BILDERBERG GROUP

The problem with being rich, powerful and influential these days is that ordinary people just don’t understand you; it’s only other rich, powerful, influential people to whom you can really relate, spend quality time with. So along with the invitation to party on down at the Bohemian Grove comes membership of a very exclusive, no-holds-barred talking shop, the Bilderberg Group.

The Group’s meetings take place once a year at a luxurious hotel somewhere nice, safe, civilized and very secret. The steering committee of around 20 members draws up a list of 100 people they think reflect the great and the good, one or two up-and-coming politicians or business people and even the odd NGO representative if it seems to make economic sense. Once gathered, the chosen ones are catered by hand-picked chefs, have the venue checked by the CIA and are guarded by mercenaries. Those, however, are all the details we have. As soon as the delegates sit down together, the media blackout begins. No one speaks about what has been discussed at the Group’s meetings, no details are leaked, no paparazzi stalk the place with their long lenses. So the kind of privacy any royal or celebrity would kill for is accorded to an innocent group of concerned and informed individuals chatting about new directions in world politics and business.

Seems fishy? Plenty of people think so. The Group is distrusted by the ultra-right, who believe it’s part of a Zionist plot to rule the world, while the far left deeply distrust its capitalist credentials. Hardline conspiracy theorists claim the Bilderberg Group has caused wars and recessions, ordered murders, ousted leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Margaret Thatcher, and dictated national policies. Unsurprisingly, the Group is also accused of having the achievement of the New World Order at the top of its secret agenda. The promotion of free trade and the elimination of protectionist policies are the first steps in its dastardly plan to undermine individual nationality, followed by a series of international conflicts which would destabilize national boundaries still further and reward its acolytes with bulging profits (lucrative Iraqi reconstruction contracts, anyone?).

The list of ready believers in this conspiracy, disturbingly, includes Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City Bombings, and convicted London nail-bomber David Copeland – all apparently convinced that Bilderberg pulls governments’ strings.The guest list for meetings certainly includes names weighty enough to set any sensitive terrorist’s paranoid antennae vibrating. George W. Bush and his neo-conservative cohorts Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz (quondam president of the World Bank), Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Lord Healey, Henry Kissinger and the conspiracy theorists’ favourite, David Rockefeller, have all been invited. 

One-third of the invitees are drawn from North America and the rest from Europe, with well over half being from the business, media and education worlds, while the rest are politicians or even royalty: the Queen of the Netherlands and the Crown Prince of Belgium have both attended, as have more unlikely candidates such as Jonathon Porritt from Friends of the Earth. There’s no suggestion that Prince Charles has joined the club yet.Members of the Bilderberg Group stress that it’s only an upmarket talking-shop, but it’s hard to believe that members do not influence each other or that the guest list is not manipulated to put the right people together. 

Will Hutton, editor of the Economist and ex-Bilderberger, came close to breaking the self-imposed code of silence when he likened Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum, where “the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide”.If Hutton is correct, then the Group will have surpassed its creators’ intentions. The original aim was to bring America and a united Europe closer together in the face of the emerging threat from Stalin’s Soviet Union and post-war anti-American feeling. 

The first meeting was masterminded by one Joseph Retinger, a Polish American with contacts in the top ranks of governments and the military, who believed peace was too important to be left to democratic means and was best brokered by powerful multinational organizations. The chosen group met in May 1954 at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeck, near Arnhem, and was hosted by former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.Since then it has met annually, and occasionally twice a year, to encourage trans-Atlantic co-operation, always with the CIA on hand to handle security (guaranteed to get any conspiracy theorist’s blood racing) and sheltered from prying eyes by a self-imposed ban by the world’s media; newspaper editors and media moguls are also invited to attend. It is this need for absolute privacy which seems to stick in the throats of Bilderberg’s critics. Tony Gosling, a former journalist and organizer of an anti-Bilderberg website, puts his fears succinctly: “My main problem is the secrecy. 

When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on … One of the first places I heard about the determination of the US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting.”According to conspiracy-theory students David Southwell and Sean Twist, the way the secrecy is maintained also suggests there is more than a polite discussion of current affairs going on behind those closed doors. They cite the occasion of the 2003 Bilderberg meeting in Versailles, which almost coincided with the beginning of a Group of Seven meeting of finance ministers in nearby Paris. The proximity of the two events made local French security police uneasy and they tried to have the Bilderberg meeting cancelled. Someone in the force even went so far as to leak an internal memo complaining of the huge numbers of mercenaries being used to protect members, and hinted they believed the event was merely a front for something “much more sinister”.

On the other hand, defenders of the Group would say that, in the face of often biased reporting from the world’s press, business leaders and politicians have much to gain from being able to voice opinions freely without the risk of their views being taken out of context, and it is this honesty which allows a greater understanding of political situations to be reached. Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf supports this view: “It’s privacy, rather than secrecy, that is key to such a meeting. The idea that such meetings cannot be held in private is fundamentally totalitarian. It’s not an executive body; no decisions are taken there.”Is the average citizen to assume, then, that all that happens at the Bilderberg’s meetings is talk with no action? 

Some credit the Group with responsibility for the creation of the Treaty of Rome in 1957; only 18 months earlier, the Group’s 1955 meeting had concluded there was a pressing need for a closely knit European market. Others say that the 1996 delegation, which included Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl, Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, plotted the war in Kosovo that would ultimately bring down Serbia’s Slobodan Milosević, a view apparently broadcast by Serbian news agencies at the time.On other occasions it would appear that a mere invitation is enough to set a train of events in motion. 

Bill Clinton was brought to the 1991 meeting in Germany when Governor of Arkansas; two years later he was US President. Tony Blair got his call to address the meeting in 1993. Good talent-spotting on the part of the Bilderberg committee, or a cynical boost to those politicians whose views are friendly to big business?As the machinations of multinational boardrooms remain beyond the realm of “public interest”, there is no way of telling what effect the Group’s meetings have had on the business and financial worlds. Company directors are not democratically elected and are accountable only to their shareholders, but the same cannot be said of the politicians who count themselves as Bilderbergers. 

These people are the democratic leaders of the Western world, accountable to millions of people and supposedly upholders of free speech and open government. Why then would they need to discuss major issues “off the record”? The answer may lie in the very economic system which they claim is integral to democracy. As conspiracy-theory journalist Alasdair Spark says, “The idea that a shadowy clique is running the world is nothing new … Shouldn’t we expect that the rich and powerful organize things in their own interests? It’s called capitalism.”