The Western Political and Corporate Elite: The Bilderberg

Offcial website, www.bilderbergmeetings.org

The Bilderberg is reputed to run the most exclusive and private annual conferences. It is the prime "mover and shaker" organisation in the world, comprising presidents, royal families, ministers, top industrialists and financial leaders.

It strictly consists of "Western" elite, i.e. of the USA and Europe. It explicitly excludes anyone from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa.

Name origins

There are two explanations about the origins of the name "Bilderberg."

It took its name from the Hotel de Bilderberg (www.bilderberg.nl/uk/) in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands, where the first meeting took place in May 1954. The hotel was built in 1918 and renovated in 1997 and believed to be named after Farben Bilder,  a key executive member of the German Third Reich (1933-45).

Farben Bilder helped organize an elite group to direct Heinrich Himmler's "Circle of Friends," and one of the Bilderberg founders was Dutch Prince Bernhard, who was born in Germany, had been a member in the Reiter SS.

Dutch Prince Bernhard admired Bilder, and wanted a similarly elite group to manage global economic events so there would never be another Great Depression.

Farben Bilder was also behind the ownership and naming of IG Farben, a German chemical industry conglomerate.

IG Farben's name is further taken from Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG, founded in 1925 and became defunct in 1952. It was born out of a syndicate of six dye-making corporations, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, Griesheim-Elektron, Weiler Ter Meer. It was broken up and liquidated "due to the severity of the war crimes committed by IG Farben during World War II." It was succeeded by the original constituent companies, BASF, Bayer and Hoechst.  

Wilhelm Karl Keppler (1882-1960) was a German businessman, the chairman of another IG Farben subsidiary Braunkohle-Benzin AG and one of Adolf Hitler's early financial backers. "To strengthen the Nazi Party's ties with business and industry, Keppler founded the Circle of Friends of the Economy (Freundeskreis der Wirtschaft, which is sometimes referred to as the "Keppler Circle"). Keppler joined the SS (#50,816) in August 1932 and founded the Circle of Friends of Heinrich Himmler, which was a continuation of the Keppler Circle."

Farben Bilder played an important role in organizing the "Circle of Friends" of Heinrich Himmler by sponsoring the meetings. Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) was a key Nazi leader.

Keppler's nephew, Fritz J. Dranefuss, was the personal assistant to Heinrich Himmler. Of the forty members of the Circle of Friends, which provided ample funds for Himmler, eight were executives of I.G. Farben or its subsidiaries.

Founders

The Bilderberg was created by four people:
1. British politician, Denis Healey (now Lord Healey of Riddlesden) (1917-). At the time he was the Labour Party's MP and Shadow Secretary of State. He later went on to be the British Secretary of State for Defence from 1964 to 1970, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1974 to 1979 and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party (1980-83). A member of the Fabian Society Executive Committee and a councillor of the Royal Institute of International Affairs before he became a politician.  
2. Joseph Hieronim Retinger (1888-1960), a Polish of German Jewish origins and the son of the private legal counsel and advisor to the eminent Polish nobleman Count Wladyslaw Zamoyski. He was the founding secretary of the Bilderberg Group from 1954-1960. According to Denis Healey, from his autobiography 'The Time of My Life' (Penguin, 1989), the Bilderberg Group was "brain-child of Joseph Retinger, a Pole who had settled in England after the Great War, married the daughter of the socialist intellectual, E.D. Morel, and worked as a secretary to Joseph Conrad, another Polish expatriate." (http://home.teleport.com/~flyheart/retinger.htm)
3. American businessman, David Rockefeller, was head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), member of the Business Council, the US Council of the International Chamber of Commerce, and founder of the Trilateral Commission.
4. The Netherlands' German-born Prince Bernhard (1911-2004), the husband of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and father of her four children, including the former monarch Queen Beatrix. At the time, he was an important figure in the oil industry and held a major position in Royal Dutch Petroleum (Shell Oil), as well as Société Générale de Belgique - a powerful global corporation. He gave the go-ahead, but the idea for the Bilderberg belonged to Joseph H. Retinger (also known as L'Eminence - His Grey Eminence).

Prince Bernhard, whose family, the Hapsburgs, is said to have descended from the Roman Emperors, was a former Nazi SS officer while he was a student. He first became interested in the Nazis in 1934, during his last year of study at the University of Berlin. He was recruited by a member of the Nazi intelligence services, but first worked openly in the motorized SS. Bernhard went to Paris to work for the firm IG Farben, which pioneered Nazi Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht's slave labour camp system by building concentration camps to convert coal into synthetic gasoline and rubber. Bernhard's role was to conduct espionage on behalf of the SS.

According to the April 5, 1976 issue of Newsweek, this role, as part of a special SS intelligence unit in IG Farbenindustrie, had been revealed in testimony at the Nuremberg trials.

It was created to make the USA and Europe work together harmoniously and as a supportive wing of NATO and the Marshall Plan which was launched in the 1940s.

That pioneering meeting grew out of the concern expressed by many leading citizens on both sides of the Atlantic that Western Europe and North America were not working together as closely as they should on matters of critical importance.

Origins of the Bilderberg


The initiative for the first convocation came from Joseph Retinger, in conjunction with Paul Rijkens, President of Unilever (which was formed in 1930 when the Dutch margarine company ‘Margarine Unie’ merged with British soapmaker Lever Brothers).

The significance of Unilever needs to be examined. Unilever is one of the largest and most powerful multinational corporations in the world and one of the top European companies. In the 1950's the advisory directors of Unilever were as follows (attention is being drawn to the links with the Rotterdam Bank and Philips, the electrical firm):
* H.M. Hirschfield, also on the board of Philips and Rotterdam Bank and with the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs during the war, and after it Commissioner for the Marshall Plan in the Netherlands;
* K.P. Van der Mandel, also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;
* Paul Rijkens, also on the board of Rotterdam Bank;
* H.L. Wolterson, also chair of Philips and on the board of Heldring and Pearson (linked with the Rotterdam Bank);
* P S.F Otten, also President of Philips (and married to a member of the Philips family)

One of the unusual features of Unilever is its bi-national structure (Stokman et al, 1985): it is a jointly owned Anglo Dutch company, with a fifty-fifty structure and a unitary board. This was a very useful device during the war, when operations could be shifted easily from the Netherlands to the Britain.

Philips had a similar arrangement under a Dutch law called the Corvo Law, whereby in an emergency it could divide itself into two parts, which it did when the Germans invaded: one with its HQ in Germany and the other American. Both these parts got large military contracts during the war, playing a role on both sides (Aaronovitch 1961, pp. 110-11).

The immediate chain of events leading to the setting up of the first conference were as follows. Prince Bernhard set off for the USA in 1952 to visit his old friend Walter Bedell Smith, director of the newly formed CIA. Smith put the organisation of the American end into the hands of Charles D. Jackson (special assistant for psychological warfare to the US President), who appointed John S. Coleman (president of the Burroughs Corporation. and a member of the Committee for a National Trade Policy), who in turn briefly became US chair of Bilderberg.

Charles Jackson was president of the Committee for a Free Europe, forerunner of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) whose extensive operations financing and organizing anti-Communist social democratic political intellectuals has only recently been fully documented (see Coleman 1989); and ran the CIA-financed Radio Free Europe (RFE) in Germany. Earlier, he had been publisher of Fortune magazine and managing director of Time/Life magazines, and during the war was deputy head of psychological warfare for Eisenhower. At the time of Bernhard's visit he was working with a committee of businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic, which approved the European Payments Union.

It was thus a European initiative, and its aim was, in official language, to 'strengthen links' between Western Europe and the USA.

Retinger drew up a selected list of people to be invited to the first conference with Prince Bernhard and Rijkens, from the European countries of NATO plus Sweden.

The resulting group consisted of the Belgian and Italian prime ministers, Paul van Zeeland and Alcide de Gasperi (CDU), from France both the right wing prime minister Antoine Pinay and the Socialist leader Guy Mollet; diplomats like Pietro Quaroni of Italy and Panavotis Pipinelis of Greece; top German corporate lawyer Rudolf Miller and the industrialist Otto Wolff von Amerongen; the Danish foreign minister Ole Bjorn Kraft (publisher of Denmark’s top daily newspaper); from England came Denis Healey and Hugh Gaitskell from the Labour Party, Robert Boothby from the Conservative Party, Sir Oliver Franks from the British state, and Sir Colin Gubbins, who had headed the Special Operations Executive (SOL) during the war; on the American side, the members of the first Bilderberg assembly included: George Ball, who was head of Lehman Brothers, a former high State Department official, where he was architect of the policy of Atlantic Partnership, and later member of the Trilateral Commission. Ball was closely associated with Jean Monnet, owing to his work as legal counsel for the ECSC and the French delegation to the Schuman Plan negotiations.

Dean Rusk - US Secretary of State 1961-69, earlier President of the Rockefeller Foundation 1952-60, having succeeded John Foster Dulles, himself an earlier Secretary of State. A close personal friend of Jean Monnet whom he had first met at Versailles in 1918 as well as of Dean Acheson, Truman's Secretary of State and the true author of the Marshall Plan.

The final list was 67. Since then, the group enlarged somewhat, but the steering group remained the same size. Each year, the "steering committee" devises a selected invitation list with a maximum 100 names.

After Retinger's death in 1960, the role of secretary was taken over by Dutch Socialist Ernst van der Beughel, headed the Dutch bureau for the Marshall Plan and later became Chairman of KLM airlines and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

After the resignation of Prince Bernhard who served as chairman for twenty-two years. He was succeeded by Lord Home of the Hirsel, former Prime Minister of Britain, who chaired the meetings for four years.

At the 1980 meeting, Lord Home turned over the chairmanship to Walter Scheel, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In 1985, Mr. Scheel resigned, and was succeeded by Lord Roll of Ipsden, President of S. G. Warburg Group plc.

At 1989 meeting, Lord Roll turned over the chairmanship to Lord Carrington, who still chairs the meetings.

Retinger, as a Catholic, was viewed by many as an agent of the Vatican, acting in liaison between the Pope and the Father-General of the Jesuit Order then.

One of Retinger's renowned achievements in European politics was the founding of the European Movement (arising out of the Congress of the Hague), leading to the establishment of the Council of Europe on 5th May 1949. With its headquarters in Strasbourg, the Council Executive Committee provided Retinger his first major platform for his expansive ideology. From his earlier days at the Sorbonne, Retinger believed in greater European unity, both in military and economic terms. It was also at the same time when his interest in the guidance of the Jesuit order manifested itself. He spent a great deal of his time fulfilling these ambitions. He suggested to Premier Georges Clemenceau a plan to unite Eastern Europe-involving the merging of Austria, Hungary and Poland as a tripartite monarchy under the guidance of the Jesuit order. Clemenceau, doubtful of the Vatican-inspired plan, rejected Retinger's proposal outright. This plan labelled Retinger, thereafter, as a Vatican agent.

Retinger was a man who could make an appointment with the President of the United States just by picking up the telephone. In 1952, Retinger proposed a secret conference to Prince Bernhard, which would involve the NATO leaders in an open and frank discussion on international affairs behind closed doors.

The Prince thought it was a grand idea, and they formed a committee to plan the conference. Bernhard briefed the Truman administration about the meeting in 1952, and although the idea was warmly embraced in the U.S., the first American counterpart group was not formed until the Eisenhower administration.

CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith and C.D. Jackson were key players in organizing the American counterpart group, heavily influenced by the Rockefeller dynasty, whose Standard Oil holdings competed with Bernhard's Royal Dutch Petroleum. From then on, the Bilderberg business reflected the concerns of the oil industry in its meetings.

At early meetings of the Bilderberg, attendees expressed frustration with American politics, then in the throes of McCarthyism, whose nationalist ideology stood in the way of global planning. C. D. Jackson tried to quell their fears by saying, "Whether McCarthy dies by an assassin's bullet or is eliminated in the normal American way of getting rid of boils on body politics, I prophesy that by the time we hold our next meeting he will be gone from the American scene."

The occasion of the first meeting has outgrown the hotel, but the Dutch link remains. Among several European royals who attend as occasional guests, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and her husband come regularly. Bilderberg's tiny secretariat sits in The Hague, the Netherlands. The meetings now take place by informal rotation in countries of the Atlantic community. Each country has two steering committee members. (The British ones have included Lord Carrington; Denis Healey – a former British MP, Defence Minister, Chancellor for Margaret Thatcher; Andrew Knight, the one-time editor of The Economist magazine and is now executive chairman of the 'rival' News International, which runs The Times and the Sun, and which is funded by the Oppenheimers and the Rothschilds; and Martin Taylor, the ex-CEO of Barclays Bank.)

Some of the Bilderberg-friendly global corporations are Xerox, Heinz, Fiat, Barclays bank and Nokia, which donate hundreds of thousands of dollars needed for the meetings. The group does not accept unsolicited donations from non-Bilderberg corporations.

Bilderberg meetings are held in remote places, and attendees are encouraged to leave spouses and aides at home, to not use prepared texts, and to conduct discussions in English as much as possible.

Director and advisory board members include Gianni Agnelli of Fiat, Dwayne Andreas (controlling shareholder of Archer-Daniels Midland), Zbigniew Brzezinski (former national security advisor in the Carter administration), Lord Carrington (former British foreign and defense minister and secretary-general of NATO and close business partner of Henry Kissinger), Andrew Knight (one time editor of the Economist and is now executive chairman of the 'rival' News International, which runs The Times and the Sun, and which is funded by the Oppenheimers and the Rothschilds), Richard Perle (of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, former U.S. assistant secretary of National Defense and one of the champions of the Strategic Defense Initiative and Euro-missile deployment, and part of the American President George Bush’s neo-conservative cabal), Paul Volker (former Federal Reserve chairman), and George Will (U.S. right-wing columnist and commentator), to name just a few.

"Providentially, the world became more accessible for me as Canada became less commodious," Conrad Black said in his biography, "A Life in Progress". "It was from Bilderberg that our company's eventual vocation as an international newspaper organization arose."

It was felt that regular, off-the-record discussions would help create a better understanding of the complex forces and major trends affecting Western nations in the difficult post-war period.

It meets regularly (presumably on a once-a-year basis) at various locations around the world, always in extreme secrecy, often at resorts controlled by either the Rockefeller or Rothschild families. The Rothschild family is the leading European force within the Bilderberg Group, sharing its power with the American-based Rockefeller family. The internationalist group has a revolving membership of several hundred participants composed of elites from the United States and Western Europe, primarily—almost exclusively—from the NATO countries. (Representatives from the former Soviet Union and East Bloc countries attended meetings since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bilderberg maintains an extremely low profile and seldom, if ever, publishes reports or studies (for the public, at least) under its own official aegis. Bilderberg participants denied the groups very existence for decades until forced into the open by the glare of media publicity, generated largely by the Spotlight magazine and its publisher, Liberty Lobby.

Since the constitution of several monarchies of the Western Europe bans members of their royal families from playing an active role in the political process, the Bilderberg meetings provide this exact forum and platform for them.

The first (Bilderberg) meeting was convened under the chairmanship of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who served as chairman for twenty-two years. He was succeeded by Lord Home of the Hirsel, former Prime Minister for the United Kingdom, who chaired the meetings for four years. At the 1980 meeting, Lord Home turned over the chairmanship to Walter Scheel, former President of the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1985, Mr. Scheel resigned, and was succeeded by Lord Roll of Ipsden, President of S. G. Warburg Group Plc. At 1989 meeting, Lord Roll turned over the chairmanship to Lord Carrington (former Chairman of the Conservative Party, former British Foreign Affairs Minister during the reign of Margaret Thatcher, former NATO secretary general, trustee of the right-wing Zimbabwe Democracy Trust and close business partner of Henry Kissinger) who still chairs the meetings.

Participants are invited to the Bilderberg meeting by the Chairman, following his consultations and recommendations by the Steering Committee membership, the Advisory Group and the Honorary Secretaries-General. This approach ensures a full, informed and balanced discussion of the agenda items. The individuals are chosen based on their knowledge, standing and experience. They attend the Bilderberg in a private and not in an official capacity. There are usually about 120 participants of whom about two-thirds come from Europe and the balance from North America. About one-third are from government and politics, and two-thirds from finance, industry, labour, education, communications. The previous participants maintain that, at the meetings, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken and no policy statements are made.

In 1991, David Rockefeller was quoted while speaking at the June, 1991 Bilderberg meeting in Baden, Germany at a meeting also attended by then-Governor Bill Clinton and by Dan Quayle: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years."

He went on to explain: "It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

Bilderberg policy is carried out by the Bilderberg Steering Committee, made up of 24 Europeans and 15 Americans; and by the Advisory Committee, which forms a much smaller group within the organization. All American members of the Steering Committee are members of the CFR. The permanent Bilderberg Secretariat is located at: 1 Smidswater, the Hague, the Netherlands. Their address in America is at: 345 E. 46th Street, New York City (which is also the location of the Trilateral Commission, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace).

The American Friends of Bilderbergers, with offices in New York City, is an IRS-approved charitable organization that receives regular contributions from Exxon, Arco, and IBM; while their meetings are funded by the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment Fund.

Prominent personalities who are/have been associated with the Bilderberg?
(Not in any order)

• Lord Carrington-Chairman of the Board, Christie's International plc; Former Secretary-General NATO and Trust and close business partner of Henry Kissinger.
• Hilmar Kopper-Spokesman of the Board of Managing Directors, Deutsche Bank AG
• Ashdown Paddy, the Leader of the Liberal Party of Britain participant in a 1989 meeting. As a young man, Ashdown served in the Royal Marines and the Special Boat Service—the navy’s equivalent of the SAS. Afterwards he is supposed to have worked for the British intelligence service MI6, whilst serving as First Secretary of the British mission to the United Nations in Geneva. Towards the end of his career as Liberal Democrat leader in the late 1990s, he made several expenses-paid trips to Yugoslavia courtesy of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. The pro-capitalist institute operates mainly in East European countries and boasts of the “exceptional levels of cooperation and coordination” between Western institutions in the Yugoslav election campaign in 2000, which led to the overthrow of Milosevic.
• Percy Barnevik – ex-President and CEO, ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, Sweden
• James D. Wolfensohn - President, World Bank
• George W. Ball - Former Under-Secretary of State, USA
• Jacob Wallenberg, chairman of the board of commercial bank SEB and head of Sweden's influential Wallenberg family whose empire has a finger in almost every big Swedish company. Executive Vice-Chairman, Investor AB. Vice-Chairman: The Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation; Atlas Copco; Electrolux SAS. Member of the Board: ABB Ltd; WM-data; Swedish Federation of Enterprise; Nobel Foundation, EQT.

EQT is a private equity fund acting as an investment advisor to all funds, has offices in Stockholm, Sweden, Helsinki, Finland and Copenhagen, Denmark. EQT realizes its business concept by acquiring medium-sized companies in the Nordic countries and serving as an active owner in close co-operation with the management of the companies acquired.

Documents from The Second European War contain evidence that Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg used their Enskilda Bank to help the Nazis dispose of assets seized from Dutch Jews who died in the Holocaust. According to extensive documentation, the Wallenberg bank also provided illicit cover so a German company could operate in the United States - with help from a future US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. The documents indicate that the company, Bosch, paid its fee in gold, but that the Wallenbergs insisted that the gold be used to buy Swiss securities because they feared the gold had been stolen by the Nazis. So dominant that Jacob was the country's unofficial business emissary to the Nazis while Marcus played the same role with the Allies. Even so, US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. warned in one wartime document that he considered both brothers to be pro-Nazi, citing their ``collaboration and/or connivance in facilitating major German capital operations in Sweden.'' One of those operations, according to documents unearthed by the Dutch scholars, was a Wallenberg agreement to purchase for resale securities that the Nazis forced Dutch Jews to surrender after the Nazis occupied Holland in 1940. After lengthy post-war negotiations, the Enskilda Bank returned securities to the Netherlands, only after a stipulation that the Wallenbergs had obtained them without any knowledge that they had been plundered from Jews. But the Dutch authors uncovered a US State Department report noting that Marcus Wallenberg subsequently admitted that the bank dealt in securities looted by the Nazis. After the war began in 1939, the Enskilda Bank agreed to become the straw owner of the American Bosch Co., a subsidiary of the German firm of the same name, so that it could avoid having its assets confiscated if the United States entered the war. Dulles, acting as the Wallenbergs' attorney, handled the details. But after Pearl Harbor, American officials saw through the ruse, and seized the company's shares. But when Bosch in 1943 arranged to pay Enskilda for its services, the fees, equivalent to about $12 million today, were obtained in gold from the German government. According to the documents found by the Dutch, one of the Wallenberg brothers - the documents do not say which - ``asked where the gold actually came from and suggested in case of an objectionable origin to sell it and buy in its place Swiss or Swedish securities.'' Bosch complied with the request.

The Wallenberg Group dominates the Swedish industry, in particular the multinational engineering sector.

• Former IMF heads Michel Camdessus and Stanley Fischer. Before joining the International Monetary Fund, Michel Camdessus was governor of the Bank of France and has spent most of his career working for the French government.
• The chairmen of carmakers Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, and DaimlerChrysler, Juergen Schrempp
• Former British finance minister Kenneth Clarke
• Dutch Queen Beatrix
• Xerox Corp CEO Paul Allaire
• Former USA President Bill Clinton
• Former Portuguese Prime Minister António Guterres
• Lord Conrad Black a British and Canadian media baron and former owner of the Telegraph group (Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph). The Telegraph Plc was controlled by Conrad Black, a senior member of the Trilateral Commission. Directors of the Telegraph include Sir Evelyn De Rothschild, chairman of N.M. Rothschild & Sons Ltd, Rupert Hambro, a member of the Hambro family and a director of the Anglo-American Corporation, which is controlled by the Oppenheimer family. Also on the board of The Telegraph Plc is Henry Keswick, chairman of Jardine Matheson Holdings Ltd. Henry Keswick's Brother is Chairman of Hambro's Bank Ltd and a director of De Beer's Consolidated Gold Mines Ltd. De Beer's is controlled by the Oppenheimer Family.
• Richard Holbrooke,
• Peter Mandelson, British Northern Ireland Secretary
• Portugal’s President Jorge Sampaio
• Lord Robert Owen
• Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister
• Helmut Kohl former German chancellor
• Lord Peter Carrington
• Queen Sophia of Spain
• Bernander, John G. - Director General, Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation
• Bolkestein, Frits - Commissioner, European Commission
• Borges, António - Vice Chairman and Managing Director, Goldman Sachs
• Castries, Henri de - Chairman of the Board, AXA, France
• Cebrián, Juan Luis - CEO, Prisa (El Pais)
• Dahrendorf, Ralf - Member, House of Lords; Former Warden, St. Antony's College, Oxford
• Dam, Kenneth W. - Deputy Secretary, US Department of Treasury
• David, George A. - Chairman of the Board, CocaCola H.B.C. S.A.
• Dinh, Viet D. Assistant Attorney General for Office of Policy Development, USA
• Draghi, Mario - Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, Goldman Sachs International, Italy
• Eldrup, Anders - Chairman of the Board of Directors, Danish Oil & Gas Consortium, Denmark
• Feldstein, Martin S. - President and CEO, National Bureau of Economic Research, USA
• Ferreira, Elisa Guimarães - Member of Parliament, Former Minister of Planning, Protugal
• Fortescue, Adrian - Director General, Justice and Internal Affairs, European Commission
• Frum, David - American Enterprise Institute; Former Special Assistant to President Bush
• Gigot, Paul A. - Editorial Page Editor, The Wall Street Journal
• Greenspan, Alan - Chairman, former Federal Reserve System
• Groenink, Rijkman W.J. - Chairman of the Board, ABN AMRO Bank N.V, Netherlands
• Halberstadt, Victor - Professor of Economics, Leiden University; Former Honorary Secretary General of Bilderberg Meetings, Netherlands
• Hoagland, Jim - Associate Editor, The Washington Post
• Krauthammer, Charles - Columnist, The Washington Post
• Kravis, Marie-Josée - Senior Fellow - Hudson Institute Inc. USA
• Mathews, Jessica T. - President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, USA
• McAuliffe, Terry - Chairman, Democratic National Committee, USA
• McDonough, William J. - President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
• Mitchell, Andrea - Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, NBC News, USA
• Moïsi, Dominique - Deputy Director, French Institute of International Relations, France
• Montbrial, Thierry de - Director, French Institute of International Relations, France
• Moskow, Michael H. - President, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago
• Ollia, Jorma - Chairman of the Board and CEO, Nokia Corporation, Finland
• Padoa-Schioppa, Tommaso - Member of the Executive Board, European Central Bank
• Perle, Richard N. - Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
• Polenz, Ruprecht - Member of Parliament, CDU/CSU, Germany
• Prestowitz, Jr., Clyde V. - President, Economic Strategy Institute, USA
• Racicot, Mark - Chairman, Republican National Committee
• Randa, Gerhard - Chairman and CEO, Bank Austria AG, Austria
• Rumsfeld, Donald H. - Secretary of Defense, USA
• Schrempp, Jurgen E. - Chairman of the Board of Management, DaimlerChrysler AG, Germany
• Schweitzer, Louis - Chairman and CEO, Renault S.A, France
• Seidenfaden, Tøger - Editor-in-Chief, Politiken, Denmark
• Shevtsova, Lilia - Senior Associate, Carnegie Moscow Center, Russia
• Siegman, Henry - Council on Foreign Relations, USA
• Soros, George - Chairman, Soros Fund Management, USA. George Soros, the global financial manipulator who is believed to be operating under orders from the House of Rothschild.
• Steinberg, James B. - Vice President and Director, Foreign Policy Studies Program, USA
• Summers, Lawrence H. - President, Harvard University, USA
• Sutherland, Peter D. - Chairman and Managing Director, Goldman Sachs International; Chairman BP Amoco
• Thornton, John L. - President and co-CEO, The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. USA
• Tiilikainen, Teija H. - Director of Research, Centre for European Studies, Finland
• Treschow, Michael - Chairman, Ericsson, Sweden
• Trichet, Jean-Claude - Governor, Banque de France, France
• Vranitzky, Franz - Former Federal Chancellor, Austria
• S Wallenberg, Jacob - Chairman of the Board, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken
• Whyte, Kenneth - Editor, The National Post, Canada
• Williams, Gareth - Leader, House of Lords; Member of the Cabinet, Britain