Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (37 page)

I have carefully reviewed the fbi memorandum to the Director, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State dated November 29, 1963 which mentions a Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency…. I do not recognize the contents of the memorandum as information furnished to me orally or otherwise during the time I was at the cia. In fact, during my time at the cia, I did not receive any oral communications from any government agency of any nature whatsoever. I did not receive any information relating to the Kennedy assassination during my time at the cia from the fbi. Based on the above, it is my conclusion that I am not the Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency referred to in the memorandum.

Which leaves the logical conclusion that George H.W. Bush was a cia operative at a time when he claimed not to be. No surprise there, given the cia's understandable reluctance to admit anything it doesn't have to. But Bush also had, at the time, an alliance with Cuban exiles who were furious with Kennedy's dis-association with the Bay of Pigs failure, encouraging some observers to make a linkage between Bush and two catastrophic events in U.S. history: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. The media chose to discount both connections, leading conspiracy buffs into a round of speculation that has endured for years.

From time to time, Skull & Bones lashes out at those who dare probe too deeply into its operations, as it apparently did when Netherlands tv producer Daniel de Wit completed a documentary on the group. De Wit's premise connected Skull & Bones with the cia in drug-smuggling activities as a means of financing unapproved covert operations, a tactic confirmed during the Iran-Contra hearings of 1988. Before his production could air, de Wit was ordered by the Netherlands government to remove all reference to the cia and drugs, and soften its criticisms of Skull & Bones. The deletions reduced the program's running time from its original 80 minutes to barely 30 minutes. Completed in 1998, the show was aired once in the U.S. on a Friday at 5 pm when, as de Wit notes, “every possible viewer is in traffic going home.” It was never repeated.

In August 2003, de Wit recalled his experience with the cia and Skull & Bones, noting, “These… institutions and their members show a brute force and an enormous concentrated power that is overwhelming and could make everyone very cynical very easily. That also must be a reason people like to stay away from these realities.”

Skull & Bones is no more immune to the passage of time and its changes than anything or anyone else, and whatever influence and impact it had beyond the Yale campus may be waning. The 2004 U.S. presidential election, after all, featured Bonesmen
George W. Bush, ’68, against John Kerry. Depending upon your point of view, this proves either that Skull & Bones members dominate the U.S. political arena to an extent no one imagined, or that the vaunted conspiracy did not exist, because why would two conspirators face each other across an ideological divide?

Whatever the answer, the innermost secrets of Skull & Bones have been leaking through the stone walls of The Tomb for several years now, even as the reality of the outside world has been seeping into it. Surely the most important change occurred in 1992 when, after a bitter rear guard battle by old Bonesmen (one, a prestigious Washington-area lawyer, suggested a coed membership “would lead to date-rape”), the organization actually agreed to admit women. By 2000, six of the fifteen Skull & Bones members that year were female.

The changes wrought by the last forty years of social upheaval—Skull & Bones now taps Jews and blacks as potential members, something it avoided during the first 150 years of its existence—make it doubtful that many of the old initiation rites, such as relating one's sexual history while stretched out naked in a coffin, are still practiced. With an estimated $4 million in assets in 2000, however, Skull & Bones could still afford to pay the $15,000 stipend and award a grandfather clock at marriage.

The spectacle of both U.S. presidential candidates being Skull & Bones members may represent the dying echo of the society's excessive influence on the country's political and judicial systems. In a day of hand-held instant messaging, global economics and tech-based fortunes, the networking arrangement that boosted the U.S. privileged class even higher in the pecking order is not nearly as influential or even necessary. The male wasp contingent of American society is no longer as exclusive as a generation ago, and secret societies on campus are considered at best anachronisms, a throwback to days of panty raids and silly rich boys in raccoon coats. Skull & Bones appears to be stumbling towards extinction; in recent years, more Yale juniors have declined the invitation to become a member than have accepted it.

Yet its influence during the past century deserves consideration. Too many of its “best and brightest” were involved in too many economic and foreign policy disasters, from Bay of Pigs through the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam and Iraq, to assess it as an exclusively campus crowd, a bunch of advantaged young men playing silly games in a dark, tomb-like room. There is more to be told. But by whom?

TWELVE

SECRET SOCIETIES IN POPULAR CULTURE

AN ENDLESS FASCINATION

THE MORE CERTAINTY WE HAVE IN OUR LIVES, THE MORE WE
are intrigued by mysteries. Their entertainment value is obvious, but we may also need threats to our security in order to fully appreciate it. In the process, we speculate about things we cannot explain, and often become fixed on threats and events well removed from our day-to-day lives. It's more comforting that way, which perhaps explains why the greatest concentration of secret society concerns rests in urban Europe and affluent North America, whose residents have the most to lose materially and spiritually.

For those of us detached from direct association with shadow people, it is the secrecy that is most worrisome, and the potential impact on our lives that is most threatening, an attitude that varies according to proximity. To citizens of Calabria and Sicily, the Mafia is a reality that need not be speculated about, because its presence and influence are evident. Similar attitudes may be found among residents of Hong Kong and Macau, who experience Triad activities first hand, and Japanese businessmen encountering crimes committed by Yakuza. To both groups, the “secret” in secret societies is something of a contradiction when their direct impact is confronted daily.

At the other end of the spectrum, Yak farmers in Mongolia, refugees in Somalia and Inuit on Baffin Island grapple daily with a range of challenges to their survival that middle-class Americans and Europeans cannot grasp. Plotting their very existence occupies too much of their consciousness to speculate
about the impact of millennia-old and foreign-based conspiracies, even as entertainment.

To the rest of us, “secret” denotes mystery, and mysteries demand solutions. Where solutions are unavailable, speculation will do. And when speculation is unleashed from reason and motivated by innuendo, we begin to sense that we are surrounded by conspiracies, believing in their existence even when faced with evidence to the contrary.

The more comfortable and predictable our lives become, the more positively we react to the notion of widespread conspiracies because their existence provides a resolution to various unsolved mysteries. Conspiracies supply blame for terrible events that remain beyond our ability to fathom them. No better example exists than the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those who cannot accept that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, could gun down one of the most admired men of his time look for evidence to support their disbelief. In this incidence there may be much yet to be found, as we saw with the examination of Skull & Bones. On a grander scale, we may ascribe the failure of our economic dreams to an unfathomable and shadowy cartel, the defeat of a favored politician to an international cabal, and unexplained climatic events to supernatural forces controlled by covens.

The growing appeal of secret explanations for catastrophic events has paralleled the impact of contemporary popular culture, with each element feeding the other. Popular novels and movies once dealt with people engaged in direct association with each other; their motivations varied between love and war, often involving both, but they were for the most part open, not shadowy, occurrences. Today's popular culture vehicles find more inspiration not in events we can fathom but in secrets that defy our explanation, held by organizations operating within shadows.

Consider the mystery novel. Most observers trace its origins back to Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 tale
The Gold Bug
. Poe's literary descendant Dashiell Hammett created the prototypical private
eye to solve crimes committed by individuals whose closest association with an international conspiracy was usually “The Syndicate,” code for the Mafia. Others, such as Arthur Conan Doyle, John Buchan, Sax Rohmer (creator of Fu Manchu) and Sapper (pen name for Herman Cyril McNeile, author of the Bulldog Drummond series), pursued criminals who functioned on a one-to-one scale with their victims while committing robbery, murder and similar unsavory and intriguing activities.

Secret societies rarely appeared in popular literature until relatively recently. Readers of Ayn Rand suggest that her novel
Atlas Shrugged
deals with values associated with the Illuminati, which may explain the basis for the book's popularity. Communists were a familiar target in American novels of the 1950s, but in this case familiarity appears to have bred boredom; communists were an everyday element in news broadcasts, which made them feckless villains in fiction for the most part.

It took Ian Fleming, and progeny such as Robert Ludlum and John Grisham, to address readers’ fears of shadowy conspirators exerting widespread power over the lives of ordinary people. A variation on this plot device blasted the Harry Potter series into the records as history's most successful publishing phenomenon in children's books and literature generally. At least three secret societies, such as the Order of the Phoenix, are involved in the Potter plots, each threatening not only the hero and his cohorts but the security of the world itself.

Harry Potter is fun, of course, even when he's scooting over the moors pursued by shadowy villains. This is unusual. In spite of near-farcical aspects of organizations such as the Rosicrucians, likely born of a college-student prank, and the unfortunate death of a Freemason initiate, secret societies are rarely subject to parody in popular culture. On television, Jackie Gleason's early 1950s comedy
The Honeymooners
frequently included the International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons, whose lodge members acted suspiciously like Masons and Shriners, engaging in code words and flapping the tails on their coonskin caps to each other. More recently, and more
acerbically, the television series
The Simpsons
has included the Stonecutters in several of its plots. Clearly based on Freemasonry, the Stonecutters meet weekly in a pyramid-shaped building where they honor their Sacred Parchment before drinking heavily and playing Ping-Pong. For proof of their power, the Stonecutters claim to control the British monarchy and prevent the metric system from being used in the USA. It is an accurate, devastating and hilarious parody of the lighter side of secret societies.

In a semi-serious vein, film adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond series were among the first to spark Hollywood's interest in international conspiracies, partially because Fleming managed to tap the public's fascination with evil secret societies. Bond's nemesis spectre (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) elevated the idea of foreign-accented men with sociopathic qualities and unlimited sources of wealth to an over-the-top level that was consistently entertaining but never within the realm of reality. Similarly, later films based on books by Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton and others usually based their conspiracies and conflicts on clashes between the American cia, the British mi6 and the Russian kgb, with periodic excursions into the realms of Nazi revivals and the Israeli Mossad.

It took Frances Ford Coppola's
Godfather
trilogy to depict Cosa Nostra with shocking realism, and
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, the first of Steven Spielberg's
Indiana Jones
series, to explore contemporary antics of ancient secret societies with a healthy injection of clichéd Nazi villains.

Perhaps because its current existence is, for the most part, unconfirmable, the Bavarian Illuminati often serves as murky villains in movies and video games. The 2001 film
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
reversed the traditional order of games spinning off movies when it adapted a best-selling video game into a major film production starring Angelina Jolie and John Voight. The plot, not surprisingly considering its source, suggests a new definition for silliness, pitting Ms. Jolie's character against the
Illuminati's ability to control time as part of that organization's plans for world domination.