Retinger was born in Poland in 1888, and from the age of 25 was involved in Paris, London and Stockholm in the international intrigues of the British Fabian Society (in particular to promote the Bolshevik revolution and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). From 1949 to 1953 he was responsible for setting up what was to become in 1954 the Bilderberg Group, and especially for finding a suitable individual as its head.
Holding a high position in Polish Freemasonry in the Order of the White Eagles, J.H. Retinger was the roving representative of his order and was well connected with the hierarchy of the Jesuit Order, with for example Reverend Father Gruber, the Vatican’s expert on secret societies, whom he had met in 1928. He was also in regular contact with Count Coudenhove-Kalergi (of whom more later) who had launched the Paneuropean Movement in Vienna, giving expression in Continental Europe to the objectives of the Anglo-American Fabian Society.
What his few biographies never reveal, is that, with the help of his British Fabian friends, Retinger had numerous contacts with individual Soviet officials. It was Retinger, incidentally, who “negociated” a “reconciliation” of sorts between Moscow and the Polish government in exile in London. Five years later, Retinger was to be found associating with the first “European” movements and groupings instigated by Jean Monnet (whom he had known well during the war). Finally, in 1954, Retinger launched the Bilderberg Group, helped by his friends David and Nelson Rockefeller, Bernard Baruch, the Dulles brothers and other officials of the CFR, such as trades unionists Irving Brown, Omer Becu and, later, Lane Kirkland.
He approached Bernhard of the Netherlands to be the Group’s President, seeing in him a socialite and aristocrat, ready to play a part on the international scene… and whom he expected to be able to “control” thanks to little-known aspects of his private life.
The blockade of Berlin by the Soviets in 1948 caused serious rifts in centrist and left-wing circles who, both before, during and after 1939-1945, had been dreaming of a united continental Europe. Divided between pro-Germans and pro-Soviets in 1940, in the face of the USSR threat after 1948, they united behind either either pro- or anti-Americanism.
Most socialists followed the example of Council President Paul Ramadier and Guy Mollet, and supported the recent founding of Nato. Behind them was a minority campaigning with Jean Monnet to establish what in 1951 would become the Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the Common Market. In contrast, a left-wing party took up a neutralist and pacifist position, attracting a flood of communists, after former Trotskyite David Rousset exposed the Soviet Gulag, and the defector Kravchenko, a Moscow economics specialist, revealed the hidden side of Stalinism.
This was the climate in which the plans and ulitmately the birth of the Bilderberg Group were being hatched. In 1954 this group would provide the leadership for all shades of “Europeist”, with the ideas and under the conditions of secrecy exposed in 1971 by American Congressman John Rarick.
The governing principle was to fight not Communism, but only deviationist Stalinism; to oppose any expansionism by Moscow, already a reality in Eastern Europe, in order to prevent it spreading to the West - that was all. I understood this reasoning at the time, when on several occasions I happened to be in the company of Thomas Braden, a CIA project leader. My extremely enthusiastic response to the anouncement of the allocation of funds to support refugees from the East, met with ironical reply from Braden: - These are funds to keep them under control, to prevent them from causing armed confrontation with the Soviets. There’s no question of doing anything else, he ended curtly. This conveyed, albeit crudely, the opinion of Jean Monnet and other European federalists.
The Bilderberg Group
What is fascinating about having eyes and ears at the annual Bilderberg meetings, is to observe how the proposals of certain rapporteurs very soon appear as the rules of conduct for European diplomacy but on Euroatlantic terms, especially at critical moments during East-West confrontation or negotiation. One example was the Bilderberg meeting of 25 to 27 April 1986, in Scotland. This critical moment occurred during a period of great unrest, much more serious than was reported in the press, which rocked the Soviet Empire and the Politburo itself in Moscow.
Mikhail Gorbachev now emerged from the shadows, and became leader of the Communist Party. What nobody noted, except our own publications (the Impact in Geneva, Le Quotidien de Paris, our Lettre d’Information) was that Gorbachev had already been head of the state “Organs” for two years; that is to say, that he supervised the intelligence and counter-espionage services, including those controlling Arab-Islamic terrorism around the world.
The 34th Bilderberg meeting in Scotland divided the 115 participants into five working groups. Key theme of the day was taken by Group I on the Evolution of the USSR, with principal rapporteur, CFR member and Rand Corporation analyst, A.L. Horelick, assisted by Theo Sommer, Editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and Trilateral member; by Arthur Hartmann, American Ambassador to Moscow, and by Dennis W. Healey, Fabian Society member and Labour Party spokesman in the House of Commons, also member of the Royal Institute in London, equivalent of the American CFR.
In the weeks that followed this conference, the world began to receive the image of a quasi-democratic, pro-Western Gorbachev, open-minded about Europe. Horelick gave the signal: on 25 April, he assured the conference that Gorbachev would accept the right of every country to choose its own road to socialism… the right to cooperate with Western socialists… with the Churches, etc. A new worldlay ahead. It was essential to avoid confrontation with Moscow,to seek agreement. Furthermore, “if the West sought to compete on military terms, the Russians would undoubtedly emerge as the winners” (page 19 of the confidential report). Therefore, Gorbachev should receive support in all areas. In plenary session, protests came from a dozen participants, but to no effect.
Group II dealt with the topic: “A Western response to the Soviet challenge”, and an identical signal was given. The rapporteurs Michel Rocard, Henry Kissinger and ex-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt proposed friendly exchanges with Gorbachev.
Kissinger suggested that – instead of wasting time on East-West arms surveys – he should be offered “a future plan”, in short a sort of partnership… Moscow would agree to withdraw without fuss from Afghanistan and cooperate with the West. What Kissinger did not say, was that if the USSR did in fact pull its troops out of the country, it was because advisers in Washington had forced the hand of the State Department and the Pentagon to supply the Afghans with Stinger missiles. As a result, Soviet domination of the airspace by its helicopters armed with missiles and minelayers, would come to an end. 270 aircrafts were shot down in 1987, in a war that was putting a serious strain on the USSR budget, already in a state of collapse. But the USSR withdrawal, as relayed by Bilderberg to Washington, and from there to the Western world, would be credited to goodwill on the part of Gorbachev.
After the April 1987 Bilderberg meeting, the American members of Bilderberg who also had places on the Trilateral Commission, forced Ronald Reagan’s hand to hold a “summit” meeting with Gorbachev in Geneva, a meeting at which we were present behind the scenes. In fact, the 318 members of the CFR in the White House and the government ministries had inundated Reagan with reports and advice concerning this meeting. For the insiders, it was a first step towards the secret “accommodations” to be finalised at a later date by visits of CFR bigshots to East Berlin, shortly before and at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The techniques of infiltration
There is no point in speculating or searching the archives of the initiates to find the proof for our repeated assertion that the masterminds of Bilderberg and other “clubs” had been silently infiltrating governments, parliaments and institutions in the countries whose sovereignty they wished to annul: with his unqualified enthusiasm for his subject, Jean Monnet’s biographer cites texts which speak for themselves.
Those of John McCloy, for example, Bilderberg member since 1964, but for a long time already a key globalist. Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Defence from 1941 to 1945, and of course CFR member, it was McCloy’s decision in 1944 that in future communists would have the right to receive commissions in all sections of the army. President of the World Bank from 1947 to 1949, he was American High Commissioner in Germany until 1952. He therefore had a sound understanding of the mysteries of the Adenauer government and of Jean Monnet’s movement. Later, when tackling the problems of disarmament, McCloy the Republican had contacts with the Democrats on the left (for example, Eleanor Roosevelt) and was also, behind the scenes, one of the leading figures in that outgrowth of Freemasonry, the “World Fraternity” group, in which it was considered that, seen from certain angles, “several communist experiments are worthy of consideration, and must make a rapprochement with the West possible”.
Soon after, as Chairman of the Ford Foundation, he was glad to make donations to the American Left. Then in 1966 he became President of the Atlantic Institute, with branches in Europe, offices in Paris and loyal friends, not to mention agents, within the European action groups.
Out of affection for Jean Monnet, he wrote*: “He avoided the offices of the political parties, because he judged he could operate better from the touchline. His talent lay in joining forces with those holding the reins of power…”. This short extract led Éric Roussel to write that Jean Monnet, “wanted to create a Europe tied in closely with, and consequently fully dependent on, the United States” (Our underlining).
The techniques of infiltration are revealed in a long quotation from a text by Henry Kissinger, who told Roussel, “The Americans working for the reconstruction of Europe after the war happened to be Democrats. But Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller or myself were also close to Jean Monnet… His committee was a success. He created a climate, mobilised people in charge. Monnet had infiltrated every institution…” (Page 849).
This was not news to us, because for several years we had belonged to the French association responsible for lending support to the Atlantic Alliance, and had come across as many men and women with no axe to grind as writers or analysts, of whom the least that can be said was that their reputation rested on a moral and financial foundation provided by a variety of American agencies based in France. The evidence for this came to me from an incident in 1975 when I was working one afternoon as a member of a special commission. Through friends in Berlin I had learnt that, 24 hours earlier, East Berlin had made illegal amendments to two articles in the constitution of the City of Berlin. I immediately made a note of this and placed a copy in front of each of my neighbours. The session chairman was Frenchman Raymond Aron (Bilderberg 1966). An American at our table passed one of the copies to him, but he mumbled that the question was not on the agenda, and that there was no call for it to be tabled… Aron was supported by a few British delegates. Theirs obviously being a minority view, the chairman closed the session.
This violation of the East-West agreements on the constitution of the City of Berlin has never been referred to since, even though the amendments to the text permitted the East to interfere at any time in the zones under the authority of the Western Powers. Even if that was a step the East German and Soviet hawks never dared take, it nevertheless meant that the unwritten rule of the powerful Kissinger and his friends, to the effect that it was necessary to “come to an accommodation” with the Kremlin, was indeed being applied by those within the Atlantic Alliance** who took their orders from the liberal American “masterminds”. Moreover, another incident shortly after brought me up against the Englishman Sir Frank Roberts. I knew of his Fabian connections and his links to international firms helping the survival of the Soviet satellite system. He was chairing a commission supposedly exposing money laundering activities in developing countries, in particular in Central and South America, and I had in my possession a file showing the involvement of Moscow and Cuba in these illegal routes (in the period 1977-1980). Again, neither the USSR nor Cuba was to be implicated. Sir Frank Roberts conveyed to me that this was “not on the agenda”! Nor was it during the campaigns of Jean Monnet’s Action Committees, nor for the management of the Bilderberg Group.
* Cf. Jean Monnet, by Éric Roussel.
** Pierre de Villemarest had been one of the official reporters on the subject of the Helsinki Accords and on several of the infringements committed by the Eastern block.