Council on Foreign Relations

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Claim: The Council on Foreign Relations and its sister organization the
Trilateral Commission are the most visible elements of a powerful and
largely submerged global elite working to consolidate political and economic
control over the world

Status: Documentable

"Some [ideological extremists] believe we are part of a secret cabal working
against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family
and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world
to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one
world, if you will," wrote David Rockefeller on page 405 of his Memoirs. "If
that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

In addition to the obvious internationalist cachet Rockefeller enjoys as the
focal point of one of the world's greatest banking and finance dynasties, he
was a long-time chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and the
chief architect of its sister organization, the Trilateral Commission (TC).
The CFR, founded in 1921 by a group of internationalists surrounding
"Colonel" Edward Mandell House (see entry), offers membership exclusively to
US citizens; the TC draws its international members chiefly from North
America, Europe, and Japan, although in recent years its roster has included
figures from China, the former Soviet Bloc, and the Middle East.

Rockefeller has also been prominently associated with the Bilderberg
meetings (see entry), an annual gathering of the world elite that in some
ways duplicates the functions of the Trilateral Commission.

The CFR publishes an annual report containing a membership roster and a
fairly detailed account of its financial affairs. The Council also sponsors
public events, some of which are televised on C-SPAN. However, as with the
TC and the Bilderberg meetings, the CFR's deliberations are secretive and
accessible only to its members, who include elected leaders, judges, key
media figures and academics, and others in positions of public trust and
authority.

The verb "to conspire," according to Webster's New International Dictionary
(2nd edition, 1938), means "to make an agreement, esp. a secret agreement,
to do some act, as to commit treason, or a crime, or to do some unlawful
deed," and the noun "conspiracy," according to the same source, refers to a
"combination of men for an evil purpose; an agreement between two or more
persons to commit a crime in concert, as in treason."

That the CFR and its affiliates compose a "combination" to amass power on
behalf of secret designs is beyond dispute. Defenders of the Council and its
comrades, or critics of the "conspiracy theory" of history, maintain that
this secretive network can't be considered a "conspiracy," because its
activities are legal.

This ignores the fact that some conspiracies become sufficiently powerful to
bend the law to their purposes, thereby making their actions "legal," at
least in a positivist sense; the best example may be the National Socialist
Government of Germany, which used its power to legalize imprisonment,
persecution, and murder of innocent people, and the prosecution of
aggressive war - offenses for which Nazi officials were arraigned, after
World War II, for participation in a "conspiracy."

The most critical disclosure of the existence and methods of the globalist
power elite of which the CFR is the most prominent element came in Tragedy
and Hope, the 1966 study by Georgetown historian Carroll Quigley. After
offering the de rigueur dismissals of "conspiracy theories," he also made
some significant admissions:

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international
Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical
Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may
identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the
Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the
operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and
was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and
secret records.


Quigley noted that the Round Table Groups, which were "semi-secret
discussion and lobbying groups," were created to help "federate the
English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes...." (see
entry) The American affiliate of this network, wrote Quigley, "was known as
the Council on Foreign Relations...." Although he did not endorse all of
that network's designs or decisions, Quigley was generally supportive of its
ends, stating that "my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to
remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to
be known."

It was this network, according to Quigley, that "provided much of the
framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow
travellers [sic] took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be
recognized that the power that these energetic Left-wingers exercised was
never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the
international financial coterie" - in other words, the people of whom David
Rockefeller could be considered typical.

Quigley noted that the workings of this elite were partially revealed by
congressional investigators in the 1950s who, "following backward to their
source the threads which led from admitted Communists like Whittaker
Chambers, through Alger Hiss and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and
the Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of the interlocking
tax-exempt foundations."

While the access given to Quigley to records and papers of the "Anglophile
network" was unparalleled, he is not the only academic who has documented
its existence and methods. In a 1956 study entitled The Power Elite,
published 40 years ago, Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills - as
Quigley would a decade later - initially sought to dismiss the "conspiracy
theory" of modern political history. However, his research vindicated the
essential claims of the conspiratorial perspective.

Although Mills claimed to find no conspirators in high places, he
nonetheless admitted, "There is ... little doubt that the American power
elite - which contains, we are told, some of 'the greatest organizers in the
world' - has ... planned and plotted." Mills also anticipated Quigley's work
by describing the existence of a definable network joining elites in
politics, academia, the military, the media, and foundations. "Certain types
of men from each of the dominant institutional areas, more far-sighted than
others, have actively promoted the liaison before it took its truly modern
shape," Mills observed.
And Mills, like Quigley after him, pointed out that the most important work
done by the Power Elite takes place in secrecy: "[T]he power elite is not
altogether 'surfaced.'... Many higher events that would reveal the working
of the power elite can be withheld from public knowledge under the guise of
secrecy. With the wide secrecy covering their operations and decisions, the
power elite can mask their intentions, operations, and further
consolidation."

If Mills' book The Power Elite could be taken as a prologue to Quigley's
monumental Tragedy and Hope, historian Michael H. Hunt's 1987 study Ideology
and U.S. Foreign Policy could, in some ways, be considered an afterword.
Hunt described the typical member of the Eastern Seaboard "anglophile" elite
into whose hands American foreign policy has been trusted for more than
seven decades: "His formal education [comes from] private schools and Ivy
League colleges and law schools.... He practiced corporate law until gaining
public office, usually by appointment. His soundness on foreign-policy
questions was insured by the values inculcated in elite social circles, in
exclusive schools and in establishment clubs and organizations of which the
Council on Foreign Relations ... was the most important."

But the CFR is hardly a mere "establishment club"; it is, in the words of
the late Richard Harwood, the former Ombudsman for the Washington Post, "the
nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States."
Writing in the October 30, 1993 issue of the Post, Harwood observed:

The president [at the time, Bill Clinton] is a member. So is his secretary
of state, the deputy secretary of state, all five of the undersecretaries,
several of the assistant secretaries and the department's legal adviser. The
president's national security adviser and his deputy are members. The
director of Central Intelligence (like all previous directors) and the
chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are members. The
secretary of defense, three undersecretaries and at least four assistant
secretaries are members. The secretaries of the departments of housing and
urban development, interior, health and human services and the chief White
House public relations man ... along with the speaker of the House [at the
time, Democrat Thomas Foley, who was succeeded by Republican Newt Gingrich
in 1995].... This is not a retinue of people who 'look like America,' as the
President once put it, but they very definitely look like the people who,for
more than half a century, have managed our international affairs and our
military-industrial complex.


Whether the actions of that secretive elite are to be considered
conspiratorial depends on one's view of accountability: Should a
self-perpetuating oligarchy with such vast ambitions be permitted to work
covertly on geopolitical projects that will affect the lives, prosperity,
and freedom of the entire world? From the Americanist perspective, which
champions liberty under law protected through public accountability, this
arrangement can only be considered conspiratorial.

And David Rockefeller, as noted above, pleads guilty to that charge,
admitting for posterity in his Memoirs what Robert Welch and the John Birch
Society have maintained for decades.

The American people certainly didn't get together and elect government
officials, or bestow authority upon private citizens such as Mr. Rockefeller
himself, to dissolve our country's independence and make it nothing more
than a subservient administrative unit in a world government - "one world,
if you will."

Now that the goal pursued by Rockefeller and his ilk is within their reach,
and the hour is very late, they have become more open about what they have
been doing - candidly admitting to what we have been saying for a long time.

Additional Resources
Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, by Carroll Quigley
The Anglo-American Establishment, by Carroll Quigley
The Power Elite, by C. Wright Mills
The Shadows of Power, by James Perloff
The Creature from Jekyll Island, by G. Edward Griffin
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