<nettime> Bilderberg papers revealed

["Editorial Department" <edit.lon@bigissue.com>]

HIDDEN AGENDA

In the first of a two-part series, Gibby Zobel uncovers how the global
power elite decides our future at the shadowy Bilderberg Summit each year. 
Documents from the secret summit - leaked to The Big Issue - reveal what
they said about money and war

For nearly 50 years an elite group of the West's most powerful men and
women, a shadow world government, have met in secret. Tony Blair is in the
club. Every US president since Ike Eisenhower has been too. So are top
members of the British Government. So are the people who control what you
watch and read - the media barons. Which is why you may never have heard
of Bilderberg. 

"Lines of black limousines, unmarked except for a 'B' on the windscreen,
swept in, sometimes accompanied by police escorts, sometimes not," says an
eyewitness of this year's meeting in Portugal. "A helicopter was overhead,
and other security officers were prudently patrolling the hillsides. The
policy on duty at the gates made it crystal clear that they were only the
tip of the security iceberg."

For two-and-a-half days, relaxing in exclusive luxury amid vast armed
security, the powerful leaders discussed past and future wars, a European
superstate, a global currency, genetics, and the dismantling of the
welfare state. Unaccountable, untroubled and unreported, the Bilderberg
meetings have formed the basis of international policy for decades. Last
year freelance journalist Campbell Thomas was arrested just for knocking
on doors near the clandestine gathering in Turnberry, Scotland. He
remained in custody for eight hours. Other journalists were told that even
the Bilderberg menu was confidential (a move they named 'Kippergate'). A
serving police officer told 'The Big Issue': "Special Branch and CIA were
everywhere - they were calling the shots." 

Never in its 47-year history has the content of these discussions been
made public. Until now. 'The Big Issue' has uncovered the Bilderberg
Papers - the secret minutes of this year's meeting in Portugal. Some of it
is banal, some of it sensational. It blows the lid off the thoughts of
presidents, chairmen of multinational companies, world bankers, Nato
chiefs and defence ministers. 

The meetings are shrouded in such secrecy that Prime Minister Tony Blair,
when asked last year in the House of Commons, failed to disclosed his own
attendance at Bilderberg in Athens in 1993.

So, what have they been hiding? 

- Nato gave Russia carte blanche to bomb Chechnya

- 'Dollarisation' could be the the next step after the single European
currency

- A senior British politician thinks New Labour is "consolidating the
victories of the Right". On welfare cuts he adds: "It might be easier for
somebody who claimed to be a socialist to impose change." 

- After Kosovo Nato is in danger of mimicking a colonial power

Although 14 media chiefs and journalists from across eight countries
attended this year, none of them chose to tell their readers of the
meeting.  It would not serve their interests to be cut out of the elite
loop. With an invite-only guest-list, covert operations and such deafening
silence, it is little surprise that conspiracy theories have thrived, from
the anti-semites who believe in a Jewish global elite, to the paranoid
delusions of the radical left. The effect has been to leave the importance
of the meetings tainted by association. It suits the Bilderbergers
perfectly. 

The Bilderberg meetings began in a Dutch hotel on May 29 1954, from where
it gets its name. 'The Economist', in a rare reference to it in 1987, said
that the importance of the meetings was overplayed but admitted: "When you
have scaled the Bilderberg, you have arrived."

At last year's meeting, former defence minister George Robertson, who is
now Nato secretary-general, planned strategies with the Bilderberg chair
and ex-Nato chief Lord Carrington. 'Observer' editor-in-chief Will Hutton
attended Bilderberg in 1997. He believes that it is the home of the "high
priests of globalisation". "No policy is made here," he says, "it is all
talk. But the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy
is made worldwide."

The 64-page leaked document - The Bilderberg Papers - is dated August
1999.  The powerful transatlantic clique at the private hideaway included
new Northern Ireland secretary Peter Mandelson MP, environmentalist
Jonathon Porritt, Kenneth Clarke MP, former US secretary of state Henry
Kissinger, billionaire oil and banking tycoon David Rockefeller, Monsanto
chief Robert B Shapiro, and the head of the World Bank, James D
Wolfensohn.

Although Asian and African politics and economics were discussed the
continents' countries had no seats at this summit. The official
eight-strong UK delegation included bankers Martin Taylor, former chief
executive of Barclay's and Eric Roll, a banker for Warburgs. They were
joined by Martin Wolf of The Financial Times and two journalists from The
Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, who, the minutes
indicate, prepared this document. 

The papers are marked 'Not for Quotation'. It states: "There were 111
participants from 24 countries. All participants spoke in their personal
capacity, not as representatives of their national governments or
employers.  As is usual at Bilderberg meetings, in order to permit frank
and open discussion, no public reporting of the conference took place."
None of the quotes in each of the 10 sections are directly attributable to
any named individual, but the moderator and panellists in each discussion
are listed. It is made perfectly clear, however, who is saying what. It is
not known who else is in the audience, but their comments are identified
by their country and profession. 

Over two weeks, we report on the central themes of this year's meeting.
This week: money and war. Next week: genetics - what the head of Monsanto
and a leading British environmentalist discussed behind closed doors. 

what they said about... money

Giants of the global banking world, in a debate titled 'Redesigning the
International Financial Architecture', discussed the concept of
'dollarisation' which is sure to send euro-sceptics into a frenzy. Around
the table were Kenneth Clarke MP, Martin S Feldstein, president of the
National Bureau of Economic Research, Stanley Fisher, deputy managing
director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Ottmar Issing, board
member of the European Central Bank and Jean Claude Trichet, governor of
the Bank of France. 

Bilderberg is understood to have been the birthplace of the single
european currency. The deputy director of the IMF opens by remarking: "It
is worth noting that this is the first Bilderberg meeting where the euro
is fact rather than a topic for discussion." 

During the discussion, "One of the panellists was sure that if the euro
worked, more regional currencies would emerge. Others raised the question
of dollarisation as a possible cure." 

There is a dissenting voice: 

"The only possible reason for surrendering control of your monetary policy
to Washington (where nobody would make decisions on the basis of what
mattered in Buenos Aires [or London]) is the fairly rotten financial
records of the governments concerned."

what they said about... war

Despite Tony Blair's presidential stance over Kosovo, Nato's historic war
was pilloried at Bilderberg. "The mood at the meeting was surprisingly
subdued... most of the speakers concentrated on the downside of the
conflict,"  begins the discussion on Kosovo. 

Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, weighs in, saying Kosovo
"could be this generation's Vietnam". Nato is in danger of replacing the
Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in a series of permanent protectorates, he
said. Another panellist warned that troops could be there for 25 years. 
Kissinger felt that this left Nato open to accusations of colonialism.
"How did one persuade countries like China, Russia and India that Nato's
new mandate was not just a new version of 'the white man's burden' -
colonialism?" asked Kissinger. 

Charles D Boyd, executive director of the US National Study Group, said
Kosovo is now a wasteland, a humanitarian disaster comparable with
Cambodia.  "Nato used force as a substitute for diplomacy rather than as a
support for it... it used force in a way that minimised danger to itself
but maximised danger to the people it was trying to protect."

An unnamed British politician "wondered whether the [Nato] alliance could
hang together after the end of the war. He warned that "there would be
little popular enthusiasm for putting lots of resources into solving the
region's gigantic problems." 

Peter Mandelson told the group that "two roads stretch in front of Nato.
One leads to a new division of Europe, where the continent returns to its
ethnocentric ways. Under this scenario, the UN is fairly powerless, Russia
and China are excluded, and Nato is little more than an enforcer. The
second road is a little closer to the nineteenth century Europe, with all
the great powers - not just America and the EU, but Russia, China and
Japan co-operating."

>From The Big Issue, November 15-21 1999. More details from the papers
will be published on November 22.  www.bigissue.com


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