Secret Societies: Inside the World's Most Notorious Organizations (41 page)

Lt. Col. Thursday:
I suggest the Apache have deteriorated, judging by a few of the specimens I have seen on the way out here.
Captain Yorke:
If you saw them, sir, they weren't Apaches.

Like the Apaches referred to by Wayne's character, any clandestine group posing a threat to broad sectors of the public will seek to either conceal or camouflage its true motives. Thus, the most dangerous organizations are either unknown or have achieved success at the practice of “hiding in plain sight.” On
that basis, “recognizable secret societies” is both an oxymoron and a clue that the danger they represent, if any, is minimal.

Assessing the risk that each known group represents could begin by categorizing them according to four classifications:

1. fictional or historical societies that may be operating in a clandestine manner,

2. organizations whose stated premise is demonstrably benign or non-threatening,

3. groups whose conspiratorial relationship has yet to be revealed, and

4. government departments exerting power beyond their formal mandate.

FICTIONAL AND HISTORICAL GROUPS
. Of this grouping, the Bavarian Illuminati draws the most persistent attention from conspiracy advocates, as it has for 200 years. Its founder Adam Weishaupt, an ex-Jesuit who nevertheless is labeled a Jew by some members of the right-wing conspiracy crowd, managed to attract a few prominent individuals to his society before it collapsed, first from suppression by the Bavarian government and later by Weishaupt's own rejection of his philosophy.

Coincidental with the expansion of the Illuminati came the radical upheavals of the French Revolution, an event so apocalyptic in nature that many conservative observers insist on viewing it as the product of a vast conspiracy. They refuse to accept that common French citizens, outraged at the antics of the ruling class for so many years, could succeed without the aid of powerful assistance from various clandestine organizations. Surely the overthrow of the French throne, they argue, could never spring from the minds and intentions of a mass of near-illiterates, echoing skeptics who reject the notion that William Shakespeare could be so erudite and prolific. The revolutionists, they propose, must have been manipulated by a secret society, and the Number One culprit is the Illuminati.

Critics of the Illuminati acknowledge that Adam Weishaupt founded the movement, but few know he repudiated it.

Established as a secret group concealed beneath the skirts of the Masons, and with the success of the French Revolution as assumed proof of its power, the Illuminati became a fixation among conspiracy theorists. No group was more industrious in promoting this idea, nor as classic in its use of the paranoia that secret societies can generate, than the John Birch Society, founded in 1958. Birchers joined the blatantly anti-Semitic Nesta H. Webster in the contention that the Illuminati had masterminded the French Revolution for its own ends. Interestingly, both ignored the fact that the French monarchy was reinstated after the fall of Napoleon in 1815.

Birch Society founder Robert Welch went on to assert that the Illuminati's agenda had been hijacked in the early 1800s by the Rothschild banking family as a means of controlling U.S. foreign policy. The family's banking success and closed structure provided all the raw material Welch needed. Established in the late eighteenth century by Mayer Rothschild, the financial house owed its success to Rothschild's tactic of installing each of his five sons in various centers across Europe, including Frankfurt, Vienna, London, Naples and Paris. He set up marriages for his sons to various closely related family members, keeping the bank's operations entirely within the family and operating it in a closed, clandestine manner. This latter aspect enabled the company to maintain total discretion about the size of its wealth as well as its multiple business connections and achievements, providing a fertile ground for people like Welch. Meanwhile, the family shield, a clenched fist gripping five arrows, suggested a belligerent attitude not normally associated with bankers.

Robert Welch lectured John Birch Society members to achieve their goals by operating as a secret society.

The Rothschild connection, according to Welch and others, also explained how an organization as large and powerful as the Illuminati managed to escape detection for 200 years. Obviously, the wealth of the Rothschilds had been employed, but the group's association with Masonry was at the heart of the cover-up, Welch declared. Various other commentators, from the inexorable Nesta H. Webster to Jacob Katz, author of
Jews and Freemasonry in Europe
, argued that the Illuminati had assumed control of German Freemasonry and relocated its headquarters to Frankfurt. There, it recruited a number of prominent Jewish leaders and financiers, including Rabbi Zvi Hirsch and Rothschild chief clerk Sigismund Geisenheimer, creating, as one observer described it, “a secret society within a secret society.” Welch put all the weight of his once influential power behind this idea, generating sufficient momentum to keep the speculation rolling fifty years later.

The importance we should place on the idea that a society managed to obscure proof of its existence over two centuries while manipulating global economics, politics and armed conflicts is minimal. How, for example, could the Illuminati maintain total secrecy among its members when various elements of the Mafia have divulged that organization's deepest secrets, defying in some cases even blood bonds? Have the lips of Illuminati supporters really been hermetically sealed for over 200 years?

Convinced that the U.S. was threatened by the Illuminati, whose goals of world domination included betraying U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations and running the world via a global socialist government, Welch began urging his followers in 1960 to support a “Get Us Out of the un!” campaign. They should, Welch advised, create influential cells of opposition and covert action by “joining your local pta at the beginning of the school year, get your conservative friends to do likewise, and go to work to take it over.” Perhaps only Welch failed to recognize that he was proposing the creation of a new secret society, masquerading as a public service organization to aid the education
of children but actually dedicated to effecting its own international agenda.

Nothing exists to prove that the Illuminati did not die with its founder, who regretted and rejected the principles originally proposed by him. Until trustworthy evidence to the contrary appears, the Illuminati remains alive only in the fertile imaginations of computer game creators and their players, and in the minds of anyone who still believes wisdom may be found among the detritus of Robert Welch's cold war meanderings.

BENIGN OR NON-THREATENING ORGANIZATIONS
. Employing a “hide in plain sight” strategy, these may openly declare their membership, announce their intentions, and declare that they function on behalf of the greater good. They may also avoid the trappings associated with “traditional” secret societies, including initiation rites, mystical ceremonies and vows of silence.

With so much latitude, every group from the Salvation Army to a neighborhood investment club could qualify as a dangerous secret society in the minds of the incessantly paranoid, but one organization in recent years has led all the rest as a candidate for evil intentions: The Bilderberg Group.

Bilderberg is often associated with the Trilateral Commission, founded in 1973 to promote closer cooperation between Europe, Japan and North America; and the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank dedicated to increasing America's understanding of the world. These associations leave the group open to accusations that it is actively involved in various schemes to exert global control of financial, military and diplomatic activities. Those concerned about Bilderberg's objectives note that it is not merely a question of how this control is applied; it's also a question of by
whom
. Heads of state in democratic monarchies such as Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands and others are prevented from playing an active role in the political process, they claim, but Bilderberg provides precisely this arena, subverting the will of democratic nations and recalling hints of the Divine Right of Kings.

Decisions made during Bilderberg conferences supposedly include the selection and approval of candidates to run for top political office in all of the world's great democracies; without Bilderberg approval, the argument contends, presidential candidates in the U.S. and potential prime ministerial leaders in Britain, Australia, Canada and other parliamentary countries cannot achieve power.

Other condemnations include wide-ranging but nonspecific claims that Bilderberg members pull the world's strings either in concert with each other or in conjunction with the Illuminati, Masons and the rest of the usual suspects. On a bizarre note, the group has been accused of eliminating warfare as a means of controlling and directing nationalistic goals and ideas among European nations, as though substituting warfare with diplomacy were a dangerous activity.

Curiously for a society with such alleged power and influence, its members and the locations of its gatherings, where upcoming agendas regarding world domination are submitted and approved, are proclaimed in advance.

The Bilderberg Group owes its existence and notoriety to the skill, connections and vision of one man who, almost fifty years after his death, is still referred to as
l’éminence grise
. Joseph H. Retinger, raised by Jesuits, possessed enormous political instincts, incisive intelligence and much charm, all of which enabled him to influence the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church to the point where he became the key linkage between the pope and the father-general of the Jesuit Order. At Retinger's funeral in 1960, one of the eulogizers recalled: “I remember Retinger in the United States picking up the telephone and immediately making an appointment with the President, and in Europe he had complete entrée in every political circle as a kind of right acquired through [the] trust, devotion and loyalty he inspired.”

Retinger's original goals in life attest to a socially conscious system of values. He spent some time in Mexico as a youth, supporting efforts to launch an effective trade union movement there during the 1920s, and convincing the Mexican government to nationalize U.S.-controlled oil interests. If the scant biographical information available on Retinger is true, he was the stuff of legends. During World War ii, he acted as a political aide to Polish general Sikorski, and in 1943, at age fifty-eight, he parachuted into Nazi-occupied territory near Warsaw to direct sabotage missions.

Joseph H. Retinger (
right
): The pope and the U.S. president always took his calls.

Retinger's interests and achievements encompassed the revival of devastated postwar Europe, and in 1949 he was instrumental in launching the Council of Europe, headquartered in Strasbourg. As a member of the council's executive committee, Retinger began fulfilling his dream of avoiding conflicts similar to the world wars that engulfed Europe in 1914–1918 and 1939–1945 by creating a European economic, political and military union. One way to achieve this was via international organizations whose long-term commitment to progress would neutralize the short-term ideological conflicts that continually erupted between governments. The benefits, to anyone with the slightest understanding of the morass that sucked nations into World War i, would prove inestimable. A neutral multinational group expressing the will of powerful interests within a multitude of countries could defuse the kinds of outbursts, strung in a chain of explosive treaties and obligations, that detonated war in 1914.