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PART II THE FINGERPRINTS Of CONSPIRACY
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.
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,
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,
Most significantly, the report states,
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,
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.
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":
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.
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.
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,
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.
"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 also reported that Sloga, a vice president of (Henry)-Kissinger Associates met with Iraqi leaders during a two-year period preceding the Gulf conflict.
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 ÿ special prosecutor when asked to do so by Congress.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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,
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.
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,
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.
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,
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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,
On October 27, less than a month later, the Times reported,
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,
Kunen caught the puzzled spirit of the youthful antiwar protesters in an opening to his book when he wrote,
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.
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."
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,
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,
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 agreeme |