler to his mentor, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, a Viennese scientist and philosopher who knew Hitler but later fled to England. Stein told how Hitler entered a trance while "channeling" a nonhuman entity in proximity to the spear.

"Hitler’s soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him," Stein explained to Ravenscroft.

This trancelike channeling was noted by an audience member during one of Hitler’s speeches:

"He just spoke and spoke, like a record running in a groove, for an hour and a half until he became absolutely exhausted... and when he was finished and breathless, he just sat down once more a simple and nice man... It was just as if he switched into another gear. And there was no in-between."

Hitler himself alluded to metaphysical control. He mentioned to several associates that an "inner voice" guided him and once remarked, "I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker."

Also during his time in Vienna, Hitler met Jorg Lanz von Licbentels, publisher of Ostara a magazine with occult and erotik themes. A Cistercian monk who founded the anti-Semitic, secret Order of the New Templars, Liebenfels and his mentor, Guido von List, sought to revive the medieval brotherhood of Teutonic Knights, which had used the swastika as an emblem.

List was a respected author on pan-German mysticism until he was chased out of Vienna following disclosures that his secret brotherhood involved sexual perversions and "medieval black magic." It was the philosophies of Liebenfels and List, extolling the glories of pagan occultism and the superiority of the Aryan race, that provided the foundation of the Thule Society.

"The names List and Liebenfels soon became synonymous with the Pan-Germanic volkisch movement that eventually gave birth to the Nazi Party," reported author Levenda.

Whatever Hitler learned in Vienna changed him drastically. Previously a devout Catholic choirboy who had considered becoming a priest, he became openly antireligious and has even been accused of dabbling in Satanism. Author Epperson offered these connections,

"So the swastika was a symbol of the Thule Society; it was a symbol of the Nazi Party; it was somehow connected to a symbol of the Sun-god; and the Sun-god was a symbol of Lucifer."

Lending support to the accusation of Satan worship, as well as reflecting Hitler’s fascination with the supernatural, is a poem he wrote in 1915 while serving in the German army on the Western Front. It was reproduced in Adolf Hitler by John Toland:

I often go on bitter nights

To Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade

With dark powers to weave a union—

The runic letter the moon makes with its magic spell

And all who are full of impudence during the day

Are made small by the magic formula!

Hitler’s connection with the supernatural became more personal after being blinded by mustard gas during a British attack on the night of October 13-14, 1918.

Sent to a hospital in Pasewalk, Pomerania, Hitler’s eyesight was improving when he learned of Germany’s defeat and the signing of the armistice from a visiting pastor.

As he languished in pain and despair, Hitler experienced a supernatural vision.

"Like St. Joan, he heard voices summoning him to save Germany," Toland wrote. "All at once ’a miracle came to pass’—the darkness encompassing Hitler evaporated. He could see again! He solemnly vowed, as promised, that he would ’become a politician and devote his energies to carrying out the command he had received.’"

Peter Levenda saw Hitler’s experience as a,

"kind of mystical enlightenment, like that experienced by Guido von List many years before during his own temporary blindness—or like that of Saul, blinded on the way to Damascus—for, from that point on, Adolf Hitler was changed."

Arriving in Munich after the war, Corporal Hitler was assigned the menial job of guarding prisoners until the communist takeover in the spring of 1919. When the Reichswehr evacuated, Hitler remained behind to spy on the revolutionaries. Later, when the Army and the Freikorps retook Munich, it was Hitler who calmly walked down the ranks of communist captives singling out the ringleaders for execution.

As a reward for this undercover work, Hitler was assigned to the Press and News Bureau of the Political Department of the German army, a thinly disguised army intelligence operation. By the fall of 1919 he was assigned to spy on the various revolutionary groups springing up on the tumultuous Bavarian political scene. Hitler’s commander, Captain Karl Mayr recalled that Hitler resembled "a tired stray dog looking for a master ... ready to throw in his lot with anyone who would show him kindness" and "totally unconcerned about the German people and their destinies."

Hitler recalled,

"One day I received orders from my headquarters to find out what was behind an apparently political society which, under the name of ’German Workers Party,’ intended to hold a meeting... I was to go there and look at the society and to report upon it."

Arriving at the Sterneckerbrau beer hall, he was not overly impressed. "I met there about 20 to 25 people, chiefly from among the lower walks of life," wrote Hitler. The young military agent "astonished" the small gathering by arguing against a proposal that Bavaria break ties with Prussia.

To his surprise, a few days later a postcard arrived at his barracks informing Hitler that he had been accepted as a member of the GWP.

"I did not know whether to be annoyed or to laugh at it," he wrote. "I had no intention of joining a ready-made party, but wished to found a party of my own."

Nevertheless, on orders from his superiors, Hitler returned. One of Hitler's German Workers Party members was Eckart, often referred to as the spiritual founder of National Socialism. Eckart saw in Hitler the malleable leader he had been seeking and was soon introducing the new member to the right social circles in Munich and his intellectual friends in the Thule Society.

Although Eckart’s role in metaphysical practices as well as in the foundation of the Nazi Party has been marginalized by most historians, it is significant that Hitler clearly understood Eckart’s importance. He ended his infamous book Mein Kampf with these words,

"And I want also to reckon among [Nazi heroes] that man, who, as one of the best, by words and by thoughts and finally by deeds, dedicated his life to the awakening of his, of our nation: Dietrich Eckart."

As Eckart lay dying in 1923, he said,

"Follow Hitler! He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune. I have initiated him into the ’Secret Doctrine,’ opened his centers in vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other German."

The "Secret Doctrine" imparted to Hitler by Eckart and University of Munich Professor Haushofer was an amalgamation of concepts and philosophies largely stemming from the work of Madam Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society.

Blending Eastern mysticism, occultism, and hidden history, the doctrine concerns the effort to understand man’s origins. According to Ravenscroft,

"When the Third Eye [believed by many to be the pineal gland between the eyes] had been opened to a full vision of the Akashic Record [the mystical hidden record of mankind], the initiate [of the Secret Doctrine] became a living witness of the whole evolution of the world and of humanity. Traveling back through tremendous vistas of time, the very spirit origin of the earth and of man was unveiled to him, and he was able to follow the unfolding destiny of mankind through ever-changing conditions of life and cycles of development."

In this doctrine, nonhuman visitors to Earth long ago produced by genetic manipulation "divine-human hybrid beings, sort of God-men" divided into seven subraces—the Rmoahals, Tlavatli, Toltecs, Turanians, Aryans, Akkadians, and Mongols. During this process there were many mistakes, resulting in mutations such as the "giants" of biblical and Nordic mythology. These races lived through progressive life cycles during the time of fabled Atlantis.

With the destruction of Atlantis, they were scatered around the world and their mental and physical attributes began to degenerate. Their life spans decreased significantly. While their thought processes in the material world sharpened, "these faculties of thought and sense perception were gained at the price of a total loss of all magical powers over nature and over the life forces in the human organism," wrote Ravenscroft. With this loss of intuitive powers, these early humans were taught by their creators that everything on Earth was directed by invisible "gods" and that they should serve these "gods" unreservedly. "Above all, they were taught to respect and protect the purity of their blood," he added.

Hitler echoed these concepts in Mein Kampf, writing,

"Aryan tribes... subjugate foreign peoples, and... develop the mental and organizatory [sic] abilities slumbering in them. Often, in the course of a few millenniums or even centuries, they create cultures which . . . bear the inner features of their character... Finally, however, the conquerors deviate from the purity of their blood which they maintained originally, they begin to mix with the subjugated inhabitants and thus they end their own existence; for the fall of man in Paradise has always been followed by expulsion from it."

At this point, it is not necessary to decide whether or not to take any of this seriously. It is enough to understand that many educated and thoughtful people at that time did take such concepts seriously. And, as in the case of Hitler, these ideas caused serious repercussions for millions.

It is interesting to note that the term "Aryan" (a Sanskrit word meaning noble) until the time of Hitler usually referred merely to people using Indo-European languages rather than any race. However, in both scholarly and occult studies the term is also connected to an Indo-European-speaking people traceable to prehistoric times. These people were of unknown origins, but due to common language characteristics many scholars believe they came from northern Europe. One branch of these Aryans was located in present-day Iraq and is connected to ancient stories of gods who came from the sky.

A second branch entered India and intermingled with the existing population. They are mentioned in the Hindu Vedas, also in connection with gods who flew in flying machines called vimanas. It all begins to sound eerily similar to the Theosophist belief in extraterrestrial visitors. Supported both by funds from Captain Mayr’s army intelligence unit and the dedicated anticommunists of the Thule through Ecknrt, Hitlerr quickly gained control of the Germans Workers Party, which soon claimed three thousand members. Levenda reported that Mayr was reporting to wealthy industrialists and military officers operating out of the Four Seasons Hotel, indicating a connection between Army Intelligence and the Thule Society.

In April 1920 Hitler changed the party’s name to the Nationalsoztalistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the National Socialist German Workers Party, abbreviated to Nazi. Later that year, the party purchased a newspaper, the Voelkischer Beobachter (Racial Observer) with secret army funds and placed Eckart in charge. "At the beginning of 1923 the Voelkischer Beobachter became a daily, thus giving Hitler the prerequisite of all German political parties, a daily newspaper in which to preach the party’s gospels," wrote William Shirer. From that point on, the Nazi machine rolled inexorably forward.

It is apparent that the Nazis could never have existed without the aid and support of the German Reichswehr and the secret Thule Society.

A study of the Twenty-five Points formulated in 1920 by Hitler, Drexler, and Eckart as the basis of the Nazi Party, reveals many which are nearly identical with the stated ideals of Marxism, indicating a common origin. Also addressed are reforms in the areas of international banking and business, particularly denouncing "interest slavery."

HITLER’S SUPPORT GROUP

Despite his clear intentions to nationalize and curtail the power of international business and finance, Hitler had little trouble getting funds from corporate sponsors who saw National Socialism as a welcome alternative to Communism.

It was, in fact, wealthy businessmen in Western industrial and banking circles who guaranteed Hitler’s success. After Hitler lost a popular election to the aging war hero Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg in 1932, thirty-nine business leaders, with familiar names like Krupp, Siemens, Thyssen, and Bosch, signed a petition to Hindenburg urging that Hitler be appointed chancellor of Germany.

This deal bringing Hitler into the government was cut at the home of banker Baron Kurt von Schroeder on January 4, 1933. According to Mullins, also attending this meeting were John Foster and Allen Dulles of the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented the Schroeder bank. The next year, when Rosenberg represented Hitler in England, he met with Schroeder Bank of London managing director Ò. Ñ. Tiarks, who also was a director of the Bank of England. Throughout World War II, the Schroeder bank acted as financial agents for Germany in both Britain and the United States.

Schroeder, the powerful head of the J. H. Stein & Company banking house of Cologne, had long provided financial support to the Nazis in hopes they would counteract the spread of Communism. Hitler had pledged his word to von Schroeder that "National Socialism would engage in no foolish economic experiments." In other words, he would not attack banking practices except in rhetoric.

With this assurance and with Schroeder’s blessing, Hitler was named chancellor of Germany by the senile President Hindenburg on January 30, 1933. A week later, the Reichstag (Parliament) building burned in a fire blamed on the communists. In another few days, Hitler was given dictatorial power with the passage of an emergency decree called the Enabling Act, euphemistically titled "The Law to Remove the Distress of the People and State" and began to assume control of the government.

Army and senior officials were becoming alarmed over Hitler’s power, especially with some three million Sturmabteilung (SA) or Storm Detachment Brownshirts under the command of Hitler’s SA chief Ernst Roehm. The Army proposed a deal: If the power of the SA was broken, the military would pledge loyalty to Hitler. Hitler agreed, and on June 30, 1934, trumped up charges of plotting a revolution caused Roehm and hundreds of Brownshirts to be fatally purged, and the SA quietly faded away.

With the death of the eighty-seven-year-old Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, Hitler merged the offices of president and chancellor and proclaimed himself commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the absolute leader—Fuhrer—of all Germany.

With both the government and military now firmly in hand, Hitler knew it was time to make deals with the international bankers and industrialists. This proved an easy task considering their multinational nature. In the 1930s many people in both Britain and America viewed Nazi ideology favorably. In 1934 there was even a failed attempt by Morgan and DuPont agents to bring about a fascist dictatorship in the United States, as detailed in my book Alien Agenda.

Automobile maker Henry Ford became a guiding light to Hitler, especially in the realm of anti-Semitism. In 1920 Ford had published an anti-Jewish book entitled The International Jew. As Hitler worked on his book Mein Kampf in 1924, he copied liberal portions of Ford’s writing and even referred to Ford as "one great man."

Ford became an admirer of Hitler, provided funds for the Nazis, and in 1938 became the first American to receive the highest Nazi honor possible for a non-German—the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle.

Like Hitler, Ford’s suspicions initially were centered on international financiers. "At first he talked only about ’the big fellows’ and said he had nothing against Jews in ordinary walks of life," recalled Edwin Pipp, editor of Ford’s anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. "Later he stated, ’They are all pretty much alike.’. . . He said that he believed they were in a conspiracy to bring on war for profits."

Ford said he learned this in 1915, when he chartered a ship to Europe in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate an end to the war there. Later, he said that Jewish passengers on board had told him that it was international Jewish bankers who arranged wars for profit and that his peace effort would be in vain unless he contacted certain Jews in France and England, undoubtedly referring to the Rothschilds.

Hitler too initially kept his verbal attacks confined to international bankers, particularly the Rothschilds. In speeches during the early 1920s, Hitler praised German industrialists such as Alfred Krupp, while condemning "the rapacity of a Rothschild, who financed wars and revolutions and brought the peoples into interest-servitude through loans."

Despite these attacks, the emerging Nazi power continued to find support in Britain, even within the Rothschild-dominated Bank of England.

"On New Year’s Day, 1924, the financial fate of Germany was settled in London at a meeting between Hjalmar Schacht, the new Reich Commissioner for National Currency, and Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England," noted John Toland. "Schacht, who had already abolished emergency money, began with a frank disclosure of Germany’s desperate financial situation."

He then proposed to open a German credit bank second to the Reichsbank, but one which would issue notes in pound sterling. Schacht asked Norman to provide half the capital for this new bank and declared,

"What prospects such a measure would afford for economic collaboration between Great Britain’s World Empire and Germany . . .

"Within 48 hours Norman not only formally approved the loan at the exceptionally low interest of a flat five percent but convinced a group of London bankers to accept bills far exceeding the loan."

William Bramley noted these international banking connections: Max Warburg, a major German banker, and his brother Paul Warburg, who had been instrumental in establishing the Federal Reserve System in the United States, were directors of Interssen Gemeinschaft Farben or I.G. Farben, the giant German chemical firm that produced Zyklon  gas used in Nazi extermination camps. H. A. Metz of I.G. Farben was a director of the Warburg Bank of Manhattan, which later became part of the Rockefeller Chase Manhattan Bank.

Standard Oil of New Jersey had been a cartel partner with I.G. Farben prior to the war. One American I.G. Farben director was C. E. Mitchell, who was also director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and of Warburg’s National City Bank. The president of I.G. Farben in Germany, Hermann Schmitz, served on the boards of the Deutsche Bank and the Bank for International Settlements. In 1929 Schmitz was voted president of the board of National City Bank, now Citibank.

Paul Manning, a CBS news correspondent in Europe during World War II, wrote that Schmitz once "held as much stock in Standard Oil of New Jersey as did the Rockefellers." Schmitz also controlled eleven I.G. Farben companies in Japan. After the war, twenty-four I.G. Farben executives would stand trial at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity, including the building and maintenance of concentration camps and the use of slave labor.

I.G. Farben’s American subsidiary, American I.G. Chemical Corporation, proved an ongoing source of important intelligence to the Nazis throughout the war as noted by German economic minister Dr. Max Ilgner. He wrote,

"Extensive information which we receive continuously from [Chemical Corporation] is indispensable for our observations of American conditions . . . [and] is, since the beginning of the war, an important source of information for governmental, economic and military offices."

Financing the rearmament of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty proved as profitable as it was dangerous to European peace.

Another American supporter of Hitler was Joseph P. Kennedy, father of the future president. On May 3, 1941, President Roosevelt was advised by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that,

"Joseph P. Kennedy, the Cornier ambassador to England, and Ben Smith, the Wall Street operator, some time in the past had a meeting with [Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann] Goering in Vichy, France, and that thereafter Kennedy and Smith had donated a considerable amount of money to the German cause. They are both described as being very anti-British and pro-German."

And support for Hitler continued to grow in Britain. According to Howard S. Katz,

"In the spring of 1934, a select group of city financiers gathered around Montagu Norman . . . [head of] the Bank of England... Hitler had disappointed his critics. His regime was no temporary nightmare, but a system with a good future, and Mr. Norman advised his directors to include Hitler in their plans. There was no opposition and it was decided that Hitler should get covert help from London’s financial section until Mr. Norman had succeeded in putting sufficient pressure on the Government to make it abandon its pro-French policy for a more promising pro-German orientation."

Considerable financial aid also came from Sir Henri Deterding, the powerful head of Royal Dutch-Shell Oil, who lived in London. His motives stemmed from his hope that Hitler, who had made it clear in Mein Kampf that he intended to subjugate Russia, might regain Deterding’s assets in the Baku, Grozny, and Maikop oil fields.

Why would these powerful businessmen, all with financial links to the great Rothschild empire, support the overtly anti-Jewish Hitler? Part of the answer may lie in an astounding assertion that Hitler was a blood relative to the Rothschilds!

Dr. Walter C. Langer, a psychologist who produced a wartime psychoanalysis of Hitler for the American OSS, reported that a secret prewar Austrian police report proved Hitler’s father was the illegitimate son of a peasant cook named Maria Anna Schicklgruber, who at the time she conceived her child was "employed as a servant in the home of Baron Rothschild" in Vienna. Upon learning of her pregnancy in 1837, she left Vienna and gave birth to Hitler’s father of record, Alois. Five years later, she reportedly married an itinerant miller named Johann Georg Hiedler. Yet Alois carried his mother’s name of Schicklgruber until nearly forty years of age when Heidler’s brother, Johann Nepo-nuik Hiedler, offered him legitimacy. Due to the illegible writing of a parish priest in changing the birth register, the name Hiedler became Hitler, either by mistake or to confuse authorities.

Alois Miller led a sail and morose life, chiefly as a government bureaucrat, and married his own second cousin, Klara Poelzl, in 1885, after obtaining special Episcopal dispensation. Adolf was born in Brau-nau, Austria, in 1889, when Alois was fifty-two years old.

This incredible story might be written off as fanciful wartime propaganda except for the fact that the OSS never made this story public, indicating the tale may have been considered too sensitive to publicize. The issue came up in the late 1930s, when Hitler’s English nephew, William Patrick Hitler, hinted to newsmen about the German leader’s Jewish background. Hitler’s personal attorney Hans Frank confirmed this scandalous information, but the name Frankenberger was substituted for Rothschild. When no record of a Frankenberger could be found in Vienna, the matter was quietly dropped by all but Hitler. Historians have long noted that the question of possible Jewish ancestry haunted Hitler throughout his life.

In case someone might question if a Rothschild would consider dallying with the servants, it is instructive that Rothschild biographer Ferguson stated that the son of one of Salomon’s senior clerks "recalled that by the 1840s, [the Viennese Rothschild] had developed a somewhat reckless enthusiasm for young girls."

The late Philippe Rothschild, a descendent of Nathan, in 1984 published memoirs revealing his "scandalous love life." He wrote, "I was a tremendous success... leaping from bed to bed like a mountain goat... I was always convinced [my father] had won his spurs riding my grandmother’s chambermaids."

"It is possible that Hitler discovered his Jewish background and his relation to the Rothschilds, and aware of their enormous power to make or break European governments, reestablished contact with the family," wrote author Epperson.

"This would partially explain the enormous support he received from the international banking fraternity, closely entwined with the Rothschild family, as he rose to power."

It is obvious why neither Hitler or his followers nor today’s neo-Nazis nor the Rothschilds nor those who desire to profit from their international power would want the Hitler-Rothschild connection made public.

It certainly appears that with all their wealth and power, the Rothschilds suffered little during Hitler’s holocaust. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica tactfully stated,

"The Rothschilds, particularly those of Vienna and Paris during the Nazi period, preserved the kind of family unity necessary to weather great misfortunes."

According to biographer Derek Wilson, various family members had narrow and traumatic escapes from Europe following German victories in 1940, but the fact remains that most safely gathered in New York City.

Far from being the destitute refugees as sometimes portrayed, some Rothschilds played crucial roles in the war effort. In May 1940 it was the French Maurice de Rothschild who arranged a secret meeting in Paris’s Ritz Hotel between French prime minister Paul Reynaud, his minister of war Georges Mandel (whose real name was Rothschild though the claim is that there was no relation to the banking family), and Britain’s Prime Minister Churchill, along with Anthony Eden, to determine the future of France. Also present was French general Charles de Gaulle, who within a month had organized the French government in exile in London.

Another family member, Lord Victor Rothschild, provided close security to Churchill during the war. He eventually was named to head Britain’s powerful Central Bankers Policy Review Staff. "Lord Rothschild had access to all manner of leaders and experts," noted Wilson. "He was responsible only to the Prime Minister and answerable to neither the electorate nor the civil service chiefs."

One exception may have been a Robert Rothschild, who during World War II refused to sell his French holdings to Alfried Krupp, grandson of the great German armaments magnate Alfred Krupp. According to The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, the irate Krupp had Rothschild sent to the infamous death camp Auschwitz, where he was gassed. This incident, along with his exploitation of slave labor, landed grandson Krupp in front of the Nuremberg War Crimes judges.

With or without Rothschild influence, there is no question that Hitler’s rise to power rested heavily on the support of the major German banks—Schroeder’s Cologne banking firm, the Deutsche Bank, Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, and the huge insurance firm, Allianz.

One Deutsche Bank executive outlined a few of the bank’s wartime loans: 150 million Reichmarks to the aircraft industry; 22 million to Bavarian Motor Works (BMW); 10 million to Daimler-Benz (Mercedes) in 1943 alone. Similar amounts were loaned again in 1944.

HITLER’S FORTUNE TURNS

At the zenith of his power, two important aspects of Hitler’s position were reversed. Following the strange flight of his lieutenant Rudolf Hess to England, Hitler officially turned against occultism and the international order turned against him.

One of Hitler’s early cronies was Rudolf Hess, who became deputy leader of the Nazi Party. Hess also was deeply involved in metaphysical studies, particularly astrology. He listened avidly to Professor Haushofer’s explanations of the "Secret Doctrine" and was a student of Dr. Rudolf Steiner’s school of anthroposophy, the use of man’s higher consciousness to contact the spirit world. Hess also was an early member of the Thule Society.

On May 10, 1941, after secret but thorough preparations, Hess flew a specially prepared Messerschmitt 110 to England, where he parachuted out over the estate of the Duke of Hamilton. He apparently hoped to discuss a negotiated peace between Britain and Germany.

"Twenty-five years later, in Spandau prison, Hess assured me in all seriousness that the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces," wrote Nazi minister of armaments and war production Albert Speer.

Others thought Hess’s flight was an under-the-table effort by Hitler to end fighting in the West in preparation for his coming attack on Russia.

Whatever the true purpose, nothing came of the flight. Hess was promptly imprisoned in the Tower of London and Hitler denounced him as a lone nut. According to Speer, Hitler blamed the flight on "the corrupting influence of Professor Haushofer." General Walter Schellenberg, head of the Nazi Foreign Intelligence Service who believed that British intelligence agents may have influenced Hess through Haushofer, said Hess astonished him by his belief in,

"old prophecies and visionary revelations.... He would recite whole passages out of books of prophecies, such as Nostradamus and others that I cannot remember, and also referred to old horoscopes concerning his own fate as well as that of his family and of Germany."

Fearful that Hess would reveal plans for his attack on the Soviet Union, Hitler declared him insane and vowed to put an end to "these stargazers." Hitler outlawed the public practice of astrology, palm and tea-leaf reading, and séances, as well as any "Freemasonlodge-like Organizations" to include the Theosophical Society, the Oriental Templars, the Order of the Golden Dawn, and Dr. Steiner’s Anthroposophical Society. Many historians point to this crackdown as proof that Hitler disbelieved in such things.

Author Levenda argued that this was simply a case of cult infighting.

"Occultists in general have no difficulty distancing themselves—with appropriate invective and astral curses—from other occultists with whom they disagree on philosophical grounds; and virtually every ’serious occultist’ . . . has had nothing but disdain for tea leaf readers, palmists and cut-rate astrologers. Thus ... [I] find no contradiction at all in Hitler’s fascination with occultism on the one hand and his order to ban ’popular’ occult practices on the other."

Duplicity in his approach to occultism was nothing new to Hitler. "The Fuehrer himself constantly ridiculed the voelkisch occult groups in his official speeches—while secretly soliciting their advice and counsel away from the prying eyes of both the press and the superstitious Christian public," noted Levenda, who also described in detail, based on captured Nazi documents, several knowledge-gathering expeditions to Tibet by the Ahnenerbe-SS, which in 1940 became a part of Himmler’s staff.

After annexing Danzig, the Sudetenland, and Austria, Hitler had carved up Czechoslovakia by agreement with the French and British at a meeting in Munich. By mid-1939 he was ready to move into Poland, which had mutual defense pacts with the Western powers.

Again, a public pretext for war was needed. After weeks of increasing tension, dead prisoners were dressed in Polish army uniforms and left near a border radio station, which Hitler claimed had been attacked by Poland. In retaliation, on September 1, 1939, a million and a half soldiers of the German Wehrmacht, including fifty-five armored and motorized divisions, rolled into Poland under cover of the largest air armada every mobilized. Arraigned against this new Lightning War or blitzkrieg was a Polish army still containing cavalry units armed with lances.

Britain and France honored their collective security agreements with Poland but were helpless to stop the German onslaught due to both time and distance. Open warfare flared again on April 9, 1940, when Hitler loosed the blitzkrieg on Belgium and Holland. On June 10, with Allied forces falling back in all sectors, Italian dictator Mussolini, his courage bolstered, joined Hitler against France and Britain. France fell in a matter of weeks, leaving a desperate Britain to fight on alone. The balance of power had dangerously shifted, and the international bankers must have begun to rethink their support for Hitler.

JAPAN AGAINST THE WALL

On the other side of the world, matters were coming to a head with the Japanese Empire. Like Britain, this island nation was totally dependent on imports for survival and with the economic depression of the late 1930s, the country was in desperate straits. Fueled by its own rich history of societies involving militant knights (samurai) with a strict code of honor (Bushido), Japan sought its own Lebensraum by attacking Manchuria on mainland China in 1931. During the next few years, Japanese forces took ever larger portions of a China weakened by civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and the communists.

With Britain busy fighting Hitler in 1940, it was clear that the United States was the only power capable of stopping Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Animosity between the two nations intensified when Japan was forced to seize further resources in China due to an ever-tightening American embargo which deprived the home island of vital materials.

In September 1940 Japan became partners with Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact, which pledged mutual assistance should the United States enter the war.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt reacted by halting Japan’s importation of American petroleum, which had provided more than 90 percent of Japan’s needs. On July 2, 1941, Japan entered Indochina, the nearest alternative source of fuel. President Roosevelt retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets in the United States. It was clear at the highest levels that war between Japan and the United States was inevitable.

This fact was not lost on Roosevelt, who had campaigned for a third term in office in 1940 by pledging to keep America out of the European war. However, planning for war was already underway—at least within the secretive Council on Foreign Relations.

Journalist Lucas noted,

"In September, 1939, the Council offered to undertake long-range planning for the hard-pressed State Department. The Department accepted, until live study groups—on Security and Armaments, Economics and Finance, Politics, Territories and Peace Aims— were established. Over the next six years, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, they flooded the State Department with 682 memoranda... By 1942 the Council groups were virtually absorbed into the State Department."

The conclusion of this CFR undertaking—known as the War and Peace Studies Project—was made public in 1940 when a group of CFR members placed newspaper ads declaring that "the United States should immediately declare that a state of war exists between this country and Germany."

"CFR members were interested in exploiting the Second World War—as they had the first—as a justification for world government," asserted Perloff. "The globalists hoped to use the Axis threat to force the U.S. and England into a permanent Atlantic alliance—an intermediate step toward world government."

But throughout 1941, even after Hitler invaded Russia that summer, the American public stubbornly maintained a position of noninterference toward the war. A 1940 Gallup poll showed 83 percent of the public was against intervention. A good pretext was needed to gain support from an intransigent public.

Controversy has raged for years over the question of Roosevelt’s foreknowledge of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. While incontestable proof remains elusive, the accumulation of available information has now caused wide acceptance of the idea that the devastating attack was encouraged and tolerated in an effort to galvanize public support for America’s participation in the war.

It cannot be denied that Roosevelt’s Depression-era social and economic policies greatly centralized the federal government and initiated social engineering which continues to this day, and he was quite open in his allegiance to England. While proclaiming neutrality, Roosevelt sent war ships and ammunition to Britain as proposed by the Century Group composed of CFR members. He ordered the occupation of Iceland, closing it off to the Germans, and authorized attacks on U-boats. He openly approved loans to Japan’s enemy, nationalist China, and quietly approved the recruitment of well-paid American "volunteers" for Chiang Kai-shek’s famous "Flying Tigers." Much of this was in violation of international war rules and was guaranteed to provoke the Axis powers.

"Roosevelt was himself a prototypic Wall Streeter," wrote Perloff. "His family had been involved in New York banking since the eighteenth century. His uncle, Frederic Delano, was on the original Federal Reserve Board."

Roosevelt’s son-in-law, Curtis B. Dall, wrote, "Most of his [Roosevelt’s] thoughts, his political ’ammunition,’ as it were, were carefully manufactured for him in advance by the CFR-One World Money group."

Those who accept the idea that Roosevelt and a few other insiders knew that Pearl Harbor was to be attacked point to these suspicious facts:

*

During Pacific naval exercises in 1932 and 1938, and with Japanese military attaches closely observing, U.S. Navy officers theoretically destroyed the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor both times.
*

Roosevelt ordered the Pacific fleet moved to the exposed position at Pearl Harbor over the vigorous objections of Admiral James O. Richardson, who was replaced for refusing to issue the order.
*

Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and other high-level officials knew that war was inevitable and that negotiations with Japan’s Kichisaburo Nomura were hopeless since the broken Japanese code revealed that Nomura was instructed not to yield to Hull’s harsh demands.
*

They also knew that a large Japanese task force, including six aircraft carriers, had dropped from sight after moving toward America.
*

This prompted U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, a close associate to many CFR members, to send an oddly worded message to Pearl Harbor commanders on November 27, 1941,
o

"Hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot, repeat CANNOT, be avoided, the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act. This policy should not, repeat NOT, be construed as restricting you to a course of action that might jeopardize your defense."

*

Despite this clear warning, with its accompanying suggestion not to attack any attackers, Pacific fleet ships remained at anchor and aircraft were bunched into clusters of "sitting ducks" as "security" against saboteurs. —During the first week of December, Americans intercepted the Japanese diplomatic "Purple" code ordering their embassy in Washington to destroy all secret papers and prepare- to i-vai’iiale.
*

On December 4 Australian intelligence reported sighting the missing Japanese task force moving toward Pearl Harbor but Roosevelt dismissed it as a rumor begun by pro-war Republicans.
*

A British agent named Dusko Popov learned of Japan’s plans from German sources but his warnings to Washington were ignored.
*

According to author John Toland, separate warnings regarding a pending attack on Pearl Harbor, though varying as to a specific time, came from U.S. ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Guy Gillette, Congressman Martin Dies, Brigadier General Elliot Thorpe in Java, and Colonel F. G. L. Weijerman, the Dutch military attache in Washington. Later, Dutch naval officer, Captain Johan Ranneft, said sources in U.S. Intelligence told him on December 6 that the Japanese carriers were only four hundred miles northwest of Hawaii.
*

During investigations after the attack, Marshall and Navy Secretary Frank Knox both testified they could not recall their whereabouts the night of December 6. It was later revealed that they were both in the White House with Roosevelt.

Then there is the issue of the aircraft carriers. In 1941 the American public, as well as a few hidebound military officers, still believed that the battleship was the ultimate weapon. But anyone who had been paying attention knew that General Billy Mitchell had proven in the mid-1920s that a single bomb-loaded airplane could destroy a battleship. Battleships were obsolete. Victory in any Pacific war would go to the side with the strongest air power and that meant aircraft carriers.

Not one aircraft carrier was present when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

On November 25, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson had a conversation with Roosevelt, after which he wrote in his diary,

"The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves... It was desirable to make sure the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors."

The answer to this dilemma came within twenty-four hours. The most damning evidence yet of Roosevelt’s foreknowledge of an attack came from the 1948 interrogation of Germany’s Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller. In a 1995 book by Gregory Douglas based on previously secret files, Mueller stated that on November 26, 1941, the Germans in Holland had intercepted a private trans-Atlantic telephone conversation between Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill.

Churchill informed Roosevelt of the movements of the missing Japanese fleet and stated,

"I can assure you that their goal is the (conversation broken) fleet in Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor."

"This is monstrous," exclaimed Roosevelt. "Can you tell me... indicate ... the nature of your intelligence?"

"Reliable," answered Churchill, who mentioned agents within the Japanese military and foreign service as well as their broken code.

"The obvious implication is that the Japs are going to do a Port Arthur on us at Pearl Harbor. Do you concur?" asked Roosevelt.

Churchill replied, "I do indeed unless they add an attack on the Panama Canal to this vile business."

Port Arthur, today called Pinyun Lu-shun, was a strategic Russian port on China’s Liaodong Peninsula. The Japanese launched a surprise torpedo attack against the port, which began the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War.

Roosevelt then said,

"I will have to consider the entire problem. ... A Japanese attack on us, which would result in war between—and certainly you as well—would certainly fulfill two of the most important requirements of our policy."

Roosevelt speaks about absenting himself from the White House on some pretext, adding,

"What I don’t know, can’t hurt me and I cannot understand messages at a distance."

Addressing the unlikely proposition that U.S. military officers would have knowingly allowed American units to be attacked, author Douglas explained, "The warning did not come to Roosevelt from below but on a parallel level and from a foreign intelligence source which was far better equipped to decode and translate the Japanese transmissions."

WORLD WAR II

Foreknowledge of the December 7 attack gives new meaning to Roosevelt’s words concerning, "a date that will live on in infamy." On that day, the American public was shocked to learn that its forces in Hawaii had suffered 2,400 dead, 1,200 wounded, lour bunk-ships sunk with another three badly damaged, and many other smaller vessels and hundreds of aircraft destroyed.

The next day, Roosevelt addressed Congress, asking for a declaration of war. It was quickly granted with only one dissenting vote—Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman to hold a seat in either house of Congress. Rankin had also been among the forty-nine Congress members who voted against Wilson’s declaration of war in 1917, and in 1968, at age eighty-seven, she led five thousand women of the "Jeannette Rankin Brigade" in a march on Capitol Hill to protest the Vietnam War. Widely despised as a "pacifist," perhaps Rankin understood the hidden machinations behind these wars better than her fellow citizens.

A special commission was appointed by Roosevelt to determine responsibility for the Pearl Harbor attack. It was headed by his friend Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts along with two CFR members on the five-person panel. The Roberts Commission blamed dereliction of duty by Pearl Harbor commanders, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter C. Short, for the tragedy and disbanded.

Incensed, the two officers sought a court martial to clear their names, which was finally mandated by Congress in 1944. During these proceedings, internal investigations by both the army and navy were shown to have fixed blame for the surprise attack on Marshall and other Washington chiefs. Kimmel was exonerated and Short was given a light reprimand. Like the future Warren Commission, the Roberts Commission had operated on a presumption of guilt and had selectively chosen evidence to fit this bias. Furthermore, investigators concluded that if decoded messages had been forwarded to Kimmel in Hawaii, they may have provided "the probable exact hour and date of the attack."

"The court-martial findings were buried in a 40-volume government report on Pearl Harbor and few Americans ever learned the truth," noted Perloff.

With the entire world now ablaze in war and nearly all of Europe under Hitler’s control, the international war financiers finally realized they had produced a Frankenstein monster, a creation out of control. Their loathing of Communism as well as an offensive against the Japanese Empire were placed on a back burner while they mobilized to stop the man who had vowed to eliminate war profiteers, Freemasons, Jews, and international bankers.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Even after more than two dozen nations formed an alliance to combat Hitler and the Japanese militarists, there were some businessmen— most connected with secret societies—who could not resist the temptation to profit from the world’s misery.

A good example was Walter C. Teagle, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, owned by Rockefeller’s Chase Bank. Teagle also was a director of American I.G. Chemical Corp., a subsidiary of the giant I.G. Farben conglomerate.

Author Charles Higham described how Teagle, through Rockefeller banking and oil interests, made his employers a handsome profit just prior to the war.

"[Teagle] remained in partnership with Farben in the matter of tetraethyl lead, an additive used in aviation gasoline," Higham wrote in his book Trading with the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949.

"[German Luftwaffe chief Hermann] Goering’s air force couldn’t fly without it. Only Standard, Du Pont, and General Motors had the rights to it. Teagle helped organize a sale of the precious substance to [Farben chairman] Schmitz, who in 1938 traveled to London and ’borrowed’ 500 tons from Ethyl, the British Standard subsidiary. Next year, Schmitz and his partners returned to London and obtained $15 million worth. The result was that Hitler’s air force was rendered capable of bombing London, the city that had provided the supplies. Also, by supplying Japan with tetraethyl, Teagle helped make it possible for the Japanese to wage World War II."

Curiously, it was this same Walter Teagle who helped created the National Recovery Administration, one of President Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies designed to regulate American business. This was an odd choice if the captains of industry were as opposed to Roosevelt’s social policies as they claimed. Some researchers see such activity as evidence that secret agendas were taking place behind seemingly innocuous scenes.

As war approached, the business and banking connections tightened. In 1936 the Schroeder and Rockefeller families formed Schroeder, Rockefeller and Company which Time magazine described as "the economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis." Partners in this company were John IX Rockefeller’s nephew, Avery, Baron Bruno von Schroeder in London and Kurt von Schroeder in Cologne. Their lawyers were John Fosier and Allen Dulles’s law firm. The younger Dulles along with Edsel Ford served on the firm’s board of directors.

I.G. Farben and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had become so intertwined that in 1942 Thurman Arnold, head of the U.S. Justice Department’s Anti-Trust Division, produced documents for Senator Harry S. Truman’s defense committee showing that,

"Standard and Farben in Germany had literally carved up the world markets, with oil and chemical monopolies established all over the map."

Even after the United States entered the war, this cozy relationship continued. Through complicated business transactions, the Rockefellers continued selling petroleum products to Germany through third-party nations. "While American civilians and the armed services suffered alike from restrictions, more gasoline went to Spain [then transferred to Germany] than it did to domestic customers," wrote author Higham.

Higham called the international cabal of interconnected businessmen and bankers "The Fraternity," linked by,

"the ideology of Business as Usual.... Bound by identical reactionary ideas, the members sought a common future in fascist domination, regardless of which world leader might further that ambition," he explained.

"Thus, the bosses of the multinationals as we know them today had a six-spot on every side of the dice cube. Whichever side won the war, the powers that really ran nations would not be adversely affected.

"When it was clear that Germany was losing the war the businessmen became notably more ’loyal.’ Then, when war was over, the survivors pushed into Germany, protected their assets, restored Nazi friends to high office, helped provoke the Cold War, and insured the permanent future of The Fraternity."

It has been carefully documented how Standard Oil of New Jersey shipped fuel to Germany through Switzerland in 1942; how Chase Bank in occupied Paris conducted business with the full knowledge of its New York headquarters; how Ford trucks were produced for the German army with home office approval; how Colonel Sosthenes Behn, the head of International Telephone and Telegraph Corp. and a director of National City Bank, worked to improve Nazi telephone communications and produce fighter planes along with the V-l buzz bomb.

All this was done legally thanks to President Roosevelt. Only six days after Pearl Harbor, on December 13, 1941, Roosevelt ordered,

"A general license is hereby grained, licensing any transaction or act proscribed by section 3(a) of the Trading with the Enemy Act, as amended, provided... that such transaction or act is authorized by the Secretary of the Treasury... pursuant to the Executive Order No. 8389, as amended."

This meant any kind of business transaction could be made legal with the approval of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, whose father helped found the Council on Foreign Relations. A considerable amount of the funds used to perpetuate the war came through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), owned by the Morgan-affiliated First National Bank of New York, the Bank of England, Germany’s Reichsbank, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of France, and other major central banks.

Created in 1930 in Basel, Switzerland, ostensibly to handle German war reparations, the BIS was actually a creature of secret society manipulators. According to historian Quigley, it was part of a plan,

"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... to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences."

The BIS soon fell under the control of Hitler associates Kurt von Schroeder, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, and vice president Emil Puhl. According to author Higham, the bank became "a money funnel for American and British funds to flow into Hitler’s coffers and to help Hitler build up his war machine." The first president of the BIS was Rockefeller banker Gates W. McGarrah, a former officer with Chase National Bank and the Federal Reserve Bank as well as grandfather to future CIA director Richard Helms. According to several conspiracy writers, the BIS continues to be a hub of drug money laundering and interconnected banking control.

Many of the complex and intertwined financial dealings during the war took place in neutral Switzerland, which by 1939 had 2,278 registered international corporations, 2,026 holding companies whose owners were not Swiss, and was the home of 214 international banks.

The connections between the German and American steel industries were outlined in 1944 by an SS Obergruppenfuehrer who explained to German industrialists and government officials that "patents for stainless steel belonged to the Chemical Foundation, Inc., New York, and the Krupp Company of Germany, jointly, and that of the I Iniu-J States Steel Company, Carnegie, Illinois, American Steel & Wire-, National Tube, etc. were thereby under obligation to work with the Krupp concern. " It had been German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, an early Nazi, who had funded Hitler and introduced him into important business circles.

In a 1942 deal involving Karl Lindemann, Standard Oil’s Berlin representative; SS counterintelligence chief Schellenberg; banker Kurt von Schroeder; and ITT head Behn, Hitler’s government entered into partnership with ITT. Thanks to these interconnected business ties, "After Pearl Harbor, the German army, navy and air force contracted with ITT for the manufacture of switchboards, telephones, alarm gongs, buoys, air raid warning devices, radar equipment and 30 thousand fuses per month for artillery shells used to kill British and American troops," reported Higham. "This was increased to 50 thousand per month by 1944. In addition, ITT supplied ingredients for the rocket bombs that fell on London, selenium cells for dry rectifiers, high-frequency radio equipment and fortification and field communication sets."

General Motors prior to 1939 invested more than $30 million in German I.G. Farben plants although executives were well aware that one-half percent of the total wage and salary payroll was being donated to the Nazis. Furthermore, Germany’s biggest manufacturers of armored fighting vehicles were Opel, a wholly owned General Motors subsidiary controlled by Morgan interests, and the Germany subsidiary of Ford Motor Company. Reuters News Service reported that Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer said that Hitler would never have considered invading Poland without the synthetic fuel technology provided Germany by General Motors.

Thanks to the political and social clout of secret society members on both sides of the Atlantic, Higham said, "The Nuremberg Trials successfully buried the truth of the Fraternity connections."

This "Fraternity" of men tied together by clandestine individual and business intrigues continued after the gunfire ceased. A U.S. Justice Department attorney named James Steward Martin arrived with an investigative team in Germany after the war and tried to sort out the tangled web of business dealings. He was blocked continually and finally resigned in frustration.

In his 1950 book entitled All Honorable Men, Martin wrote,

"We had not been stopped in Germany by German business. We had been stopped in Germany by American business. The forces that stopped us had operated from the United States but had not operated in the open. We were not stopped by a law of Congress, by an Executive Order of the President, or even by a change of policy approved by the President... in short, whatever it was that stopped us was not ’the government.’ But it clearly had command of channels through which the government normally operates. The relative powerlessness of governments... is of course not new... national governments [have] stood on the sidelines while bigger operators arranged the world’s affairs."

None of the information presented here should be construed to mean that it was unnecessary to fight the Nazis and Japanese militarists. Obviously, however the world situation is viewed today, it must be better than a string of intercontinental concentration camps filled with non-Aryans lorded over by jackbooted SS troopers and Japanese guards.

But it is important to understand the manipulation of the public by secret societies in order to prevent future recurrences. And it must be pointed out that the secret society men who propagated and financed the war continued to profit throughout the hostilities. Exhibiting no allegiance to the countries in which they prospered, these men and their companies continued to provide support to the deadliest of enemies during the most perilous of times for the United States and Great Britain.

Lest anyone think that this is all dry ancient history with no connection to today’s world, consider that in late 1998 there were a multiplicity of lawsuits still pending against Ford Motor Co., Chase Manhattan Bank, J. P. Morgan & Co., several Swiss banks, and other firms in connection with their wartime dealings with Nazi Germany.

The German insurance giant Allianz AG, which in 1990 purchased America’s Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. in a $3.3 billion deal, was sued for failing to pay off life insurance policies of Jewish customers. The firm also was found to have insured buildings and civilian employees of the infamous death camp Auschwitz against "careless or malicious actions on the part of prisoners."

In early 1999 Germany’s Deutsche Bank officials were concerned that their admission that the bank loaned the money to build Auschwitz might jeopardize the bank’s $9.8 billion buyout of New York’s Bankers Trust Corp. Why the late admission? Dr. Hermann Josef Abs, the central bank’s founder and a leading banker for Hitler and the Nazis, had remained as the bank’s honorary chairman until his death in 1994.

WORLD WAR I

The hand of the secret societies with its attendant banking and business manipulation of war can be seen even more clearly in the "wars to end all wars," commonly known as World War I.

Contrary to the high school textbook explanation that the war was caused by the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungry by a Serb in 1914, researchers have found that planning for this conflagration began many years before and, once again, involved members of secret societies.

"Since the latter part of the 18th century, the Rothschild Formula [pitting nation against nation while making loans to both] had controlled the political climate of Europe," wrote author Griffin. "An arms race had been in progress for many years... The assassination of Ferdinand was not the cause but the trigger."

Just as today, the Balkan states were locked in a cycle of war, revolution, and ethnic conflict. Following wars during 1912-13, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, chief of Serbian military intelligence, conspired to assassinate Ferdinand as part of a plan to liberate Serbs in South Austria-Hungary. He operated under the name "Apis" in a secret society known as "The Black Hand."

According to a 1952 Masonic publication, Ferdinand’s assassin, the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princep, and others were Freemasons, encouraged by Apis and incensed by disclosure of a secret treaty between the Vatican and Serbia. The death of Ferdinand caused a chain reaction of ultimatums and mobilizations which ultimately spread war from the Balkans to the whole of Europe.

Prior to this, trustees of the Andrew Carnegie Foundation’s Endowment for International Peace met in 1909 to discuss changing life in America. Bonesman Daniel Coit Gilman was a former president of the Carnegie Institution, and fellow members of The Order sat as trustees of this study. According to one congressional researcher, the trustees came to the same conclusion as the Report from Iron Mountain,

"There are no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective is altering the life of the entire people. . . . How do we involve the United States in a war?"

It was a very good question, since the American people were overwhelmingly isolationist, adhering to the advice of President George Washington "to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world."

Author Gary Allen in his 1971 underground classic None Dare Call It Conspiracy also saw an evil design in this war. He wrote,

"Woodrow Wilson was re-elected by a hair. He had based his campaign on the slogan: ’He Kept Us Out of War!’... Just five months later we were in it. The same crowd which manipulated the passage of the income tax and the Federal Reserve System wanted America in the war. J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, ’Colonel’ House, Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg and the rest of the Jeykll Island conspirators were all deeply involved."

"Even before the actual clash of arms, the French firm of Rothschild Freres cabled to Morgan and Company in New York suggesting the floatation of a loan of $100 million, a substantial part of which was to be left in the United States to pay for French purchases of American goods," wrote author Charles Callan Tansill in America Goes to War.

This loan involved banker J. P. Morgan Jr., who had taken control of the Morgan financial empire after the death of his famed father in 1913. Morgan as the Rothschild’s American representative—some say partner—was a pivotal character in the coming bloodbath.

President Woodrow Wilson, who was put in office by the largess of bankers Morgan, Bernard Baruch, Jacob Schiff, and Cleveland Dodge, chose the younger Morgan as chief purchasing agent for the United States even as he was acting as the sole purchasing agent for Britain, France, Russian, Italy, and Canada. In this capacity, Morgan oversaw the transfer of tremendous amounts of money as the war continued. He bought more than $3 billion in American military and other materials on behalf of the Allied powers while organizing more than two thousand U.S. banks to underwrite more than $1.5 billion in Allied bonds. After the war, Morgan’s firm arranged loans totaling more than $10 billion to reconstruct the European nations.

Banker Bernard Baruch, who later helped fund the Council on Foreign Relations, was named by President Wilson to head the War Industries Board where he controlled all domestic war material contracts. "It was widely rumored in Wall Street that out of the war to make the world safe for international bankers he netted $200 million for himself," wrote Allen.

Morgan and Baruch were not the sole beneficiaries of war profits. According to published statistics, yearly profits to the DuPonts, manufacturers of gunpowder, rose from $6 million in 1914 to $58 million by 1918, a 950 percent increase. In the five years proceeding the war, U.S. Steel’s yearly earnings averaged $105 million. This jumped to $240 million during the war years of 1914-18. Profits for the International Nickel Company went from $4 million a year to $73.5 million by 1918, an increase of more than 1,700 percent.

Was this massive amount of money well spent? Not according to Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler. In his 1935 book War is a Racket, Butler commented,

"Take the shoe people... For instance, they sold Uncle Sam 35,000,000 pairs of hobnailed service shoes. There were 4,000,000 [U.S.] soldiers. Eight pairs, and more, to the soldier. My regiment during the war had only a pair to a soldier. Some of the shoes probably are still in existence... There was still lots of leather left. So the leather people sold your Uncle Sam hundreds of thousands of McClellan saddles for the cavalry. But there wasn’t any American cavalry overseas!... They sold your Uncle Sam 20,000,000 mosquito nets for the use of the soldiers overseas... Well, not one of these mosquito nets ever got to France!... Some 6,000 buckboards [horse-drawn wagons] were sold to Uncle Sam for the use of colonels! Not one of them was used. But the buckboard manufacturer got his war profit."

But trouble soon developed for these gigantic money transactions— Germany appeared to be winning the war and the treasuries of both England and France were empty. British and French bankers, faced with total loss if Germany ended the balance of power by victory, looked to the United States for rescue. U.S. ambassador Walter Hines Page, who also was a trustee of Rockefeller’s General Education Board and was being paid a $25,000-a-year allowance by Rockefeller’s National City Bank, outlined the problem to the State Department in a March 15, 1917, telegram,

"I think that the pressure of this approaching crisis has gone beyond the ability of the Morgan Financial Agency for the British and French Governments. . . . Unless we go to war with Germany, our Government, of course, cannot make ... a direct grant of credit."

The leaders wanted America in the war but President Wilson had pledged not to get involved. But quietly he made other arrangements. On March 9, 1916, eight months before the presidential election, Wilson authorized a secret agreement arranged by his right-hand man, Colonel I louse, to enter the war on the Allied side.

"After the war, the text of the leaked out," wrote German writer George Viereck.

"[Britain’s Sir Edward] Gray was the first to tattle. Page discussed it at length. Colonel House tells its history. . . . But for some incomprehensible reason the enormous significance of the revelation never penetrated the consciousness of the American people."

Yet the American public still resisted going to war. Clearly, the public’s attitudes had to be changed.

Attitudes are shaped by the media, and even in World War I much of the major media was under the control of Rockefeller-Morgan interests. As recorded in the Congressional Record of 1917,

"In March, 1915, the J. P. Morgan interests... got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and [the] sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press... They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.

"An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

Any publication which was not controlled outright was intimidated by the strength of Rockefeller-Morgan advertising dollars. Griffin noted,

"After the J. P. Morgan bloc, the Rockefellers have the most advertising of any group to dispose of. And when advertising alone is not sufficient to insure the fealty of a newspaper, the Rockefeller companies have been known to make direct payments in return for a friendly editorial attitude."

But even this money-backed media blitz, coupled with anti-German rhetoric from the Rockefeller-Morgan foundations and universities, failed to convince the American public to enter the war. Public polls showed opposition to entering the European war at nearly ten-to-one.

A STIMULUS FOR WAR

As throughout history, a provocation was needed to push a recalcitrant public into war. This provocation was the sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania. I low this cruel act played out is an intriguing study in behind-the-scenes manipulation.

Britain’s Winston Churchill, who was appointed first lord of the admiralty in 1911, was desperate for America to join England as an ally. In a later book, The World Crisis, Churchill wrote, "The maneuver which brings an ally into the field is as serviceable as that which wins a great battle."

Under existing rules of war, both British and German warships were to give the crew of enemy vessels a chance to escape before sinking them. For submarines this meant surfacing and challenging the enemy. In 1914 Churchill ordered British merchant ships to disregard any challenge, even counterattack if they were armed. This order forced German U-boat commanders to launch torpedoes while submerged for protection. Churchill also ordered British ships to remove their hull names and to fly the flags of neutral nations when in port.

Churchill freely admitted his orders were a ploy to involve other nations in the war. "The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers."

Just such a "mistake" occurred on May 7, 1915, when a German U-boat commander torpedoed the British liner Lusitania en route from New York to Liverpool.

Nearly 2,000 persons went down with the ship, including 128 Americans. This act set off a firestorm of anti-German feeling throughout the United States, fanned by the Rockefeller-Morgan dominated press.

Only in later years did the facts of the Lusitania’s demise become public. Contrary to United States claims of neutrality, the ship carried 600 tons of gun cotton explosive, 6 million rounds of ammunition, 1,248 cases of shrapnel shells, plus other war materials. "When the Lusitania left New York harbor on her final voyage, she was virtually a floating ammunition dump," commented Griffin. According to author Colin Simpson, the ship’s original manifest listing these armaments was ordered hidden away in Treasury archives by Wilson.

Griffin also pointed out that the Lusitania was registered as an armed auxiliary cruiser by the British Admiralty and owned by the Cunard Company, the closest competitor to J. P. Morgan’s international shipping trust, which included Germany’s two largest lines along with Britain’s White Star line. "Morgan hail attempted in 1902 to take over the Cunard Company, but was blocked by the British Admiralty, which wanted to keep Cunard out of foreign control so her ships could be pressed into military service, if necessary, in time of war," noted Griffin.

The imperial German embassy in Washington, fully aware that tons of war materials were being carried into the war zone around England, aside from vainly protesting to the U.S. government, made an effort to prevent tragedy. Embassy officials attempted to place ads in fifty East Coast newspapers.

The ad read:

"NOTICE! TRAVELERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk."

Of the fifty newspapers slated to carry this notice, only the Des Moines Register ran it on the date requested. The other papers pulled the ad because of intervention by the U.S. State Department. Government officials cowed editors by claiming that, due to the possibility of libel suits, they should first obtain approval by State Department lawyers.

President Wilson was alerted to the situation. Years later, author Simpson wrote,

"There can be no doubt that President Wilson was told of the character of the cargo destined for the Lusitania. He did nothing, but was to concede on the day he was told of her sinking that his foreknowledge had given him many sleepless hours."

Adding support to those who believed the Lusitania was consciously sent to her fate, British commander Joseph Kenworthy, on duty when the ship was sunk, later revealed that her military escort was withdrawn at the last minute and her captain ordered to enter at reduced speed an area where a German U-boat was known to be operating. It is clear why Germany attacked this ship, and Britain would have done the same if U.S. munitions were being shipped to Germany. "The Germans, whose torpedo struck the liner, were the unwitting accomplices or victims of a plot probably concocted by Winston Churchill," concluded author Simpson.

Survivors and later investigations revealed that the German torpedo did not sink the Lusitania. Its destruction was caused instead by a secondary internal explosion, most probably the tons of stored explosives and ammunition.

Whether the sinking of the Lusitania was contrived or not, the incident still was not enough to propel the American people into war. "Torpedoings of merchant ships and loss of noncombatant lives, including American, convinced Americans of German frightfulness but not of German hostility to themselves," wrote author Barbara W. Tuchman.

The German high command, in a studious effort to avoid antagonizing the United States following the sinking of several merchant ships including the Lusitania, in September 1915 suspended unrestricted submarine warfare.

Despite all the maneuvering on the part of Wilson and Churchill, it was the Germans themselves that finally pushed America into the war. This event involved Mexico and, more specifically, the one man who more than any other launched World War I. This was Arthur Zimmermann, who as acting German foreign secretary in 1914 helped start the war in the first place by drafting the telegram that announced Germany’s decision to support Austria-Hungary against Serbia following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. This action angered Russia and precipitated war.

By January 1917 Zimmermann had been appointed foreign secretary and was a strong supporter of unrestricted U-boat warfare. On January 16 he sent a coded telegram to the German minister in Mexico by way of the German ambassador in Washington authorizing the proposal of an alliance with Mexico and Japan. Both of these nations had strained relations with the United States. Brigadier General John "Blackjack" Pershing, who would become the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France, was chasing Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa at the time; meanwhile, the Japanese cruiser Asama was causing concern in California by maneuvering off the west coast of Mexico.

Zimmermann advised Mexican president Venustiano Carranza that Germany was about to resume unrestricted submarine warfare. In the event that war with the United States ensued, Germany promised to assist Mexico "to regain by conquest her lost territory in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico."

While this promise in all likelihood was merely the usual wartime diplomatic maneuvering, it was just the catalyst needed to put America into the war. The sensational telegram was intercepted by British cryptographers, who spent days de-ciphering the document before it was given to the American ambassador on February 25. It was made public on March 1 and initially was greeted with great skepticism.

Former senator Elihu Root—who later became honorary president of the CFR—and other New York elitists meeting at the Round Table Dining Club, forerunner of the Council on Foreign Relations, couldn’t believe their good fortune. Former U.S. ambassador to England Joseph H. Choate, "as warm an Anglophile as any in America . . . openly said that the Zimmermann note was a forgery and was practically unanimously supported by the whole bunch," reported author Tuchman.

But questions regarding the authenticity of the telegram were laid to rest on March 3 at a Berlin news conference. Here a Hearst news correspondent, who later turned out to be a German agent, gave Zimmermann every chance to deny the telegram. "Of course Your Excellency will deny this story," urged the correspondent. Zimmermann then inexplicably announced "I cannot deny it. It is true."

This simple confession produced the desired effect in America. Newspaper editorials railed against the "Hun," and public pressure for war against the German Kaiser grew irresistible. Wilson, who had fought so long and hard for a negotiated peace with himself as leader of a "league" of nations, was forced to declare war on April 6, 1917. Eight days later, money began to flow when passage of the War Loan Act authorized $1 billion in credit to the empty banks of the Allies.

While the Zimmermann telegram apparently was authentic, no one will ever know why something so audacious was produced or why it was acknowledged once discovered.

World War I cost 323,000 American casualties, a pittance compared to 9 million Russians, 6 million Frenchmen, and 3 million British. The war also effectively ended any meaningful gold standard for money, although several nations tried to return to it in the 1920s.

Not only did the total expenditure of the United States for the war years rise to an unprecedented $35 trillion, but the fiat money supply— paper backed only by government edict—nearly doubled from $20.6 to $39.8 billion, which caused the purchasing power of the dollar to drop by almost 50 percent. Tremendous amounts of debt were created, while only those who collected the interest benefited. As always, it was the American public that suffered the real losses in dead relatives, devalued money, and enduring foreign commitments.

The entry of America and the withdrawal of Russia following revolution guaranteed victory for the Allies in World War I. Hostilities were ended by the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the belligerent nations on June 28, 1919. Attending was Paul Warburg, who as chairman of the Federal Reserve System represented American banking interests, and his brother Max Warburg, who represented the German central bank, his own M. M. Warburg and Company, and who reportedly was involved with German Intelligence during the war.

President Wilson, who grew up in the South under the harsh Reconstruction policies of the Republicans, knew firsthand the long-term misery and devastation caused by war. It seems clear that his attempt to keep America out of the European war was based on a sincere personal conviction. It is equally clear that this noble impulse was subverted at every turn by schemers in England and by his own advisers.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of the "war to end all wars" was that it didn’t settle much of anything. The harsh terms of Versailles only prompted resentment in Germany and paved the way for Hitler. All sides soon began to rebuild and rearm, enriching lenders by ever greater spending and borrowing.

British foreign secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, another delegate, said he felt the treaty only set the stage for more war and even predicted the date.

"This is no peace; this is only a truce for twenty years," he stated at the 1919 Versailles conference.

His comment—or was it informed prophecy?—generated much comment among conspiracy researchers since World War II indeed began in 1939, exactly twenty years later.

Curzon may have known precisely what he was talking about, as he had attended both Oxford and All Souls College, the home ground of Cecil Rhodes and John Ruskin. Following his marriage to the daughter of a Chicago millionaire, he became leader of the House of Lords in 1915 and was a member of the inner cabinet that dictated the policies of World War I.

Marriage, it seems, played an important role in connecting these early secret society members together.

"Money Barons such as the Rockefellers of National City Bank and Chase Bank, J. P. Morgan of Morgan and Company, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb Company and, most important, the brothers Warburg... tied the plot into a neat knot with Paul marrying Schiff’s daughter, Felix [Warburg] marrying Loeb’s daughter, and Max staying home in Germany where he could influence the Kaiser and help finance the Russian Revolution," noted Neal Wilgus in his nonfiction book The Illuminoids.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

There indeed exists a wealth of documentation indicating that the Russian Revolution—indeed the very creation of Communism—sprang from Western conspiracies beginning even before World War I.

"One of the greatest myths of contemporary history is that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a popular uprising of the downtrodden masses against the hated ruling class of the Czars," wrote author Griffin, who claimed that both planning and funding for the revolution came from financiers in Germany, Britain, and the United States.

In January 1917 Leon Trotsky was living in New York City working as a reporter for The New World, a communist newspaper. Trotsky had escaped an earlier failed attempt at revolution in Russia and fled to France, where he was expelled for his revolutionary behavior. "He soon discovered that there were wealthy Wall Street bankers who were willing to finance a revolution in Russia," wrote journalist Still.

One of these bankers was Jacob Schiff, whose family had lived with the Rothschilds in Frankfurt. Another was Elihu Root, attorney for Paul Warburg’s Kuhn, Loeb & Company. According to the New York Journal-American, "It is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about $20 million for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia." Root, a CFR member, contributed yet another $20 million, according to the Congressional Record of September 2, 1919.

Schiff and Root were not alone. Arsene de Goulevitch, who was present during the early days of the Bolsheviks, later wrote, "In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million roubles were spent by Lord Milner in financing the Russian Revolution." Recall that it was Alfred Milner who was the primary force behind Rhodes’s Round Tables, that grand ancestor of the modern secret societies.

"In 1915, the American International Corporation was formed to fund the Russian Revolution," wrote Icke.

"Its directors represented the interests of the Rockefeller, Rothschilds, DuPont, Kuhn, Loeb, Harriman, and the Federal Reserve. They included Frank Vanderlip (one of the Jekyll Island group which created the Federal Reserve) and George Herbert Walker, the grandfather of President George Bush."

Gary Allen noted,

"In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world’s richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth men like the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it. Can there be any other explanation that makes sense?"

This conspiratorial view was echoed by none other than Winston Churchill, who in 1920 wrote,

"From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt [head of the mysterious Illuminati] to those of Karl Marx, to those of [socialists Leon] Trotsky, Bela Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman, this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization... has been steadily growing.

"It played a definitely recognizable role in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads, and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."

If there can be identified one single motivating factor behind the horror and tragedy experienced in the twentieth century, it is surely anti-Communism. The animosity between the so-called democracies of the West and the Communism of the East produced continuous turmoil from 1918 through the end of the century.

The flight of the privileged elite from Russia in 1918 and from China in 1949 sent shock waves through the capitals of Europe and America and prompted a backlash that lasted for decades. The cry of "Workers of the world unite!" struck fear in the capitalists of Western industry, banking, and commerce who were not in the know. This fear trickled through their political representatives, employees, and on into virtually every home.

Mystified conspiracy researchers for years were puzzled how such high-level capitalists as the Morgans, Warburgs, Schiffs, and Rockefellers could condone, much less support, an ideology which overtly threatened their position and wealth.

To understand this seeming dichotomy, indeed to understand how the secret society members operate, one must study the philosopher who influenced these men through Rhodes and Ruskin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Coming on the heels of the Age of Reason—the intellectual revolt against the authority of the church—German philosophers Hegel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Immanuel Kant inspired future generations with the idea that modern man need not be chained by religious dogma and tradition. These iconoclasts differed only in that Kant believed that things which cannot be experienced in the material world cannot be known to man, while the metaphysical Fichte and Hegel believed that man’s reason is "the candle of the Lord," that intuition and love create a unity of man with the Divine which brings understanding and equality.

Hegel’s claim to the rational interpretation of the human essence, termed the Hegelian System, was an attempt to reconcile opposites, to comprehend the entire universe as a systematic whole. It was a mind-boggling effort and has not yet been fully completed. Adherents and opponents of Hegel will continue to philosophize well into the coming millennium. It is easy to understand why such abstract thinking has been interpreted in so many ways by Hegel’s followers, including Karl Marx and Hitler.

Hegel’s fellow idealist and the man who most influenced his work, Fichte, was a member of secret societies. "It is interesting that Fichte, who developed these ideas before Hegel, was a Freemason, almost certainly Illuminati, and certainly was promoted by the Illuminati," wrote author Sutton. It has even been suggested that Hegel himself may have been a member of the revolutionary German Illuminati lodge outlawed by the government in 1784, though no conclusive documentation has been found. He certainly espoused the Freemason theology of rationalism.

Marx turned Hegel’s theoretical philosophy to the material world and developed an exceptional tool for manipulating people and events. This has become known as the Hegelian dialectic, the process in which opposites—thesis and antithesis—are reconciled in compromise or synthesis.

The application relevant here is the idea that Western capitalists created Communism on one side (thesis) as a perceived enemy to the democratic nations (antithesis) on the other side. The ensuing conflict produced huge markets for finance and armaments and eventually a leveling of both sides (synthesis). Often during the past fifty years it was said, the U.S. is getting more like Russia, and they are getting more like the U.S.

The members of secret societies traceable to Rhodes’s Round Tables understood the Hegelian dialectic well. Their predecessors had successfully used it for centuries without the name of Hegel. These early-day Machiavellis had found it was but a small step to the realization that one needn’t wait for crisis and turmoil. Social upheaval could be created and controlled to their own benefit. Hence came the cycles of financial booms and busts, crises and revolutions, wars and threats of war, all of which maintained a balance of power.

Social activists and bureaucrats alike have learned this both-ends-against-the-middle stratagem well, whether by experience, intuition, or study. Demand more than you really need (thesis) from your opposition (antithesis) and, after compromises, you’ll usually end up with what you wanted in the first place (synthesis).

"This revolutionary method—the systematic working of thesis vs. antithesis = synthesis—is the key to understanding world history," declared conspiracy author Texe Marrs.

Returning to Trotsky, we find he left the United States by ship on March 27, 1917—just days before America entered the war—along with nearly three hundred revolutionaries and funds provided by Wall Street. Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was being trailed by British agents who suspected him of working with German Intelligence since his stay in prewar Vienna. In a speech before leaving New York, Trotsky stated, "I am going back to Russia to overthrow the provisional government and stop the war with Germany."

When the ship carrying Trotsky and his entourage stopped in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they and their funds were impounded by Canadian authorities, who rightly feared that a revolution in Russia might free German troops to fight Allied soldiers on the Western Front.

But this well-grounded concern was overcome by President Wilson’s alter ego, Colonel House, who told the chief of the British Secret Service, Sir William Wiseman, that Wilson wanted Trotsky released. On April 21, 1917, less than a month after the United States entered the war, the British Admiralty ordered the release of Trotsky, who, armed with an American passport authorized by Wilson, continued on his journey to Russia and history.

After an abortive revolution in 1905, thousands of Russian activists had been exiled, including Trotsky and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, a revolutionary intellectual who adapted the theories of Hegel, Fichte, Ruskin, and Marx to Russia’s political and economic predicament. After years of attempts at reform, the czar was forced to abdicate on March 15, 1917, following riots in Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd) believed by many to have been instigated by British agents.

As Trotsky traveled to Russia with an American passport and Wall Street funding, Lenin also left exile. Aided by the Germans and accompanied by about 150 trained revolutionaries, "[He] was put on the infamous ’sealed train’ in Switzerland along with at least $5 million," wrote Still.

The train passed through Germany unhindered, as arranged by Max Warburg and the German High Command. Lenin, like Trotsky, was labeled a German agent by the government of Aleksandr Kerensky, the second of provisional governments created following the czar’s abdication. By November 1917 Lenin and Trotsky, backed by Western funds, had instigated a successful revolt and seized the Russian government for the Bolsheviks.

But the communist grip on Russia was not secure. Internal strife between the "Reds" and the "Whites" lasted until 1922 and cost some twenty-eight million Russian lives, many times the war loss. Lenin died in 1924 from a series of strokes after helping form the Third International or Comintern, an organization to export Communism worldwide. Trotsky fled Russia when Stalin took dictatorial control and in 1940 was murdered in Mexico by a Stalinist agent.

Author Icke saw a "multidimensional" aspect to the funding of the Bolsheviks.

"The Russian ’revolutionaries’ such as Lenin and Trotsky were being used to get Russia out of the war, to the benefit of Germany. But at the Elite level, the bogeyman called Communism was being created to stimulate the division of fear and mistrust presented as communism vs. capitalism vs. fascism."

Even Lenin apparently came to understand that he was being manipulated by more powerful forces.

"The state does not function as we desired," he wrote. "A man is at the wheel and seems to lead it, but the car does not drive in the desired direction. It moves as another force wishes."

This other "force" were the members of the secret societies that were behind the birth of Communism itself, "monopoly finance capitalists" as Irnin described them.

THE RISE OF COMMUNISM

Many varied secret societies were involved in the movement which eventually led to Communism. One of the earliest may have been the Carbonari, or charcoal burners, of Italy of the Middle Ages. According to author Arkon Daraul, the Carbonari claimed to have begun in Scotland where they lived a free and communal life in the wild forests burning wood to make charcoal. They created a government consisting of three vendite, or lodges, for administration, legislation, and judicial matters. The lodges were ruled by a High Lodge led by a Grand Master, who headed a form of primitive Masonry.

"Under the pretense of carrying their charcoal for sale, they introduced themselves into the villages, and bearing the name of real Carbonari they easily met their supporters and communicated their mutual plans," wrote Daraul. "They made themselves known to each other by signs, touches and words."

The anticleric doctrine of the Carbonari, which became known as "forest Masonry," spread widely after initiating the French king, Francis I. At one point members so filled Italy, they nearly dominated the country.

"In the early 1820s, they were more than just a power in the land," wrote Daraul. "[They] boasted branches and sub-societies as far afield as Poland, France and Germany."

He added, "The Bolsheviks and their theoreticians of the Communist persuasion are traced by many as offspring of the Charcoal-burners. ..."

The antiauthoritarian socialism of the Carbonari, Illuminated Freemasonry, and other rationalist and humanist groups that grew during the Age of Enlightenment coalesced during the early nineteenth century, greatly aggravating the Roman Catholic church.

"In our day, if Masonry does not found Jacobite or other clubs, it originates and cherishes movements fully as satanic and as dangerous. Communism, just like Carbonism, is but a form of the illuminated Masonry of [Illuminati founder] Weishaupt," warned Monsignor George Dillon in 1885.

One such movement was the International Working Men’s Association—better known as the First International—the direct forerunner to Communism, convened in London in 1864 and soon under the leadership of Karl Marx.

Marx was born in IK 18 in Trier, Germany, to Hcinrich and Henrietta Marx, both descended from a long line of Jewish rabbis and hence undoubtedly familiar with the mystical traditions of the Torah and Cabala. To deter anti-Semitism, both Karl and his father were baptized in the Evangelical Established church. And both were greatly influenced by the humanism of the Age of Enlightenment.

Following his graduation from the University of Bonn, Marx enrolled in the University of Berlin in 1836 where he joined a secret society called the Doctor Club filled with devotees of Hegel and his philosophy. Although he had earlier expressed devout Christian ideals, Marx joined these Hegelians in moving from a belief that the Christian Gospels were "human fantasies arising from emotional needs" to outright atheism.

Some modern conspiracy writers even claim that Marx eventually became a Satanist. They point to his eventual criticism of Hegel as not material enough in his thinking, the antisocial societies in which he moved, and a work written by Marx as a student which stated,

"If there is a Something which devours, I’ll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins... that would be really living."

Again the metaphysical views of both Marx and his detractors cannot be ignored.

In 1843 Marx married and moved to Paris, a hotbed of socialism and extremist groups known as communists. It was in Paris that Marx befriended Friedrich Engels, scion of a well-to-do English textile mill owner. Marx and Engels both became confirmed communists and collaborated in writing a number of revolutionary pamphlets and books, the most famous being three volumes discussing capital, Das Kapital. Ironically, it was Engels—the capitalist’s son—who would financially subsidize Marx—the champion of the working class—most of his life.

Engels, also a devoted Hegelian, had been converted to socialist humanism by Moses Hess, called the "communist rabbi," and by Robert Owen, a Utopian socialist and spiritualist openly hostile to traditional religion.

Marx and Engels eventually moved to Brussels and then on to London, where in 1847 they joined another secret society called the League of the Just, composed primarily of German emigrants, many of whom were thought to be escaped members of the outlawed Illuminati.

The group soon changed its name to the Communist League and Marx along with Engels produced its famous proclamation, The Communist Manifesto.

Marx’s manifesto set forth the ten immediate steps to create an ideal communist state. They bear a striking resemblance to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, suggesting some common origin. These steps include:

*

abolition of private property
*

a progressive or graduated income tax
*

abolition of all inheritance
*

confiscation of all property of dissidents and emigrants
*

creation of a monopolistic central bank with state capital to control credit
*

centralization of all communication and transport
*

state control over factories and farm production
*

state ownership of all capital and the creation of a deployable labor force
*

combining agriculture with manufacturing industries and the gradual distribution of the population to blur the distinction between towns and rural country
*

free public education to all children

This list was also remarkably similar to the steps for creating the ideal society proposed by the Bavarian Illuminati, strongly indicating a close connection between the two. "In fact, the Internationale can hardly be viewed as anything but Illuminated Masonry in a new disguise," commented author Still.

In 1848 Marx failed to incite a socialist revolution in Prussia and, after evading prison, returned to London. Personality clashes, petty bickering, and fractious fights over ideology prevented the Communist League from becoming an effective force. Militant factions chided Marx for being more concerned with speeches than revolutions, and he gradually withdrew into isolation which only ended with his attendance at the 1864 First International.

Marx’s life of struggle and poverty made a tremendous impact on world history by providing a philosophical platform for the modern secret societies based on the tenets of the older ones. He died of apparent lung abscesses on March 14, 1883, depressed over the suicides of his two daughters and just two months after the death of his wife.

It is clear that Communism did not spring spontaneously from poor, downtrodden masses of workers, but was the result of long-range schemes and intrigues by secret societies.

"There is no proletarian, not even Communist, movement that has not operated in the interests of money... and without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact," wrote German philosopher Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West.

COMMENTARY

The imprint of the secret societies can be found in every war and conflict of the twentieth century.

The historic record is unmistakable. The same society members turn up in every instance—passing from father to son, business partner to close associate, fraternity brother to brother. It would seem, based on the public’s demonstrated antipathy toward war, that occasionally there would be governmental house cleaning, a complete changeover of leadership and officials. Yet the same old secret society faces keep returning to power, as noted by President Kennedy. The mass media appears unconcerned and the public is asked to believe that this is all sheer coincidence—simply a case of the most competent man for the job.

The Report from Iron Mountain, whether provable as historic fact or not, accurately reflects the thinking of secret society members. For example, in a 1981 interview concerning overpopulation, CFR member Maxwell Taylor blithely stated,

"I have already written off more than a billion people. These people are in places in Africa, Asia, Latin America. We can’t save them. The population crisis and the food-supply question dictate that we should not even try. It’s a waste of time."

While some conflicts arguably were necessary—such as World War II—others like Vietnam and the Gulf War appear less so. Yet all were immensely profitable to secret society members and all advanced their goal of one-world government.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs and the CFR made plans for a conflict in Southeast Asia as far back as 1951. The creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in 1954 was a calculated scheme to provide U.S. officials a legal basis for intervention in Vietnam. President Kennedy, who was assassinated before he could withdraw troops, had been at increasing odds with secret society members on Wall Street, several of whom passed judgment on his death as members of the Warren Commission.

President Johnson and his CFR advisers were deceitful in their maneuvering to obtain unconstitutional war powers from Congress following the phony "Gulf of Tonkin" incident in 1964. These same advisers continued to support that war until it became apparent that the costs—both in lives, money, and national unity—were becoming greater than the profits, at which time they turned against Johnson.

Korea was a prototype conflict to judge how the American public would react to a winless United Nations "police action." It set the precedent of American GIs fighting outside the United States under foreign commanders, an activity which continues today. Ironically, ranking Russian officials commanded the North Koreans on one side and the United Nations troops on the other.

World War II was fought to stop fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan, who had been created and financed by secret society members in the West. Despite the deadly nature of this war, American and British society members continued to do business with the enemy and then arranged their reconstruction afterward. Nowhere was this duplicity more evident than in President Roosevelt’s failure to alert American troops at Pearl Harbor of the impending Japanese attack brought on by his own containment policies.

Hitler, that great scourge of the twentieth century, was clearly a creation of both secret societies and their Western financiers. Explanations for this extraordinary circumstance range from the desire to create a balance of power with Communism to the extraordinary possibility that Hitler was directly related to the Viennese Rothschilds. His Nazis were more a cult than a political party and reflected both the esoteric knowledge and obsessions of elder European secret societies which can be traced back to the Ancient Mysteries.

These societies had been active during World War I and the Russian Revolution, which was directly encouraged and financed by American and British secret society members. The goals of the Russian communists and Karl Marx were largely the same goals of the Illuminati and continental Freemasonry. It was all a real-world model of the theory of Hegel, who saw one side of a conflict (thesis) pitted against the other (antithesis) created a compromise (synthesis). This formula—with the added element of actually creating the conflict—has been used successfully by the students of Hegel, which include the Illuminati, Cecil Rhodes, Hitler, and members of the modern secret societies.

It is evident that, to whatever degree, individuals connected by blood, titles, marriage, or membership in secret societies have manipulated and controlled the destinies of entire nations through the fomentation and funding of war. These people consider themselves above the morality and ethics of the average man. They obviously look to some higher purpose—whether that be sheer wealth and power or perhaps some hidden agenda concerning mankind’s origin, destiny, and spirituality.

Even as Marx, Engels, and their followers were creating Communism in London during the mid-nineteenth century, the long-standing plans of the Illuminati and its descendent societies to foment internal strife within the United States were being brought to fruition in a great rebellion.