The Council on Foreign Relations: Big Business Think Tank That Dominates Government, Media, Universities, CIA, "Grassroots" Activism, and "Foreign Intervention" NGOs

By: Joël v.d. Reijden | Date: Aug. 4, 2022 | Updated: June 28, 2023 | MEMBERSHIP LISTS | NGO Study Center

Contents

1. Intro
   
   
   Funding
2. Big banks, tech, oil, mining, defense, pharma, etc.
3. Robber baron origins
4. The Pilgrims-CFR relationship
5. The CFR's "Rockefeller era": 1931-2017
   
   
   CFR pervasiveness
6. CFR members among Top 59 superclass: 98%, higher than the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, Atlantic Council, etc.
   
   
   CFR pervasiveness in government
7. CFR pre-secretary of state: 94% over the last 68 years
8. CFR pre-secretary of defense: 83% over the last 49 years
9. CFR pre-national security advisor: 79% over the last 64 years
10. CFR pre-CIA director: 57% overall, 83% over 35 years (1977-2012)
11. CFR pre-treasury secretary: 75% over the last 48 years
12. CFR pre-U.S. president: 20% (3 of 15) over the last 102 years
13. Closing thoughts on government pervasiveness
    
    
    CFR pervasiveness in the media
14. Near 100% of "big media" represented in the CFR
15. Quite a bit of "liberal CIA" and "new media" represented as well
16. CIA, CFR, media: all the same, at one point
    
    
    CFR pervasiveness in CIA-tied "foreign and domestic aid" NGOs
17. CIA, CFR, covert operations
18. CFR at the center of the "liberal CIA" foundations: Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Soros, etc.
19. CFR at the center of USAID, NED, IRI, NDI outsourced CIA operations
    
    
    CFR pervasiveness in education
20. CFR university trustees 1973-2022; Harvard from 40% to 0%; Yale 48% to 12%, Columbia 39% to 14%
21. 88% of top 20 English superclass anno 2023 an Oxford or Cambridge graduate
22. 67% of top 60 U.S. superclass anno 2017 a background at Harvard (27%), Yale (13%), Princeton (13%), Columbia (8%), or Oxford (12%)


23. Was the CIA indeed "top Ivy League"-dominated in the 1950-1970s?


24. Notes

"The Carnegie Endowment created something of a Frankenstein in building up its vast propaganda network ... indoctrinating our students with radical internationalism...

"The Council on Foreign Relations ... is [yet] another organizaton dealing with internationalism which has the substantial financial support of both the Carnegie Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation. [It too is focused on] promoting the globalism concept. ... The Council on Foreign Relations came to be in essence an agency of the United States government...

"This committee does not speak from an "isolationist" standpoint. It is obvious enough that the world has grown smaller and that international cooperation is highly desirable. ... But we feel ... that a public foundation has no right to promote globalism to the exclusion of support for a fair representation of the opposite theory of foreign policy."

May-July, 1954, U.S. Congress: House, Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations (Reece Committee), 'Tax-Exempt Foundations - Part 1', pp. 175-177. About the first and last time any study was done into the CFR and its ties to the "globalism concept".

"[David Rockefeller mentor John] McCloy has recalled: "Whenever we needed a man [in Washington] we thumbed through the roll of [CFR] members and put through call to New York." And over the years the men McCloy called in turn called other Council members. ...

"Richard Barnet, co-director of Washington's radically-oriented ["liberal CIA"] Institute for Policy Studies and a recently admitted Council member, says the Council has traditionally been "a way of certifying who the responsible foreign policy leadership is; it defined the recruiting pool.""

Nov. 21, 1971, New York Times, 'The Council on Foreign Relations -- Is It a Club? Seminar? Presidium? 'Invisible Government'?'.

Intro

From late 2020 on, the course of ISGP started to shift. For the first 15 years there was a lot of dedicated focus on the Pilgrims Society, the 1001 Club and Le Cercle Pinay to identify members of the ruling elite. While not necessarily inaccurate, as the network of globalist NGOs all had the same network surrounding David Rockefeller operating at its core, it wasn't ideal to overlook the more "basic" NGOs as the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission, NGOs in which David Rockefeller actually had the most "hands on" involvement for many decades on end.

The reason the author largely ignored the Council on Foreign Relations for the longest time in terms of doing detailed research on it, is because of all the hype surrounding it. The same went for Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission. There's a tendency to tune out when things are brought up too often, especially when the narrative (purposely) gets mixed with anything from Christian extremism about the "liberal-lefty elites" to chemtrails or even Holocaust denial. In addition, the other groups - The Pilgrims Society, 1001 Club and Le Cercle Pinay - were uncharted territory, making them much more interesting to research. At least personally to this author.

With this article, it is time to get back to very important basics with regards to the globalist movement.

FUNDING

Big banks, tech, oil, mining, defense, pharma, etc.

Before we discuss any pervasiveness of CFR members in the American government, it is important to understand where the money comes from; who is footing the bill. That would be: big business.

As the CFR reported in 2004, "over half of the New York–area membership and one-third of the total membership" consists of representatives of the "business community". 1 At the moment of writing, the biggest corporate donors are listed as the CFR's "corporate members". These are further sub-divided into "Founders" ($100,000+), a "Presidents' Circle" ($60,000+), and a "Premium Circle" ($30,000+). There's little point in adhering to this structure here, as the brackets in which corporations fall changes all the time. One year a corporation might donate $200,000, followed by several years of $25,000 to $75,000 - just to give an example. The important thing here is that corporate donors involves the same set of elite corporations, often over a period of decades. For those that have doubts about the veracity of the names below, here are a number of CFR donor documents:

• CFR corporate members 2010.
• CFR donor listing 2013-2014.
• CFR donor listing 2014-2015.
• CFR corporate members 2015.
• CFR corporate members 2022.

BANKS AND FINANCIAL SERVICES

1. JPMorgan Chase & Co.
2. Morgan Stanley
3. Blackstone Group
4. Lazard
5. KKR
6. Goldman Sachs
7. Rockefeller Group
8. Rohatyn Group
9. Warburg Pincus
10. Bank of New York Mellon
11. Rothschild N.A.
12. Soros Fund Management
13. Bleichroeder / First Eagle
14. Bank of America Merrill Lynch
15. Barclays
16. Citi
17. Credit Suisse
18. Deutsche Bank AG
19. UBS
20. BNP Paribas
21. BlackRock
22. Bridgewater Associates
23. American Express
24. Visa
25. Mastercard
26. McKinsey & Co.
27. PricewaterhouseCoopers
28. Deloitte
29. Nasdaq OMX Group
30. S&P
31. NYSE Euronext
32. Moody's
33. Abraaj Group

OIL AND MINING

1. Chevron
2. ExxonMobil
3. BP
4. Shell
5. Marathon Oil
6. ConocoPhillips
7. Duke Energy
8. Hess Corporation
9. Aramco Services
10. TOTAL S.A.
11. Occidental Petroleum
12. Noble Energy
13. Newmont Mining
14. Freeport-McMoRan
15. Alcoa
16. Rio Tinto
17. De Beers
18. Energy Intelligence Group

DEFENSE, AIRCRAFT INDUSTRIES, SECURITY

1. Lockheed Martin
2. Northrop Grumman
3. Boeing
4. Raytheon
5. Airbus Americas
6. United Airlines
7. Booz Allen Hamilton
8. DynCorp (defunct in 2021)
9. Marsh McLennan
10. KBR

SILICON VALLEY

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. Meta: FB, IG, WhatsApp
4. TikTok (since Aug. 2021)
5. PayPal
6. IBM
7. Dell
8. Palantir
9. Xerox
10. AT&T
11. Telefonica Int. USA
12. Verizon

MANUFACTURING

1. General Electric (GE)
2. Fluor Corporation
3. Toyota N.A.
4. Volkswagen of America
5. Hitachi
6. Mitsubishi
7. Mitsui
8. Tata Group

PHARMACEUTICAL

1. BASF
2. Bayer
3. GlaxoSmithKline
4. Johnson & Johnson
5. Merck
6. Pfizer

MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

1. Coca-Cola Company
2. PepsiCo
3. Nike
4. Sony
5. Bloomberg
6. McGraw-Hill
7. MacAndrews & Forbes
8. WarnerMedia
9. News Corp.
10. Thomson Reuters
11. The Economist Intel. Unit

LAW FIRMS

1. Sullivan & Cromwell
2. Milbank, McCloy

REMAINING

1. Deere & Company
2. Walmart
3. FedEx
4. New York Life
5. Tishman Speyer Properties
6. U.S. Chamber of Commerce

LATIN AMERICAN

1. Grupo Cisneros

Not listed are foundations as Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller. These started financing the CFR in the 1930s, and similarly played a role in the early financing of Bilderberg 2, the Trilateral Commission 3 and other elite think tanks. At the moment though, these foundations are not found in donor rolls of the CFR, likely because they are very important in directing funds towards "liberal CIA", "anti-establishment" media and action groups that help mimic a "free" society.

Robber baron origins

Corporate control over the CFR has always been a fact; only the names change. To illustrate, the earliest key members of the CFR represented the banks and corporations belonging to America's "robber barons" of the time: Morgan, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, a recently deceased Andrew Carnegie, Warburg, Schiff, Dulles, Du Pont, Mellon, etc. Here are a few examples from a founding November 1, 1922 list of CFR officers:

• Founding honorary chair was Elihu Root, a representative of the Carnegie interests. A cousin of Henry Luce and educated as a lawyer, Root was Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of war 1899-1904 and secretary of state 1905-1909. From 1910 to 1925 he served as the first president of the Carnegie Foundation, establishing Carnegie Europe during his period. Root also advised the founding of the Carnegie Corporation - a major "liberal CIA" financier for more than a century to come - serving as a trustee until his death in 1937. In 1919 he both visited the Versailles Peace Conference and prepared the final will of a dying Andrew Carnegie. Root remained an honorary chairman of the CFR until his death in 1937.


• Founding president was John W. Davis, chairman of Davis, Polk and Wardwell, a law firm whose main client was J.P. Morgan and Co. and the Morgan-controlled U.S. Steel. Davis stayed on as CFR president until 1936, and remained a director until his death in 1955.


• Founding CFR director Frank Polk was a partner in the same Davis, Polk and Wardwell, on top of serving on the board of the Rockefeller's Chase National Bank and Mutual Life as late as the 1920s and 1930s.
  
  Polk also was a lifelong friend of Cornelius Vanderbilt III, whose classmate he had been at Yale. He was Vanderbilt's best man at his wedding in 1896. In 1935 both Polk and Vanderbilt were involved in the founding of the obscure Association pour la Constitution aux Etats-Unis, alongside the Morgans, Rockefellers, Rothschilds and a certain Marshal Petain, soon to be the leader of pro-Nazi Vichy France. This is not particularly noteworthy, as countless CFR-tied interests were making huge investments in fascist Italy and Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. This is not the focus of this article though.


• Founding CFR director Paul Warburg was a leading member of the famous Jewish German-English-American Warburg banking house. Paul came to the United States with his brother Felix Warburg in 1902. Felix, another founding member of the CFR, had married the daughter of (alleged one-time Rothschild agent) Jacob Schiff in 1895 (among Felix's children would be Carola Warburg Rothschild). Paul and Felix both were long-time partners in Kuhn, Loeb & Co., headed by Jacob Schiff, whose son, Mortimer Schiff, yet another partner, would become yet another founding member of the CFR. In 1910, alongside representatives of the Morgan and Rockefeller interests, Paul was part of the secret Jekyll Island meeting that led to creation of the Federal Reserve System.


• Founding CFR director Otto Kahn was another decades-long partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. He was known for his expertise in reorganizing railroads, through which Kuhn, Loeb had become one of the main banking rivals of Morgans and the Rockefellers since well before the CFR was established.


• Founding secretary and treasurer Edwin Gay was editor of the New York Evening Post, owned by key Morgan banker Thomas W. Lamont, a founding member of the CFR.

The November 1, 1922 CFR list - considered "founding" in this article - contains 186 names. There are plenty of other noteworthy names to be found among the regular membership here:

• Thomas W. Lamont: Mentioned above. Partner of J.P. Morgan & Co. 1911, chair 1943- after Jack Morgan died. Present at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Trustee Carnegie Foundation.


• Russell C. Leffingwell: Member of the law firm of founding CFR vice president Paul D. Cravath 1907-1923. Present at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference. Partner of J.P. Morgan & Co. 1923-, chair 1948-1950. Trustee Carnegie Corporation. CFR president 1944-1946, chair 1946-1953.


• Felix Warburg: Mentioned above. Decades-long partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. under Jacob Schiff, together with Mortimer Schiff, Otto Kahn and his brother Paul Warburg, the latter two founding CFR directors.


• Mortimer Schiff: Mentioned above. A partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co., similar to his father, Jacob Schiff, who died in 1920, just before the CFR was founded.


• Albert Wiggin: Vice president of the Rockefeller's Chase National Bank 1904-1911, president 1911-1917, chair 1917-1932.


• Raymond Fosdick: Legal council of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. since 1920 and became involved in many different Rockefeller projects, from the Rockefeller Foundation to the Interchurch World Movement.


• John Foster Dulles: One half of the Dulles brothers, who came to run the CIA and the State Department under Dwight Eisenhower. The brothers grew up with the Rockefellers and ran the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm.


• Gates McGarrah: Executive chairman of the Rockefeller's Chase National Bank 1926-1927, a director of the Astor Trust and Astor Foundation, and the grandfather of future CIA director Richard Helms. That's not all. McGarrah was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York 1923-1926, an American director of the general council of the Reichsbank starting in 1924, and the founding president of the Bank for International Settlements 1930-1933.


• Herbert Lehman: Partner in Lehman Brothers from 1907 on, and ended up becoming governor of New York City from 1933 to 1942.


• Clarence Dillon: 1921-founder of the prestigious Wall Street banking house Dillon, Read & Co. His son, C. Douglas Dillon, was CFR director 1965-1976, and vice chairman 1976-1978. C. Douglas Dillon was particularly close to the Rockefellers. He co-founded the Business Committee for the Arts in 1967 and the German Marshall Fund in 1972, both with David Rockefeller; served as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation 1972-1975; and was appointed to serve under Nelson Rockefeller on the 1975 Presidential Commission on CIA Activities. From 1968 to 1972 he was president of Harvard's Board of Overseers 1968-1972, and from 1071 to 1975 he was chairman of the Brookings Institution.


• George Murnane: Banker connected to the Wallenbergs in Sweden, the Bosch family in Germany, the Solvays and Boëls in Belgium, China, as well as his CFR allies. Became the business partner of Jean Monnet, the post-World War II "founder of Europe", in Monnet, Murnane & Co. in 1935.


• T. Coleman du Pont: First cousin of the well-known heads of the Du Pont empire. President of E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Co. 1902-1915, but had family members Pierre S. and Irenee du Pont take over from him due to ill health.


• Owen D. Young: Director of General Electric who ended up becoming chair from 1922 to 1939. Chairman Federal Reserve Bank of New York 1938-1940.


• Lindsay Russell: Lawyer and important founder of the U.S.-U.K. branches of the Pilgrims Society in 1902 and 1903, and the one who inspired its Lion-Eagle emblem with the motto "Hic et Ubique" ("Here and Everywhere"). An important co-founder of the Pilgrims Society alongside Russell was General Lord Frederick Roberts, the general who fought the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa as devised by his allies: Lord Alfred Milner and Cecil Rhodes. The Pilgrims Society included Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and the first generations of Morgans, Rockefellers, Schiffs and Warburgs before the CFR came around. In 1907 Russell co-founded the Japan Society with John D. Rockefeller III, and served as president 1910-1919.


• John Hays Hammond: An American educated at Yale, Hammond ended up in charge of Cecil Rhodes' diamond and gold mines in South Africa - an infamous, British imperialist enterprise in turn financed by the Rothschilds. Hammond was forced to flee the country in 1896 after his role in the Jameson Raid become known: an attempted coup against the Dutch-heritage Boers and a precursor to the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. A friend of U.S. president William Howard Taft, an old Yale friend who had been invited to Skull & Bones, Hammond would continue his mining business in the United States.


• Henry W. Taft: Son of the co-founder of Yale's Skull & Bones secret society. Brother of William H. Taft. Member of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, similar to CFR founding director George Wickersham.


• Edward Mandell House: Unofficial but dominant advisor to U.S. president Woodrow Wilson from 1912 until his key role at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, where he negotiated the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations, and more privately the founding of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Secretly negotiating too many compromises in the eyes of President Wilson, the two men would never speak again after the end of the conference. House later supported the World Court and the presidency of FDR, which has always made him a particularly singled-out target of America's CFR-opposing John Birch Society.

Clearly the CFR was set up by the most dominant U.S. banking and business interests of the time, not a whole lot different from how the CFR would be operated a full century later. And we still need to get a little deeper into the latter.

The Pilgrims-CFR relationship

It might be worth noting that the financial interests using their front men to stack the early CFR board, for the most part were not directly involved in the CFR themselves, at least not as official members. In contrast, these interests were to be found as members in the older Pilgrims Society, founded in London in 1902 and in 1903 in New York City.

Along with Jacob Schiff and Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was present as early as 1907 at a Pilgrims meeting welcoming Lord Northcliffe. The first Rockefeller to officially join the Pilgrims though was Skull & Bones member Percy Avery Rockefeller, whose name can be found on 1914 and later membership lists. The son of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s brother, William, Percy was a director of the family's National City Bank, as well as W.A. Harriman & Company and a variety of other financial and mining corporations.

As for some of the other important names, Edwin Gould, a son of the notorious Rockefeller partner Jay Gould, was a founding member of the Pilgrims in 1903. Jacob Schiff was a founding member as well. Andrew Carnegie, Colonel John Jacob Astor IV, Paul and Felix Warburg, and Mortimer Schiff all were on membership lists from at least 1907 on. J.P. Morgan, Sr. joined in 1910, 3 years before his death. J.P. Morgan, Jr., Vincent Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt III (an executive) all appear on a 1914 list, alongside Percy Avery Rockefeller. Thomas Coleman Du Pont is on a 1924 list. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. started appearing alongside his cousin Percy between 1924 and 1926, with David Rockefeller joining his father in the 1945-1948 period. Andrew W. Mellon was reported to be involved in occasional meetings as early 1907, but doesn't appear in membership lists until about 1935, as an executive. His son, Paul Mellon, joined in the 1960s.

Do the names of these family patriarchs mean that the Pilgrims was - or even is - more elite? Not really. It's older and existed when J.P. Morgan, Sr. and Andrew Carnegie were still alive. Through much of its existence it has had a membership comparable in size to the CFR, except that it seems to have been more focused on New York City's upper class social network with a bit of a (British-Dutch-Huguenot-German) heritage aspect, and less on pure politics and foreign policy. Even members of the Van Rensselaer family were to be found in the Pilgrims early on, as were two sons of Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt, who married into the old, aristocratic Cecil family that has been advising the British crown for centuries.

Why didn't the remaining "robber barons" not immediately move over to the CFR? Well, some did, of course, and certainly very relevant ones. For the rest it could have been a deliberate move to not have (in)famous names as Astor, Vanderbilt, Morgan (Jr.) and Rockefeller associated directly with a private group clearly aimed at influencing the foreign policy of the United States. Why would they risk negative press from the moment the group is founded? Having J.P. Morgan, Jr. as president and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. as executive chairman in a group called "Council on Foreign Relations" is bound to draw a ton of headlines, even more so if there's an Astor and Vanderbilt among the directors at the same time. Even having all these names in the regular membership of a political group is not very "classy", not to mentioned smart. If, as an establishment, one is looking to control the foreign policy of a country, it would be wise for some of the bigger names to take a step back. They want control, so they put some of their most trusted front men in place, but by keeping some distance themselves it's easier for everybody, even for their flunkies in the press, to ignore the whole issue. It's just common sense.

What certainly is clear though is that there was great interest at the Pilgrims Society at what was going on at the Council on Foreign Relations. Those that came to run the CFR early on, if they weren't already members of the Pilgrims Society, often quickly found their way over there. For example, not present on either the 1914 or 1920 Pilgrims of the United States list were founding CFR president John W. Davis and founding honorary chair Elihu Root. As discussed in the precious chapter, they respectively were chief representatives of the Morgans and Andrew Carnegie, two individuals with Pilgrims Society membership. The CFR involvement of these two individuals clearly elevated their prestige and importance within the Eastern establishment, as a 1924 membership list reveals the men to be two of five vice presidents of the Pilgrims of the United States. In addition, founding CFR director Frank Polk was nowhere to be found either in the 1914 and 1920 Pilgrims lists. However, no later than 1924, three years after his first CFR involvement, he was serving as executive chairman of the Pilgrims Society.

The overlap between Pilgrims Society and CFR members, even CFR directors, remained great over the decades. This author did an analysis years ago, after having filled in the biographies of 1,800 historical Pilgrims Society members, mainly until the 1980s at that point:

"CFR members: 235: This means that about 18% of the US Pilgrims are CFR members. [More than 2,500 Pilgrims names had not yet been researched, so this number is almost certainly lower.]

"CFR executives: 47: About half of total leadership until late 1980s, including all four chairmen and all vice chairmen until at least 1991. All presidents until 1971, except Norman Davis."

Still, despite having a lot of the same financial interests at its core, the Pilgrims is a different type of group. It's also easy to demonstrate that since World War II and certainly since the founding of Bilderberg in 1954 (exclusive by CFR members on the U.S. side) and the rest of this complex network of privately-funded think tanks and conferences spanning the globe, that the CFR is where all the activity is. Many more relevant names can be found here, with the Rockefeller clique, as always, having been involved in both.

While it serves an Anglo-American diplomatic function, it can even be said that the Pilgrims Society largely still exists for nostalgia about times that do not exist anymore: of lords and ladies, dukes and barons, wealthy landowners, privately-run banks, western imperialism and even a non-Third World-dominated New York City. In other words, it's nostalgia about time periods that are actively being vilified by white elites in the West, if only to keep wave after wave of Third World immigration going until white society is completely economically "integrated" with Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The "Pilgrims" of the Mayflower, where the society is named after, are gone. Long gone. The new pilgrims are Ali, Moustafa, Nkuku, Bandile, Juan and Anandita. And they are here to take over. The Rockefellers, whose involvement has clearly been a driving force behind the continued existence of the Pilgrims Society for so many decades, played a very important role in that agenda. If anything, these elites are a disgrace to the society they have been involved in for decades on end.

The CFR's "Rockefeller era": 1931-2017

If we move back to discussing the CFR, individuals representing the Rockefeller interests clearly were involved from the very beginning in the CFR. That is only to be expected, because by the time the CFR was founded in 1921 the Rockefellers had built a fortune, as well as quite the reputation. It was way back in 1904 that Ian Tabell's McClure Magazine series 'The History of the Standard Oil Company' (1904) prominently exposed the deceitful "robber baron" practices that John D. Rockefeller, Sr.'s fortune was based upon. Despite such exposés, Rockefeller Sr.'s wealth would only increase, reaching a peak in 1913 with $900 million ($28 billion moving into 2023). A year later, his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., would be held responsible for the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, involving a strike-breaking attempt on a tent colony of coal miners and their families.

Until 1913 the tax rate in the United States was 0%, with federal income only being generated through tariff on consumption and import of goods - disproportionately taxing the poor who used much larger shares of their income on the consumption of goods. With World War I looming, federal income tax was re-introduced and quickly at much higher rates than the maximum of 2.5 to 10 percent it had been between 1862 and 1872. At the end of World War I, in 1918, the highest tax rate stood at 77%. Like magic, American "robber barons" founded tax-exempt "charitable foundations", at the same time continuing their relentless union-busting tactics. This involved anything from racially mixing and thus dividing their workforces, to the funding of foreign and domestic fascism, beloved by elites for its suppression of labor unions. Eventually these "charitable foundations" became important financiers of emerging privately-funded think tanks as the CFR.

The Rockefellers were very influential at the time of the founding of the CFR. But where maybe more prestigious families as Astor, Morgan, Carnegie and Vanderbilt kept dwindling in influence, the "Rockefeller Five" - a reference to the five sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: John III, Nelson, Laurance, Winthrop, and David - were only just beginning their careers.

The Rockefeller family became directly involved as members of the CFR in 1931 through John D. Rockefeller III, followed in 1938 by Nelson Rockefeller. In 1942 yet another brother of the then-emerging "Rockefeller Five" became a CFR member: David Rockefeller.

Unlike an Andrew W. Mellon, a "robber baron" who briefly was a non-resident (less-membership-paying) member over 1933-1937, the Rockefeller influence persisted. David Rockefeller would emerge as the most central and important leader of "the internationalist" movement 4, known as the "globalist movement" or "new world order" to outsiders; playing, among other things, a key role in the founding of Bilderberg in 1954 and the Trilateral Commission in 1973. David was a director of the CFR from 1949 on, and the group's chairman from 1970 to 1985. 5 Until his death in 2017, he remained a regular member of the CFR.

In this case though, "regular member" might not exactly be the best choice of words, as there is plenty of evidence that his influence within the halls of the CFR didn't exactly diminish after 1985. Many reasons can be brought forward to support that notion. A few:

• At the time of this writing, all but one of CFR (co-)chairmen after David Rockefeller first were members of his Trilateral Commission, with the lead candidate for a future chairmanship also already being a Trilateral, as well as working for Kissinger Associates and having a deep CIA history:
  
  
  • David Rockefeller: CFR member 1942-2017, director 1949-1985, chair 1970–1985. Key founder Trilateral Commission in 1973. David served on the international advisory council of his family's Chase Manhattan Bank (becoming JPMorgan Chase in 2000) until 2004, under the chairmanship of close ally George Shultz (chair 1990s-2009), with Henry Kissinger continuing to serve on the council into the 2020s.
  • Peter Peterson: CFR member 1970-, director 1973-1984, chair 1985–2007. Founding Trilateral Commission from 1973 until at least 1978, with his 1981-founded Peterson Institute for International Economics being represented in the Trilateral Commission by several individuals, including founding managing director C. Fred Bergsten. Peterson served as co-founder and chair of the Blackstone Group, the Kissinger Associates-partnered firm that held the lease on 7 WTC when it (controversially) went down on 9/11.
  • Carla Hills: CFR co-chair 2007–2017. Member of the Trilateral Commission from at least 1978-1984, 1995-, serving as an executive from at least 2003 and into 2022. Hills has served on boards that include AIG, Coca-Cola, JPMorgan Chase, Rolls Royce, Gilead Sciences and the Albright Stonebridge Group.
  • Robert Rubin: CFR member 1981-, co-chair 2007–2017. Rubin was a Goldman Sachs partner 1971-1992 and eventual co-chair of the bank in 1990-1992. From about 2008 on he has been very active alongside Henry Kissinger and others in China-oriented think tanks.
  • David Rubenstein: CFR director 2005-, vice chair 2012-2017, chair 2017–. Member Trilateral Commission since 2002, becoming an executive here in 2021. Rubenstein is a key founder and chairman of the Carlyle Group.
  
  
  • Jami Miscik: CFR member 2003-, director 2007-, co-vice chair 2017-. A member of the Trilateral Commission since 2014, she is the leading candidate for the CFR chairmanship in the future. The rest of her biography: CIA deputy director for Intelligence 2002-2005, preparing President Bush's daily intelligence brief, but apparently opposing tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. Worked on intelligence transmission for Obama November 2008 - January 2009. Member Obama's President's Intelligence Advisory Board 2009-2014, chair 2014-2017. Vice chair and CEO Kissinger Associates 2009 - still anno 2022, also serving as president 2009-2015. Trustee of the CIA's technology investment firm In-Q-Tel from 2010 and still anno 2022. Director Morgan Stanley 2014-, General Motors 2018-.
    
    

    

    Henry Kissinger, of course, is the most important protege of the Rockefellers. Initially he was close to Nelson Rockefeller. Next he became David Rockefeller's closest ally in building this privately-funded globalist NGO network. Kissinger is the number one connected individual in ISGP's Superclass Index, with lifetime involvement in more than 170 elite think tanks, conferences, commissions and social clubs.


• Footage from 2002 exists of David Rockefeller, at the opening of the CFR's Geoeconomic Center, thanking Dick Cheney, then-vice president under George W. Bush, for his support of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) treaty 6, an attempt to turn the whole of the Americas into one trade block, similar to the European Union. The attempt failed in 2005. Cheney is looking at David Rockefeller with the biggest puppy dog eyes, with Rockefeller being praised by the moderator of the event as a key founder of the center. 7
  
  

  

  Rockefeller also is the one asking the first question at the CFR event, the second coming from C. Fred Bergsten 8, an old Henry Kissinger assistant and subsequent founding managing director of the influential Peterson Institute for International Economics, where David and close associates as Peter Peterson of Blackstone (then-sitting CFR chair), David Rubenstein of Carlyle (future CFR chair), Carla Hills (future CFR co-chair), George Shultz, Paul Volcker, Maurice Greenberg, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, George Soros were sitting on the board in this period, plus tons of Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission veterans: Conrad Black, Sir Peter Sutherland, Jean-Claude Trichet, Jacob Wallenberg and many other names to be found in ISGP's Superclass Index. Lynn Forester de Rothschild joined the board in 2009. 9 World Bank "dissenter" Joseph Stiglitz 10, who had already allied himself with famous "liberal CIA" conspiracy journalist Greg Palast in 2001 11, was on the advisory board throughout the 2000s and beyond, as were other famous economists many people have at least vaguely heard of.
  
  It seems this is one way to semi-covertly dominate an important meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations: control who is asking the questions.


• We can also look at a 2006 picture where U2's Bono is having a closed-door meeting at the CFR with 8 leading members, including the CFR president, chairman and various directors. In the annual report for that year, David Rockefeller can be seen sitting next to CFR president Richard Haass.

Not overlooked should be the fact that David Rockefeller helped set up the CFR's Corporation Service in 1953 12, a kind of early "premium" membership that involved twice-annual closed-door meetings with leading administration officials, from senior CIA officials to treasury secretaries. 13 In that capacity he not only became a key fundraiser for the CFR, but also a coordinator for the funding of the entire globalist structure he and his associates were setting up - in effect a secret, permanent government meant to dominate all national, permanent governments through banking and monetary policy, the media, and the funding of left-right "grassroots" protest groups.

Such a conclusion is relatively easy to reach, because when one checks the funding of the roughly 2,000 NGOs ISGP has organized, the funding all comes from the same set of multinational banks, corporations and "liberal CIA" foundations. It doesn't matter whether it involves an NGO set up today, or if it was the Trilateral Commission in 1973, Bilderberg in 1954, or the Royal Institute of International Affairs and CFR in 1920 and 1921. In fact, Bilderberg was founded by CFR members 14, and the Trilateral Commission was founded by the corporate Bilderberg clique surrounding David Rockefeller. 15

In that sense, checking up on the funding of the CFR is rather uneventful and straightforward, as it is very predictable who the financiers are. It's very important information nevertheless. Key even. Those that pay the bills, tend to set the agenda, as even the New York Times speculated in 1971 16; and certainly can't justify funding something so consistently if it acted against their own interests. Or could turn against them.

CFR PERVASIVENESS

CFR members among Top 59 superclass: 98%

Now that we are fully aware of who is funding and controlling the CFR, we can look at some statistics involving the political class of the United States. Having the unique distinction of having gathered and structured about 2,000 globalist NGOs around the world (since 2020 with help), and having created a Superclass Index of individuals the most often found in these various think tanks, conferences, and social clubs, it has to be acknowledged that - certainly at the time of David Rockefeller's death in 2017 - membership and involvement in the Council on Foreign Relations is pretty much universal among the "Top 59" most connected American members of the globalist superclass. Why the heck a "Top 59" the reader asks? Well, a round number couldn't be achieved due to 5 people sharing the 60th spot.

A more dated in terms of latest NGO additions, but still good oversight of the top superclass members at the time of David Rockefeller's death in 2017.

Stunningly, only with Michael Chertoff official CFR membership could not be produced, making the CFR the most pervasive NGO among top globalist elites from America. Other well-known, key NGOs follow with quite some distance:

1. Council on Foreign Relations: 98% (58/59) official historical membership, with 100% (+1 person) involvement.


2. Trilateral Commission: 64% (38/59) official historical membership, with 65% (+1 person) known involvement.


3. Bilderberg: 61% (36/59) have visited at least once.


4. Atlantic Council: 51% (30/59) official historical membership, with 63% (+7 persons) known involvement.


5. Bretton Woods Committee: 54% (32/59) official historical membership.

Compare this with ISGP's previous "favorites" to tie the globalist movement as a whole back to:

1. Pilgrims Society: At least (25%) (15 out of 59) were members or speakers, as far as we know. David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, and Donald Rumsfeld have been among the official members.


2. 1001 Club: (3%) (2 out of 59) were members: David Rockefeller and the Rothschild family.


3. Le Cercle Pinay: (10%) (6 out of 59) have visited, as far as is known: David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

These low percentages do not mean that the last three NGOs are not important. Far from it. They contain the same "Rockefeller clique" core group. They will also give a researcher all kinds of crucial insights into the social, business and intelligence networks of the elite. But in terms of influencing national governments and societies on a day-to-day basis, in the modern era, it might be wise to look at the CFR first.

Be aware, these statistics are an approximation, as dozens and dozens of NGOs have been added to ISGP's NGO oversight since, shaking up the "top 59" of ISGP's Superclass Index. Considering the average age of top elites is over 70, individuals are always dying, and it is not practical to spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure out which memberships should be omitted from still living elites based on a certain point in time, even less so when "new" old NGOs are still being discovered. If the Rockefeller or Ford Foundation ever finances ISGP, maybe *then* we could put everything into a searchable database with timelines.

Despite that, the above statistics demonstrate without a doubt which think tanks and conferences are the most pervasive NGOs among top elites over the past century or so, and quite possibly for a few more decades still.

CFR PERVASIVENESS IN GOVERNMENT

CFR history of secretaries of state: 94% over the last 68 years

Maybe a slightly less unique statistic related to the CFR is just as powerful. The Council on Foreign Relations entry in ISGP's NGO Oversight has separate sections that list historical secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, national security advisors, and CIA directors. Why? To check the percentage of government officials who already were CFR members BEFORE they were appointed to the highest positions in the U.S. government.

The results are as follows:

20 out of 26 (77% of) secretaries of state between 1929 and 2022 were CFR members BEFORE being appointed to that position. 17 out of 18 (94% of) secretaries of state between 1949 and 2017 (68 years) were CFR members before their appointment.

1. Henry Stimson: Member 1924-; SecState 1929-1933.


2. The "left-wing", "anti-establishment" FDR appoints Cordell Hull the non-CFR secretary of state, who occupies that position over 1933-1944.





3. Edward Stettinius Jr.: His father, a Morgan banker, was a member 1924-, himself 1939-; SecState 1944-1945.


4. FDR's old vice president Harry Truman appoints non-CFR secretaries of state James Byrnes and General George Marshall, the latter a World War II hero whose name is tied to the Marshall Plan.


5. Dean Acheson Member 1948-; SecState 1949-1953.
6. John Foster Dulles Founding member 1922-; SecState 1953-1959.
7. Christian Herter Member 1930-; SecState 1959-1961.
8. Dean Rusk Member 1952-; SecState 1961-1969.


9. Nixon appoints William Rogers the non-CFR "anti-State Department" secretary of state (member 1975-; SecState 1969-1973), whose main function is to not get in the way of national security advisor and Rockefeller favorite Henry Kissinger.


10. Henry Kissinger: Member 1956-; SecState 1973-1977.
11. Cyrus Vance: Member 1968-; SecState 1977-1980.
12. Edmund Muskie: Member 1973-; SecState 1980-1981.
13. Alexander Haig: Member 1973-; SecState 1981-1982.
14. George Shultz: Member 1974-, director 1980-1982; SecState 1982-1989.
15. James Baker III: Member 1978-; SecState 1989-1992.
16. Lawrence Eagleburger: Member 1974-; SecState 1992-1993.
17. Warren Christopher: Member 1973-; SecState 1993-1997.
18. Madeleine Albright: Member 1976-, director 2004-; SecState 1997-2001.
19. Colin Powell: Member 1986-; SecState 2001-2005.
20. Condoleezza Rice: Member 1984-; SecState 2005-2009.
21. Hillary Clinton: Husband a member 1990-, daughter 2012-, herself (officially) never; SecState 2009-2013.
22. John Kerry: Member 1994-; SecState 2013-2017.


23. Trump appoints Rex Tillerson (2017-2018) and Mike Pompeo (2018-2021) as non-CFR "anti-establishment" secretaries of state. Tillerson, as chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, was a trustee of CSIS though from April 2005 to January 2017, all these years alongside Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Pompeo was a veteran of the defense and oil services industry, both of his companies invested in by the Koch brothers, who can't seem to decide whether they are "conservative CIA" or "liberal CIA" financiers. His congressional campaigns were also financed by the Koch brothers.


24. Anthony Blinken: Member 1991-; SecState 2021-.

CFR history of secretaries of defense: 83% over the last 49 years

Now let's take a look at the relationship between the CFR and secretaries of defense:

18 out of 28 (65% of) secretaries of defense between 1947 and 2022 were CFR members BEFORE being appointed to that position. 15 out of 18 (83% of) secretaries of defense between 1973 and 2022 (49 years) were CFR members before their appointment.

1. James Forrestal: Member 1927-; 1st SecDef 1947-1949 under Truman.


2. Louis Johnson: SecDef 1949-1950 under Truman. Never a CFR member.
3. General George Marshall: SecDef 1950-1951 under Truman. Never a CFR member.


4. Robert Lovett: Member 1927-; SecDef 1951-1953.


5. Charles Erwin Wilson: SecDef 1953-1957. Never a CFR member, but came to the Eisenhower administration as president and CEO of General Motors.


6. Neil McElroy: Member 1955-; SecDef 1957-1959.


7. Thomas Gates Jr. (member 1961-; SecDef 1959-1961) under Eisenhower was not a CFR member beforehand, but came to the administration as chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust and a partner in Drexel and Co. who rejected the presidencies of General Electric and Ford Motors.
8. Robert McNamara (member 1968-; SecDef 1961-1968) under JFK and LBJ was not a CFR member beforehand, but came to the administration as president of Ford Motors.
9. Clark Clifford (SecDef 1968-1969) under LBJ was never a member.
10. Melvin Laird (member 1974-; SecDef 1969-1973) under the "anti-liberal elite" Nixon was not a CFR member beforehand, although arguably Kissinger ran the whole administration.


11. Elliot Richardson: Member 1969-; SecDef 1973, under the "anti-liberal elite" Nixon.


12. James Schlesinger (member 1986-; SecDef 1973-1975) under the "anti-liberal elite" Nixon only became a CFR member later on.





13. Donald Rumsfeld: Member 1974-1979; SecDef 1975-1977 under Gerald Ford.
14. Harold Brown: Member 1969-; SecDef 1977-1981.
15. Caspar Weinberger: Member 1982-, but worked under George S. at Bechtel; SecDef 1981-1987.
16. Frank Carlucci: Member 1976-; DD/CIA 1978-81; SecDef 1987-1989; later chair Carlyle Group; chair CFR's 2001 'State Department Reform' report.
17. Dick Cheney: Member 1982-, director 1987–1989, 1993–1995; SecDef 1989-1993.
18. Les Aspin: Member 1973-; SecDef 1993-1994.
19. William Perry: Member 1999-; SecDef 1994-1997.
20. William Cohen: Member 1981-; SecDef 1997-2001.
21. Donald Rumsfeld: Member 1974-1979; SecDef 1975-1977, 2001-2006.
22. Robert Gates: Member 1983-; SecDef 2006-2011.


23. Leon Panetta (SecDef 2006-2011) has never been a CFR member, but has been involved in many other elite NGOs..


24. Chuck Hagel: Member 1999-; SecDef 2013-2015.
25. Ashton Carter: Member 1984-; SecDef 2015-2017.


26. Trump picked "anti-establishment" secretary of defense Gen. Jim Mattis, who never was a CFR member, but was close to George Shultz through the Hoover Institution and Spirit of America.


27. Mark Esper: Member 2008-; SecDef 2019-2020 under Trump.
28. Lloyd Austin: Member 2013-; SecDef 2021- under Biden.

National security advisors: 79% over the last 64 years

Next up are the national security advisors, a position that has existed within the U.S. government since 1953. The results:

19 out of 26 (73% of) national security advisors between 1953 and 2022 (69 years) were CFR members BEFORE being appointed to that position. If we cut off the first two national security advisors, at which point the position may still have been a bit experimental, we end up with 19 out of 24 (79%) over the last 64 years: from 1958 to 2022.

1. Robert Cutler: Never a member; NSA 1953-1955, 1957-1958.
2. Dillon Anderson: Member 1959-; NSA 1955-1956.


3. Gordon Gray: Member 1951-; NSA 1958-1961.
4. McGeorge Bundy: Member 1948-; NSA 1961-1966.
5. Walt Whitman Rostow: Member 1955-; NSA 1966-1969.
6. Henry Kissinger: Member 1956-, director 1977-1981; NSA 1969-1975.
7. Brent Scowcroft: Member 1974-, director 1983-1989; NSA 1975-1977; Kissinger protege.
8. Zbigniew Brzezinski: Member 1968-, director 1972-1977; NSA 1977-1981.


9. Richard V. Allen: Member only from 1999-; NSA 1981-1982.
10. William P. Clark, Jr.: NEVER a member; NSA 1982-1983; seemingly not to be confused with CFR member William Clark Jr., who was a member of the CFR until his death in 2008.


11. Robert McFarlane: Member 1983-; NSA 1983-1985.


12. John Poindexter: NEVER a member; NSA 1985-1986.





13. Frank Carlucci: Member 1976-; DD/CIA 1978-81; NSA 1986-1987; SecDef 1987-1989.
14. Colin Powell: Member 1986-; 1987-1989.
15. Brent Scowcroft: Member 1974-; director 1983-1989; NSA 1989-1993.
16. Anthony Lake: Member 1970-; 1993-1997.
17. Sandy Berger: Member 1985-; 1997-2001.
18. Condoleezza Rice: Member 1984-; NSA 2001-2005.
19. Stephen Hadley: Member 1993-; NSA 2005-2009.
20. Thomas Donilon: Member 1996-; member CFR task force 'Renewing the Atlantic Partnership' (2004), distinguished fellow 2013-; NSA 2010-2013.
21. Susan Rice: Member 1992-; NSA 2013-2017.


22. Gen. Michael Flynn: Never a member; NSA Jan. 22 - Feb. 13, 2017, for 23 days. Pizzagate disinformation pusher close to Blackwater's Erik Prince, JSOC's Gen. Stanley McChrystal, George Shultz (through the board of Spirit of America, together with McChrystal), and top neocon former CIA director James Woolsey (through the advisory board of ACT! for America and the Trump campaign). Became part of Trump's "anti-establishment" cabinet.


23. Gen. H.R. McMaster: Member 2004-; NSA 2017-2018; part of Trump's "anti-establishment" cabinet.
24. John Bolton: Member 2000-; NSA 2018-2019; part of Trump's "anti-establishment" cabinet.


25. Robert O'Brien: NSA 2019-2022. Part of Trump's "anti-establishment" cabinet. Not a CFR member, but since 2007 a member of the CFR's California-based sister group (and also CFR co-founded in 1995), the Pacific Council on International Policy. 17 Considering this is a virtual troll action, we could give O'Brien half a point. But for clarity's sake, let's not.


26. Jake Sullivan: Summer intern around 2000 at the CFR's president's office of Leslie Gelb. 18 Although never an official member (which is odd to say the least), as an intern was present at meetings and dealing with the CFR's top leadership - at CFR headquarters. Because of that, he is counted as a member here. NSA 2021-.

CFR history of CIA directors: 57-83%

Now let's take a look at the relationship between the CFR and CIA directors:

13 out of 23 (57% of) CIA directors between 1950 and 2022 were CFR members BEFORE being appointed to that position. 10 out of 12 (83% of) CIA directors between 1977 and 2012 (35 years) were CFR members before their appointment.

1. Roscoe Hillenkoetter: Never a member; CIA director 1947–1950.
2. Walter Bedell Smith: Member 1952-; CIA director 1950-1953 who co-founded Bilderberg, but did not attend the initial meeting.


3. Allen Dulles: Member 1927-1955, director 1928-early 1950s, secretary 1933-1945, vice president 1945-1946, president 1946-1950, non-resident member 1956-; CIA director 1953-1961.
4. John McCone: Member 1957-; CIA director 1961-1965.





5. Richard Helms: Member 1973-; CIA director 1966-1973. However, a son of huge Rockefeller-Astor-BIS-Federal Reserve banker and founding CFR member Gates McGarrah. While not done at the moment, we could easily give half a point here.


6. James Schlesinger: Member 1986-; CIA director 1973.
7. William Colby: Member 1975-; CIA director 1973-1976.


8. George H. W. Bush: Member 1972-, director 1977-1979; UN ambassador 1971-73; CIA director 1976-77.
9. Adm. Stansfield Turner: Member 1973-; director CIA 1977-1981.
10. William Casey: Member 1973-; SEC chair 1971-73; CIA director 1981-1987.
11. William Webster: Member 1987-; CIA director 1987-1991.
12. Robert Gates: Member 1983-; acting CIA director 1986-1987, CIA director 1991-1993.
13. James Woolsey: Member 1975-; CIA director 1993-1995.
14. John Deutch: Member 1976-, director 1995-1996; father CFR since 1958.


15. George Tenet: Member 1998-; CIA director 1996-2004.


16. Porter Goss: Member 1999-; CIA director 2004-2006.
17. Gen. Michael Hayden: Member 2003-; CIA director 2006-2009; director NSA 1999-2005.


18. Leon Panetta: Never been a member, before or after; CIA director 2009-2011.


19. Gen. David Petraeus: Member 1986-; CIA director 2011-2012, when forced to resign over an affair.


20. John Brennan: Never been a member, before or after; career CIA officer; director 2013-2017. Hardcore pusher of the "Trump collusion with Russia" disinformation from 2016, a Bilderberg visitor in 2017 after stepping down as CIA director, "senior advisor on world events" at Kissinger Associates by 2018, and shouting on national TV he's "embarrassed to be a white man" by 2021.
21. Mike Pompeo: Never been a member, before or after; CIA director 2017-2018. As mentioned before, thanks his career to funding by the Koch brothers.
22. Gina Haspel: Never been a member, before or after; career CIA officer, tied to the "extraordinary rendition" torture program; director 2018-2021, endorsed to the Senate for that post by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and countless notorious CIA officers: Cofer Black, David Cohen, Buzzy Krongard, Porter Goss, Gen. Michael Hayden, John Brennan, Stephen Kappes, George Tenet, William Webster, and the non-CIA John Negroponte. 19


23. William J. Burns: Member 1993-, director 2021-.

CFR history of treasury secretaries: 75% over the last 48 years

Now let's take a look at the relationship between the CFR and U.S. treasury secretaries:

18 out of 29 (62% of) U.S. treasury secretaries between 1923 and 2022 were CFR members BEFORE being elected to that position. 12 out of 16 (75% of) U.S. treasury secretaries between 1974 and 2022 (48 years) were CFR members before their appointment.

1. Andrew Mellon (member 1934-; treasury sec. March 1921-1932).


2. Ogden Mills (member 1924; treasury sec. 1932-1933)
3. William Woodin (member 1921/22-; treasury sec. March - Dec. 1933)
4. Henry Morgenthau Jr. (Morgenthau Sr. was a member 1922-1940; treasury sec. 1934-1945)


5. Fred Vinson (never a member; treasury sec. 1945-1946)
6. John Wesley Snyder (never a member; treasury sec. 1946-1953)
7. George Humphrey (never a member; treasury sec. 1953-1957)


8. Robert B. Anderson (member 1953-; treasury sec. 1957-1961)
9. C. Douglas Dillon (son of Clarence Dillon, a founding member 1922-; himself a member 1940-; treasury sec. 1961-1965)
10. Henry Fowler (member 1950-; treasury sec. 1965-1968)


11. David M. Kennedy (treasury sec. 1969-1971; member 1976-)
12. John Connally (never a member; treasury sec. 1971-1972)
13. George Shultz (treasury sec. 1971-1974; member 1974-)


14. William Simon (member 1973/1974-; treasury sec. 1974-1977)
15. Michael Blumenthal (member 1970-; treasury sec. 1977-1979)


16. G. William Miller (treasury sec. 1979-1981; member 1981-)


17. Donald Regan (member 1973-; treasury sec. 1981-1985)
18. James Baker III (member 1978-; treasury sec. 1985-1988)
19. Nicholas Brady (member 1983-; treasury sec. 1988-1993)
20. Lloyd Bentsen (member 1973-; treasury sec. 1993-1994)
21. Robert Rubin (member 1981-; treasury sec. 1995-1999)
22. Larry Summers (member 1991-; treasury sec. 1999-2001)


23. Paul O'Neill (never a member, only visited; treasury sec. 2001-2002)
24. John W. Snow (never a member; treasury sec. 2003-2006)


25. Hank Paulson (member 2001-; treasury sec. 2006-2009)
26. Timothy Geithner (member 1996-, director 2015-; treasury sec. 2009-2013)
27. Jack Lew (member 2006-; treasury sec. 2013-2017)


28. Steven Mnuchin (never a member; treasury sec. 2017-2021)


29. Janet Yellen (member 2006-; treasury sec. 2021-)

CFR history of U.S. presidents: 20%

Now let's take a look at the relationship between the CFR and U.S. presidents, the only elected, instead of appointed, position here:

3 out of 15 (20% of) U.S. presidents between 1923 and 2025 (102 years) were CFR members BEFORE being elected to that position: Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Of these, George H. W. Bush was the only one who was invited well before coming into the picture as a U.S. vice president or president.

1. Calvin Coolidge: Never a member. U.S. president 1923-1929.


2. Herbert Hoover: U.S. president 1929-1933. Member 1938-.


3. FDR: Never a member. U.S. president 1933-1945.
4. Harry Truman: Never a member. U.S. president 1945-1953.


5. Dwight Eisenhower: Member 1949-. Pilgrims Society executive 1948-. U.S. president 1953-1961. Interested in publicly supporting the idea of the creation of Bilderberg in his 1952 presidential campaign, but various key founders thwarted that idea. Agreed that (incoming) administration officials worked on the creation of Bilderberg.


6. JFK: Never a member. U.S. president 1961-1963.
7. LBJ: Never a member. U.S. president 1963-1969.


8. Gerald Ford: U.S. president 1974-1977. Member CFR 1982-.
9. Jimmy Carter: U.S. president 1977-1981. Member CFR 1983-.


10. Ronald Reagan: Never a member. U.S. president 1981-1989.


11. George H. W. Bush: Member CFR 1972-, director CFR 1977-1979. UN ambassador 1971-1973. CIA director 1976-1977. Vice president 1981-1989. President: 1989-1993.
12. Bill Clinton: Member 1990-. U.S. president 1993-2001.


13. George W. Bush: At most a CFR "member" through his father. U.S. president 2001-2009.
14. Barack Obama: Never a member. U.S. president 2009-2017.
15. Donald Trump: Never a member. U.S. president 2017-2021.
16. Joe Biden: Never a member. U.S. president 2021-.

Closing thoughts on government pervasiveness

The first conclusion that has to be drawn is that not being a member of the CFR does not automatically mean "independent" or "outsider". Far from it. Not even looking at personal associations, secretaries of defense Charles Erwin Wilson (1953-1957), who stepped down as president and CEO of General Motors; Thomas Gates Jr. (1959-1961), who stepped down as chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust and a partner in the Drexel bank; and Robert McNamara (1961-1968), who stepped down as president of Ford Motors, are great, classic examples of this. For whatever reason, and often due to living and working location, not every member of the elite joins the CFR. However, a lot of them clearly do. A whole lot.

The most basic, general conclusion that we can reach at this point is that no matter who an American citizen votes for, whichever candidate gets into office, he or she will surround himself or herself with CFR members - individuals part of a permanent, big business-funded government with an agenda of its own. Alternately, it is not much of a stretch to claim that an organized clique of banks and multinationals have controlled for over a century who is appointed to the top positions in government, whereby it doesn't matter if a Democrat or Republican president is in power. It only matters whether or not a candidate portrays himself as anti-establishment - which is not a very common thing to happen.

If we look at the unwanted attention Jimmy Carter's pre-existing Trilateral Commission membership brought, or Bush Sr. and Clinton's involvement in the CFR, it is not overly surprising that there's no emphasis at the CFR on recruiting popular and viable presidential candidates. All the Council seems to be doing is gathering a network of "professionals" and "experts" that no elected presidential candidate can get around to appointing. Although they are not all necessarily outspoken about it, in the end these people always have a few opinions in common:

• Pro-Third World immigration.
• Anti-genuine conspiracy theory.
• No unique spiritual ideas.
• Generally pro-feminist and pro-LGBTQ, unless maybe representing the more right-wing aspect of the establishment.

Presidential candidates don't come out of the blue. Almost universally they serve as congressmen, senators and governors, and thus already know how to "play the game". They have "movers and shakers" within the liberal-globalist or conservative establishment who ultimately decide whether or not it's a good idea for them to be running for president. Pick a presidential candidate: there are always members of the establishment in the background, even with anti-establishment candidates as Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. If there's enough support, dinner invitations, donations and media attention starts coming in. People tied to establishment start advising and running the presidential campaign.

It should be clear that an important part of the vetting process is who a presidential candidate is willing to appoint to the key positions in his upcoming government: exactly those positions we just saw being dominated by past CFR members. Then there's the issue that whoever is appointed, needs to be vetted by congress, a process that generally involves key members of an establishment writing letters of recommendation for their proteges or proteges of colleagues and friends. It is to be imagined that if somehow an outside person was to be appointed by an incoming president that these letters would disappear, and congress and the media out obstruct the confirmation process to the maximum extent.

The thing is, with many people that we talk here, as surrounding presidential candidates, belong to the CFR. And with that, we can look at the CFR as a big business friendly establishment that any prospecting presidential candidate, and likely even every congressional, senatorial, or gubernatorial candidate, needs to keep friendly.

Is there more to it? Certainly there is: in particular the deep cover left-right and conspiracy theory elements. But that is not the focus here. We will be looking at other areas in society here where we can find CFR members.

CFR PERVASIVENESS IN THE MEDIA

Near 100% of "big media" represented in the CFR

One of the questions that quickly comes up, of course, is why this rather obvious concentration of power within the CFR is not exposed by the media. The answer is equally obvious: "The media are part of the same network."

That certainly is true. If looking for a quick conclusion, it can be stated that 100%, or near hundred percent, of America's Big Media is represented in the Council on Foreign Relations at any point, whether that is through company directors, editors, or both. Certainly all the news organizations of the North-East are represented. A lot of companies situated in California are more focused on entertainment instead of foreign policy, but also here there tend to be at least one or two CFR members on boards or among chief editors.

We can go in a bit more detail. Anybody who online searches for 'CFR and media' these days will quickly run into a very extensive 2017 chart created by the curious Swiss Propaganda Research / Swiss Policy Research (SPR) agency that demonstrates that journalists from most American media outlets are to be found in groups as the CFR, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg. This chart received additional prominence in 2018 when the equally curious Julian Assange of Wikileaks linked to it. Click on the image below to see the full chart:

It's quite a decent chart. The horizontal spacing of media outlets and names is not overly pleasant to read, but it is accurate and there are quite a lot of names there. This author knows for a fact that it is accurate, because he checked most of the names in CFR membership lists. If they weren't in his own oversights yet, they were added to it. The basic conclusion that has to be drawn is that the American, and part of the British, media, is deeply plugged into the CFR network.

It's actually more than possible to expand and update the oversight created by SPR. Examples would be:

• TIME INC: This Henry Luce publication doesn't exist anymore since 2018, but it contains tons more historical CFR members than is room for in the chart. Psychological warfare specialist and Bilderberg co-founder C.D. Jackson is one of them. Time's elite character makes sense, because seed funders of the magazine in 1923 where Morgan partners Dwight Morrow and Henry Davison, as well as E. Roland Harriman, all early members of the CFR. Luce himself joined in 1934.


• NEW YORK TIMES: While its century-long Sulzberger publishers are an obvious pick, SPR's identification of modern New York Times editors tied in with the CFR is extensive. No less than 16 have been identified: foreign editor Joe Kahn; "liberal CIA" Rhodes scholar Nicholas Kristof; Thomas Friedman, who seems to cover a lot of elite NGO gatherings; economist Paul Krugman, once a fellow of the neoliberal-oriented Peterson Institute of International Economics, with directors as David Rockefeller, George Soros, Lynn Forester de Rothschild and George Shultz; and more.
  
  Among past publishers with CFR ties, only one is missing from the SPR list: Orvil Dryfoos, publisher of the New York Times over 1961-1963, in between different Sulzbergers and part of the same clan. He had joined the CFR in 1958. Anno 2007, one of his descendants, Susan W. Dryfoos, still was on the New York Times board.
  
  Occasionally more names can be encountered among past editors:
  
  
  • SPR (correctly) identifies New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal as a CFR member. Andrew's father, however, A. M. Rosenthal, was New York Times executive editor from 1977 to 1988 and then columnist over 1987–1999. He joined the CFR in 1967, while rising through the ranks of the newspaper.
  • Self-described anarchist-socialist Chris Hedges, a CFR member from 2003 on, worked for the New York Times from 1990 to 2005, eventually leaving over his opposition to the Iraq War.
  • Carla Anne Robbins, a deputy editorial page editor of the The New York Times from 2006 to 2012, has been a CFR member since 1991, from her days at the U.S. News & World Report (published by elite CFR member Mortimer Zuckerman) and then, from 1993 to 2005, at the Wall Street Journal.
  
  Surprisingly, if not shockingly, looking at the board of the New York Times for 2007 and 2022, not a single CFR member can be found. The Sulzberger family really seems to have divested itself from the CFR as much as possible since 1971, and quite possibly doesn't want any of the newspaper's directors being members of the CFR.
  
  Clearly, the CFR connections are there. One just has to look a bit deeper, beyond the famous Sulzbergers and the New York Times' board of directors.


• WASHINGTON POST: SPR lists 14 editors and 4 past publishers, pretty much the maximum it has space for. One person that is missing (here) is Katrina vanden Heuvel, a CFR member since 1993 and publisher of the "lefty" Nation. She also writes a weekly column for the Washington Post anno 2022.
  
  As for past directors of The Washington Post who belong to the CFR, Warren Buffett, Barry Diller, Ronald Olson, Lee Bollinger and Anne Mulcahy are not listed in the SPR oversight, all directors in the years before, and even after, Jeff Bezos bought the newspaper in 2013.
  
  The rise of Warren Buffett through the establishment ranks actually can be traced back to him becoming a major investor in the Washington Post in 1973, followed by a directorship at this newspaper from 1974 to 2011. In this position he became the chief financial advisor to Washington Post owner Katharine Graham, who herself, her family and chief editors - Phil Graham, Donald Graham, Ben Bradlee - all were deeply tied in with either the founding CIA clique or the CFR and Trilateral Commission. Buffett kept his shares in The Post until 2014 and was represented in the latter period by Ronald Olson.
  
  Not listed either is past publisher and CFR member (1961-) Phil Graham, the husband of Katharine Graham, who is important in any discussion of past CIA ties of the Washington Post, something we will get to at a later point. Fritz Beebe, a CFR member since 1956, was chairman of the Washington Post from 1961 until his death in 1973. An attorney by profession, Beebe had been hired as chair by Phil Graham after overseeing the Post's acquisition of Newsweek in 1961. After Phil's suicide in 1963, he served as a key mentor at the paper to Kay Graham, who essentially operated as a figurehead for the longest time because she was never expected to take the reign of the newspaper. This only occurred due to Phil's suicide. Beebe, who oversaw The Post and Newsweek from New York City, also was a governor of the United Nations Association.
  
  Similar to New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger, the latest member of the Graham clan, Donald Graham, is not a member the CFR. Similar to his mother, Graham is a member of the Trilateral Commission, in his case since 2004, making him one of the longer-serving members. Graham also is to be found at the Business Council, the Sun Valley Meetings, and Alfalfa Club.


• NEWSWEEK: Apart from more modern editors, Newsweek's founding editor Malcolm Muir - from 1937, when it was owned by Vincent Astor, a Pilgrim; and CFR member Dean Acheson, until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961 - was a CFR member from 1944. Muir's long-time assistant at Newsweek, Harry Kern, was a CFR member from 1954. Both men have spoken about their closeness to the CIA and CIA director Allen Dulles.


• BLOOMBERG: SPR lists Michael Bloomberg as a CFR member. It also lists Bloomberg L.P. director Matthew Winkler, although it does not specify which NGO he belongs to (he is CFR, which is what counts here). However, not listed are fellow-Bloomberg L.P. directors and CFR members Arthur Levitt Jr., an advisor to Carlyle, Kroll, Goldman Sachs and AIG; Jane Bryant Quinn and Frank Savage.


• CBS NEWS: Historical directors with CFR membership, Henry Kissinger, James Wolfensohn, Harold Brown, Henry Schacht, and Frank Stanton, are not listed.


• VIACOM: Two years after the SPR chart was created, CBS again was taken over by Viacom. Looking at the January 2022 board of Viacom, we find no less than 6 members of the CFR, exactly half the board: Linda Griego, Candace Beinecke, Barbara Byrne, Judith McHale, Frederick Terrell, and Charles Phillips Jr.


• DISNEY: Directors of 2022, Michael Froman and Maria Lagomasino, respectively CFR members from 1996 and 2003, aren't listed by SPR.


• FOX / NEWS CORP.: As mentioned by SPR, Rupert Murdoch was a CFR member over 1994-2014. One of his sons, James, joined the CFR in 2020. Rupert's sons are even more openly liberal-globalist than he himself is.


• SONY: Not listed, but Sony is a decades-long Trilateral Commission company, with successive heads being represented there. Recent CEOs Sir Howard Stringer and Michael Lynton have been CFR members.


• AT&T: Owner of CNN and HBO through WarnerMedia, which it acquired over 2016-2018. SPR mentioned various past Warner executives who were CFR members. But also looking at the board of AT&T in February 2022, we find that Glenn Hutchins and Luis Ubinas are CFR members.

Readers probably get the point: CFR ties to media corporations go back a full century; and apart from well known newspapers, today's "Big Five" / "Big Six" media conglomerates are also well represented at the CFR:

The exception here actually is Comcast, which took over NBC Universal in 2011. Anno 2022 not a single one of its directors is a member of the CFR. The same goes for the board of NBC Universal. The only exception here is CFR director Cesar Conde, the chair of NBCUniversal News Group. As SPR demonstrated, CFR membership really is limited to programmers and anchors of NBC News and MSNBC.

So yes, despite the fact that Big Media has the much bigger annual Sun Valley Meetings, which essentially is a Trilateral Commission spin-off, much, if not all, of America's Big Media is very much plugged into the CFR. The excuse may be that this is because of the CFR's "foreign policy expertise", but it nevertheless is a multinational-funded - and hence, biased - private entity that could be said to be controlling state department policy. Minus, of course, the deep cover, controlled opposition aspect.

Quite a bit of "liberal CIA" and "new media" represented as well

In this sense it is interesting that the CFR has allowed a small degree of "liberal CIA" elements, as it immediately strips them of their "anti-establishment" status. There's a reason why these elites created a giant "liberal CIA" foundation network involving the Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Soros, MacArthur and other foundations that provides absolutely crucial funding for "grassroots", "new left", "anti-establishment" action groups and media. Allowing the heads and trustees of these foundations into elite CFR, Bilderberg, Trilateral Commission circles immediately gives the game away.

"Liberal CIA" media outlets, looking at foundation financing, include The Nation and PBS. We could look at the same time at so-called "new media" that has come up in the age of the internet. These too are often seen as "less elite" and more "anti-establishment" than the Washington Post, New York Times - and certainly the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the Economist. Which is interesting, considering that in the end they all rabidly push the exact same feminist, LGBTQ and pro-Third World immigration propaganda.

A few examples along these lines from CFR ranks:

THE NATION

Founded in 1865, The Nation quite possibly the most prominent and longest-existing of the "liberal CIA"-funded, "new left", anti-establishment magazines, criticizing the likes of Henry Kissinger, right-wing CIA coups, and the neocons. It is deeply tied into the "liberal CIA" Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) think tank, founded in 1963 (with all the same funding) by Markus Raskin and Richard Barnet, respectively aides to national security advisor McGeorge Bundy and presidential adviser John J. McCloy, both in 1961. Bundy was a CFR member from 1948, over a decade before becoming national security advisor. McCloy was a CFR member from 1940, chairman from 1953 to 1970, chairman of the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank 1953-1960, where he groomed David Rockefeller on behalf of the family. Hence, "obviously", Raskin and Barnet were the perfect candidates to set up a progressive "anti-establishment" think tank.

IPS co-founder Raskin was a decades-long editorial board member of The Nation, from at least the early 1980s until his death in 2017. Barnet, a CFR member since 1969, was a frequent contributor to The Nation. Robert Borosage, a director of IPS since 1979, also became a decades-long "contributing editor" to The Nation. Another Nation editor from at least the early 1980s until the present is Richard Falk, a CFR member since 1967 who became a supporter of the Ayatollah after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, and a proponent of 9/11-no-plane theories in the wake of 9/11. Fascinatingly, fellow-9/11-no-planer Gore Vidal was another decades-long editor of The Nation alongside Falk. So was Vidal's protege, Christopher Hitchens, a Marxist-socialist who after 9/11 turned into a neocon hawk pushing for war with Iraq - and denounced Vidal for pushing "9/11 conspiracy theories". Add "liberal CIA" assets Alexander Cockburn and Michael Moore into the mix, and the board of The Nation makes for a very strange soup indeed.

That's not all. We are focused on the CFR here after all. Katrina vanden Heuvel, a CFR member since 1993, has been editor-in-chief of The Nation from 1995 to 2019. In the 2000s she also became publisher of The Nation, a role she has not given up since stepping down as editor-in-chief. Today, she is still listed as "editorial director and publisher of The Nation."

What makes things even more fascinating is that Katrina is the daughter of William vanden Heuvel, a Pilgrim since the 1960s, of which he was an executive by the 2000s, and a CFR member since 1986. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, "lefty" William vanden Heuvel actually sat on the board of the William Donovan Foundation and the subsequent Pilgrims Foundation it merged into. Other directors included Henry Luce III, the Drexels, former OSS chief David Bruce, former Opus Dei arms dealer Prince Michel de Bourbon, Bernadette Casey Smith, the daughter of Reagan's CIA director William Casey; and former CIA special operations expert General John Singlaub.

That's quite the company to have when your daughter runs a major "new left" "anti-establishment" magazine.

PBS

PBS is a "publicly funded" non-profit broadcaster that in reality has received heavy funding from the Ford, Rockefeller and Soros foundations for decades on end.

PBS' main founder in 1969 and its initial president was Hartford Gunn Jr., who by 1972 was a member of the CFR. Jim Lehrer became an anchor of PBS in 1973, initially covering the Watergate affair, and from 1975-2011 served as anchor of what eventually became known as PBS NewsHour. Lehrer was invited to the CFR in 1980.

The somewhat legendary Bill Moyers operated his Bill Moyers Journal at PBS over 1971-1981, and again from 2007 to 2010. In "alternative" circles he probably is best known for his critical reports on the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. Moyers not only was a member of the CFR from 1966 to 1985, he also served as director from 1967 to 1974, overlapping with the chairmanship of David Rockefeller. In the exact same period he was a Bilderberg steering committee, underscoring his close relationship to David Rockefeller. Things didn't really stop there. In 1990 Moyers became president of the "liberal CIA" foundation the Schumann Center, through which he funded PBS and other NGOs. Over the 1990s and 2000s he served as a trustee of the Open Society Institute, owned by "that other lefty" CFR member and Bilderberger: George Soros.

Looking at the board of PBS at the turn of the century, we find Colin G. Campbell, a CFR member since 1989, as chairman. Campbell served as president Rockefeller Brothers Fund from 1988 until 2000, immediately underscoring PBS' "liberal CIA" ties again. Sharon Percy Rockefeller, the wife of Senator Jay Rockefeller, and hence the daughter-in-law of David Rockefeller brother Nelson Rockefeller, served on the board in the same period. Pat Mitchell (Seydel), a Ted Turner employee at CNN whose son married a daughter of Ted Turner, was director, president and CEO of PBS in 2000-2006. She joined the CFR in 2003. After Mitchell left as president and CEO, she stayed involved in PBS as an "advisor and officer" of the 2004-created PBS Foundation.

Alberto Ibarguen joined the board of PBS in 1997-, became vice chair in 2001 and would serve as PBS chairman from late 2003 to late 2005. He became a member of the CFR in 2001-, and was a CFR director over 2006-2013. After leaving PBS, he became a director of PepsiCo 2005-, a board he came to share with PBS' Sharon Percy Rockefeller. That same year he became president and CEO of the "liberal CIA" Knight Foundation, a position he still holds anno 2022.

While there are several more CFR members, today, in 2022, Chuck Robb is the most noteworthy CFR name on the PBS board. A top superclass member, Robb became a member of the CFR in 1999. He joined the board of PBS in 2009, leaving over 2013-2015 to become Obama's secretary of defense. Subsequently he rejoined the PBS board, whose liberal inclinations he clearly subscribes to. Although, for a few years until 2008, on the board could be found American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, a "traditional conservative" to spice things up a bit - although never too much of course. Ornstein has been a CFR member since 1978.

Similar to the regular board of directors, the board of the PBS Foundation only has a handful of CFR members. In fact, in late 2007, Ted Turner in-law Pat Mitchell was the only one among the officers, trustees and advisors to have that distinction. Enter Donald A. Baer. A CFR member since 1999, who joined the board of the PBS Foundation in 2008 and has been serving as its chair since 2011. More often than not, CFR members do seem to head straight for the top spots.

Apart from the CFR ties and "liberal CIA" funding, PBS directors also very often are tied into the biggest multinationals: Bank of America, McKinsey and Company, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T are just some of the corporations boards members have represented. So how can PBS ever be seen as "liberal", "socialist", "anti-establishment", or anything along these lines? It does cater to that role quite a bit, but it should be clear that this image shouldn't be taken too serious.

THE ATLANTIC

Founded in 1857, The Atlantic is an old magazine and to this day caters to liberal intellectuals who may not be quite as "lefty" as The Nation or Democracy Now!, two outlets funded by foundations as Ford and Soros.

The magazine drifted into CFR hands after 1938, after Ellery Sedgwick, the owner and chief editor of the magazine, sold it. The magazine's next chief editor, Edward Weeks - from 1938 to 1966 - became a CFR member in 1948, a membership he held until 1968. Robert J. Manning, an Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under JFK from 1962 to 1964, was editor of The Atlantic from 1966 to 1980, and held CFR membership over 1967-1992.

From 1980 to 1999 the magazine was owned and chaired by upcoming media baron Mortimer Zuckerman - who joined the CFR in 1988, was a member of the Trilateral Commission over 1997-2018, and in general grew into one of the more connected superclass members of his time, with involvement in over two dozen major NGOs.

In 1999 businessman David G. Bradley, a member of the CFR since 2006, bought The Atlantic. Bradley is a Harvard and Georgetown graduate, who at one point served as a Fulbright Scholar in the Philippines. While in recent years members have distanced themselves from the "bureaucratic CIA", it has to be said that quite a few Fulbright scholarships, similar to its Rhodes counterpart, show up in the biographies of superclass members.

In 2017 Bradley sold a majority stake in his Atlantic magazine to the Emerson Collective, an LLC owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple's Steve Jobs, who died in 2011. Not long after, in 2021, Jobs was attacked (and hence, pushed) by "conservative CIA" outlets as Breitbart for being "the New Soros", operating as "a secret superpower behind a vast network of left-wing media outlets." Worth about $22 billion at the time, and being very politically active for Democrats, social Democrats and with regard to global warming, dubbing her the new Soros is very much overblown for the time being. What is of interest here, is that Jobs joined the CFR in 2011, and became a director in 2017.

Hence, the connection between the "left-wing" Atlantic and the CFR has been significant for about three-quarters-of-century at this point.

SLATE MAGAZINE

Jacob Weisberg, a CFR member since 1997, has been editor of Slate Magazine 2002-2008 and a founding editor the Slate Group 2008-2018. In 2004 Slate magazine was bought by Donald Graham, the former publisher, and current chairman and CEO of The Washington Post, for his Graham Holdings. As discussed earlier, Graham comes from a long line of CIA-tied CFR members. He himself only is a member of the Trilateral Commission, a membership his mother held as well.

THE DAILY BEAST: New online media outlet founded in 2008 and owned by Barry Diller, a CFR member since that same year. Diller is chair of InterActiveCorp, which, apart from The Daily Beast, controls just about every online dating app.

POLITICO: Online newspaper founded in 2007 by Robert Allbritton, the son of Joe Allbritton, whose CFR membership goes back to 1973 and who in 1985 was a founding governor of the Reagan Foundation with anyone from notorious right-wing politicians as Barry Goldwater, Pete Wilson and Ross Perot, to establishmentarians as David Rockefeller, Brooke Astor, Alan Greenspan and Maurice Greenberg.

A senior staff writer and editor for Politico in 2014-2015 was existing CFR member Garrett Graff.

In 2021 Politico was bought by German publishing firm Axel Springer, headed by Bilderberg steering committee member Mathias Dopfner. In turn, since 2020 Axel Springer has been majority owned by Wall Street firm KKR of CFR, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg elites Henry Kravis and former CIA director Gen. David Petraeus.

BUSINESS INSIDER

Founded in 2007 by Kevin P. Ryan, a member of the CFR since 2005. Since 2015 the Business Insider has been owned by the above-mentioned Axel Springer SE firm.

WASHINGTONIAN MAGAZINE

Editor at large 2005-2009 and editor in chief 2009-2014 was Garrett Graff, who received a CFR invite in 2012.

SALON.COM

Columnist from 2003 to 2008, and Washington bureau chief over 2004, was Sidney Blumenthal, a CFR member since 1992. Blumenthal left Salon in November 2007 to "join the Hillary Clinton campaign as a senior advisor," Both Blumenthal and Salon have "liberal CIA" ties, hence the publication has already been dealt with in that article.

Of course, a good number of other "new left", "new media" outlets exist, maybe most prominently Buzzfeed, but most of these publications have already been dealt with in ISGP's "liberal CIA" oversight, similar to PBS and The Nation. Whether publications are "elite CFR" or "liberal CIA" "anti-establishment", it really doesn't matter in terms of independence. It all ties back to the same interests. The CFR is just one more way to demonstrate this, also, as it turns out, for a variety of publications not immediately associated with "the establishment".

CIA, CFR, media: all the same, at one point

On several occasions in the previous chapters on the media, indications emerged that people within both "big" and "small" media have cooperated with the CIA, or to this day operate as intelligence operatives. There's no need to address this in any detail here, because much of that has been discussed in ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, namely in the following chapters:

• 'U.S. media I: print and television'.
• 'U.S. media II: CIA Mockingbird and Washington ties'.
• 'British media and MI5/MI6 infiltration'.

The historical overlap in membership between the U.S. branch of the Pilgrims Society and the Council on Foreign Relations is enormous. The basic story in The Pilgrims article is that the following CIA officials were key in recruiting the national media into its CIA intelligence gathering and propaganda-disseminating arm. As can be seen, the overlap between key early CIA officers and CFR membership is very significant:

• Allen Dulles: His brother, John Foster Dulles, was a founding CFR member 1921-. Himself a CFR member 1927-, and president 1946-1950. CIA director 1953-1961.





• James Angleton: CIA counter-intelligence chief 1954-1974. Never a CFR member, but part of the Georgetown Set and close to various other players here.


• Frank Wisner: Member CFR 1946-. CIA directorate of operations chief 1951-1958.


• Richard Bissell Jr.: Member CFR 1952-. CIA directorate of operations chief 1959-1962, said to have often boasted about his "mighty Wurlitzer" press propaganda machine. 20


• Cord Meyer Jr.: Member CFR 1947-. Part of the founding UN conference in 1945. President United World Federalists 1947-1949, followed up by Alan Cranston. After being recruited by Allen Dulles in 1951, head of the CIA's International Organizations Division 1954-1962. Head of the Covert Action Staff of the CIA's directorate of operations 1962-1967. Assistant deputy director of operations under Helms' protege Thomas Karamessines. CIA station chief London 1973-1976.


• Richard Helms: Son of huge Rockefeller-Astor-BIS-Federal Reserve banker and founding CFR member Gates McGarrah. Chief of operations of the CIA directorate of operations under Wisner and then Bissell 1952-1962, and its head 1962-1965, all the while overseeing global CIA coups. CIA director 1966-1973. Ambassador to Iran 1973-1976, helping to keep the Shah of Iran in power. Member CFR 1973-.


• John McCone: Member CFR 1957-. CIA director 1961-1965. A Bechtel partner, McCone had made early connections with CIA director Allen Dulles. As a Catholic, he was a favorite replacement of Allen Dulles for the Catholic John F. Kennedy. McCone about the media recruitment program of the CIA: "I wouldn't necessarily have known about it [as CIA director]. Helms would have handled anything like that. It would be unusual for him to come to me [over that.] He had a job to do." 21

Among the media bosses approached and recruited by these CIA-CFR men, the following were the most important (except maybe a Barry Bingham Sr.). Once again, the CFR is what ties all these men together:

• The Sulzbergers: CFR 1927-. Publishers of the New York Times.


• Eugene Meyer and Phil Graham: Respective CFR members from 1930 and 1961 on. Publishers of the Washington Post.


• Henry Luce: Founder and head of Time magazine. CFR 1947-.


• Malcolm Muir and Harry Kern: Key Newsweek editors in the 1940s and 1950s. Respective CFR members from 1944 and 1954 on.


• Barry Bingham Sr.: CFR 1946-. Owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal.


• William Paley: CFR 1936-1989. Builder of CBS over 1928-1986. 22

More media outlets were recruited into the CIA: the Miami Herald, the Associated Press, Reuters, Hearst, Scripps-Howard, etc., but certainly Sulzberger, Luce, Paley and Malcolm Muir were known to maintain a very close friendship with Dulles, and to have opened up their media empires for CIA intelligence gathering, propaganda-dissemination, and the providing of cover for CIA agents. 23

It's interesting to note as well that CFR member Marshall Field III, the owner of the Field Newspaper Syndicate and its Chicago Sun-Times, employed the CIA's former assistant deputy chief of covert operations, Cord Meyer Jr. (CFR 1947-), as a columnist from 1978 on, with Meyer partially taking over duties from "long-established Washington columnist Charles L. Bartlett ... a college classmate of Meyer (Yale '43)." 24 A Guaranty Trust banker, Marshall Field was a Pilgrim by 1924 and joined the CFR in 1926. He has a long history of controlled-opposition "new-left" funding of media and activist enterprises, randing from Picture Magazine to the Field Foundation and Saul Alinsky's "community organizing".

As just discussed, parallel to the recruitment of the mainstream media, was the funding and controlling of the new left, "liberal CIA" network of media outlets. There's plenty of evidence too that the "old/alt right" "conservative CIA" network was controlled from the start as well, similar to all conspiracy media. That is the story of America's "free press".

CFR PERVASIVENESS IN CIA-TIED "FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC AID" NGOS

CFR, CIA and covert operations

As already made clear in the media chapters, the historical overlap in membership between the U.S. branch of the Pilgrims Society and the Council on Foreign Relations is enormous. The basic story in ISGP's Pilgrims article is that the following CIA officials were key in recruiting the national media into its CIA intelligence gathering and propaganda-disseminating arm. As can be seen, the overlap between key early CIA officers and CFR membership is very significant:

• Allen Dulles: His brother, John Foster Dulles, was a founding CFR member 1921-. Himself a CFR member 1927-, and president 1946-1950. CIA director 1953-1961.





• James Angleton: CIA counter-intelligence chief 1954-1974. Never a CIA member, but part of the Georgetown Set and close to various other players here.


• Frank Wisner: Member CFR 1946-. CIA directorate of operations chief 1951-1958.


• Richard Bissell Jr.: Member CFR 1952-. CIA directorate of operations chief 1959-1962, said to have often boasted about his "mighty Wurlitzer" press propaganda machine.


• Cord Meyer Jr.: Member CFR 1947-. Part of the founding UN conference in 1945. President United World Federalists 1947-1949, followed up by Alan Cranston. After being recruited by Allen Dulles in 1951, head of the CIA's International Organizations Division 1954-1962. Head of the Covert Action Staff of the CIA's directorate of operations 1962-1967. Assistant deputy director of operations under Helms' protege Thomas Karamessines. CIA station chief London 1973-1976.


• Richard Helms: Son of huge Rockefeller-Astor-BIS-Federal Reserve banker and founding CFR member Gates McGarrah. Chief of operations of the CIA directorate of operations under Wisner and then Bissell 1952-1962, and its head 1962-1965, all the while overseeing global CIA coups. CIA director 1966-1973. Ambassador to Iran 1973-1976, helping to keep the Shah of Iran in power. Member CFR 1973-.


• John McCone: Member CFR 1957-. CIA director 1961-1965. A Bechtel partner, McCone had made early connections with CIA director Allen Dulles. As a Catholic, he was a favorite replacement of Allen Dulles for the Catholic John F. Kennedy. As already sourced in the media section. McCone said about the media recruitment program of the CIA: "I wouldn't necessarily have known about it [as CIA director]. Helms would have handled anything like that. It would be unusual for him to come to me [over that.] He had a job to do."

We already looked at the media angle in the past chapters: all kinds of key media owners and editors who ended up in the CFR, also closely collaborated with the CIA leadership of the time. The same went for other areas of society:

1. The "new left" foundations operating both domestically and overseas.
2. the later "foreign intervention"-type NGOs as USAID and those under National Endowment for Democracy umbrella
3. Ivy League universities.

These are the elements we will be focusing on in the next few chapters, both their ties to the CIA and the CFR.

CFR at the center of the "liberal CIA" foundations: Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Soros, etc.

This author has linked to one or more of its "liberal CIA" articles on a number of occasions. This involves foundations as Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller (especially Rockefeller Brothers Fund), Open Society (Soros) and others financing an anti-establishment, "new left" movement. Apart from funding their own media outlets, together these foundations pour billions annually into many hundreds of NGOs that take the following (hardline) stances:

• Pro-green.
• Pro-LGBTQ.
• Pro-feminism.
• Pro-Third World immigration.
• Pro-Palestine.
• Pro-online and offline privacy.

In this manner these foundations play a key role in simulating "left-wing" "grassroots" activism within our society. This process is protected and aided by the media, which, as we've seen, ties back to the CFR in most occasions, at least in the United States.

Isn't it fascinating then that when we start analyzing the boards of major "liberal CIA" foundations, that these also very heavily tie into CFR membership? And have done so since the very beginning of the CFR in the 1920s? Below is an oversight of a study carried out by ISGP:

Of course, "Liberal CIA", despite a strong historical and current context, remains a bit of an unofficial term, albeit based on citations from insiders from the 1960s and 1970s. The CIA tie wasn't always that unofficial though, because back in 1967 it was exposed that:

"The [CIA] agency was involved to some degree in nearly half of all charitable grants by American foundations exclusive of the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie organizations, known collectively as the "Big Three."" 25

Other major foundations, including some of those seen above, were involved with the CIA, but these ties were investigated in even less detail than the "Big Three". 26 Looking at the extremely close correlation between pre-existing CFR membership leading to top CIA appointments, such intimate collaboration should barely come as a surprise, especially not as fellow CFR men dominated the boards of all these foundations. As can be seen above, that domination, albeit it slightly less, continues to the present day.

Thus, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie foundations, which these days fund so much crucial "anti-establishment" media and "grassroots" activism, used to be full-blown fronts for the CIA, with there not existing much indication that any real changes were made. After all, the same few hundred CFR members remained in charge of both the CIA and the foundations, as well as the media and top administration positions.

One major indication that change never took place is the fact that, while supposedly having divested themselves of their CIA ties since 1967, the above foundations always kept heavily financing "new left", "anti-establishment" media as:

1. The Nation
2. Mother Jones
3. PBS
4. Democracy Now!
5. The (Manchester) Guardian

For decades these outlets have heavily criticized "elites" as Henry Kissinger over the Vietnam War and a variety of CIA- and big business coups, especially the one in Chile in 1973; George H. W. Bush and CIA director William Casey over the BCCI affair, the Contra cocaine involvement and the related "racist" CIA crack-cocaine affair; as well as "neocons" as Dick Cheney over the Iraq War. However, as we've already seen at an earlier stage in this article, all these criticized individuals have been long-time CFR members and directors, regularly hobnobbing with the trustees of the "liberal CIA" foundations that pour money into these "new left", "anti-establishment" magazines. How much sense does that make?

The argument from CFR-side would undoubtedly be that it is a "non-political", "bipartisan" group. This is little more than an euphemism for "controlled opposition". The names on the boards of these foundations, especially in the past, simply are too elite, with modern Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation presidents, apart from the CFR, regularly being involved in groups as Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission. Readers can follow the links below for detailed lists of trustees:

• Rockefeller Foundation
• Ford Foundation
• Carnegie Corporation
• Rockefeller Brothers Fund
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Soros' Open Society Foundations
• MacArthur Foundation

In these foundation lists, readers can find some of the following names:

• John McCloy (CFR 1940-, chair 1953–1970):
  • Chase Manhattan chair, CFR chair and David Rockefeller mentor in both positions.
  • Trustee Rockefeller Foundation 1946-1949, 1953-1958.
  • Trustee Ford Foundation 1953-, chair 1958-1964.
  • Bilderberg visitor in 1958 and from 1964 to 1966.


• Stephen Bechtel Sr. (CFR 1958-1982).
  • Trustee Ford Foundation 1961 - December 1970.


• David Rockefeller (CFR 1942-2017, chair 1970-1985):
  • Only indirectly involved in the management of the Rockefeller Foundation through his grandfather John Sr. (trustee 1913-1923), John Jr. (president 1913-1916, trustee 1913-1939, first chair 1917-1939), brother John III (trustee 1932-1971, exec. comm. chair 1953-1971) inlaw Winthrop Aldrich (trustee 1935-1951), close friend John Foster Dulles (trustee 1935-1952, chair 1950-1951), and son David Jr. (trustee 2007-, chair Dec. 2010 - June 2016).
  • Trustee Rockefeller Brothers Fund 1940-1990, executive vice chair 1970s, executive chair 1980-1987, resigning together with Henry Kissinger.
  • Co-founder Bilderberg in 1954. Key founder of the Trilateral Commission in 1973, etc.
  • Received CIA division chiefs briefings when his close friend Allen Dulles was CIA director 1953-1961, while Rockefeller was fronting for the CIA, also beyond this period.





• Henry Kissinger (CFR 1956-, director 1977-1981):
  • Bilderberg visitor October 1957 and 1964, and visited almost every meeting between 1978 and 2022.
  • Controversial national security advisor 1969-1975 and secretary of state 1973-1977.
  • Trustee Rockefeller Brothers Fund 1977-1987, resigning together with close friend David Rockefeller.
  • Trilateral Commission executive 1978 until at least 1998, and again by 2022. A regular member in between.


• Future secretary of states John Foster Dulles (CFR 1922-), Dean Rusk (CFR 1942-), Cyrus Vance (CFR 1968-), and Condoleezza Rice (CFR 1984-):
  • Dulles was trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation 1935-1952, chair 1950-1951. His brother was offered the presidency of the Ford Foundation by David Rockefeller, a college friend, if President Eisenhower would not have appointed him CIA director in 1953, at the same time that his brother took the position of secretary of state.
  • Dean Rusk was trustee president of the Rockefeller Foundation 1951-1961, serving as Kennedy and LBJ's secretary of state from 1961 to 1969.
  • Condoleezza Rice was a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation 1994-1998, serving as George W. Bush's national security advisor 2001-2005 and secretary of state 2005-2009.


• Teresa Heinz Kerry (CFR 1995-), a trustee of the Carnegie Corporation 1993-2001, is the wife of Sen. John Kerry (CFR 1994-), who served as Obama's secretary of state 2013-2017.


• McGeorge Bundy (CFR 1948-):
  • JFK and LBJ's national security advisor 1961-1966.
  • Trustee and president Ford Foundation 1966-1979.
  • Scholar-in-residence Carnegie Corporation 1990-1996.


• Robert McNamara (CFR 1968-):
  • President Ford Motors 1960-1961 under the guidance of Henry Ford II.
  • JFK and LBJ's secretary of defense 1961-1968.
  • Visited Bilderberg in 1968, 1969 and 1975.
  • President World Bank 1968-1981.
  • Member Trilateral Commission from the day he left the World Bank in 1981, eventually being listed as "Lifetime Trustee" 2002-2009.
  • Trustee Ford Foundation 1968-1986.


• Paul Volcker (CFR 1970-, director 1975–1979, 1988–1999).
  • Economist and eventual vice president under David Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank until 1969.
  • At the Treasury under Nixon 1969-1974.
  • Trustee Rockefeller Foundation 1975-1978.
  • Federal Reserve chairman 1979-1987.
  • Member Trilateral Commission from 1978, North American chair 1991-2001, continuing as a member afterwards.
  • Regular Bilderberg visitor 1982-2010.


• Vernon Jordan (CFR 1978-), the black civil rights activist and Clinton couple mentor who brought Bill Clinton to Bilderberg and the Trilateral Commission before his presidential election in 1992.
  • Trustee Rockefeller Foundation 1971-1984.
  • Very regular Bilderberg visitor over 1979-2019.
  • Member Trilateral Commission 1985-1998.


• James Wolfensohn (CFR 1981-): Both as a future and past World Bank president.
  • Background at Holcim, J. Henry Schroder & Co, Salomon Brothers and Chrysler from the 1960s to the 1980s.
  • Trustee Rockefeller Foundation 1979-1986.
  • President of the World Bank group 1995-2005.
  • Very regular Bilderberg visitor between 1985 and 2017, in two periods belonging to the steering committee.


• Executives of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Rothschild North America, and other elite corporations.

With these examples, we find more solid proof that major "anti-establishment", "new left", "liberal CIA" foundations have always been controlled by individuals to be found in ISGP's Superclass Index who represent a mix of big business, Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and, most pervasively, the CFR. There's really no debate possible on that.

That automatically brings us to the question: Why would these people pour money into media and action groups that oppose the elite? The answer is simple, at least when allows it to be answered: controlled opposition. It's the "guided" or "managed democracy" in action, a concept that to this day barely exceeds "stub" status on Wikipedia.

Earlier we already touched on what is being funded by these foundations: green, LGBTQ, feminism, pro-Third World immigration and pro-Palestine activism. Anything from online privacy advocacy to the overturning of false convictions are also being funded by this network.

Not all "liberal CIA" foundations are involved in the same type of funding though. Some are heavily focused on environmentalism, such as the Hewlett Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation has focused a lot on AIDS projects and other social programs in Africa, quite similar to the Bill Gates Foundation. Soros' Open Society Foundations and the Ford Foundation have very large endowments and are particularly heavily focused on Third World immigration, LGBTQ and feminist activism. The much smaller Carnegie Corporation and smaller still Rockefeller Brothers Fund do focus quite a bit on these last couple of issues as well.

Below are grantees from annual reports of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, from the 1950s to today. This foundation was picked because, almost hilariously, Henry Kissinger - a premier target of both the "alt right" and the "new left" - and David Rockefeller shared the board of trustees here from 1977 to 1987. 33 A partial list of what the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has funded the past couple of decades 34:

Trilateral Commission Asia Society Japan Society Brookings Institution Atlantic Council Aspen Institute German Marshall Fund State of the World Forum American Indian Defense Association / Association on American Indian Affairs Martin Luther King's activism National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Africa-America Institute Africa News Service American Society for Muslim Advancement Immigrant Legal Resource Center International Refugee Assistance Project New York Immigration Coalition Urban Justice Center Color of Change National Urban League

United Nations United Nations Association Population Council Planned Parenthood Federation Center for Community Change Earth Council Foundation Earth Day Network Nature Conservancy Sierra Club Friends of the Earth Greenpeace Foundation National Resources Defense Council Rainforest Action Network New Israel Fund Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network Palestine Legal Gisha Grassroots Jerusalem Jewish Voice for Peace (with Palestine) Free Press The Nation Electronic Frontier Foundation Institute for Policy Studies People for the American Way (PFAW) Institute for Public Accuracy Tides Foundation

It's a fascinating list to look at, isn't it? Here we have a number of think tanks very much associated with the elite. Then there is a wider network of grantees that traditionally is not associated with "the elite" at all. Instead, they are considered "grassroots" or "anti-establishment". Or maybe more accurately, just "nothing" in terms of affiliation, with most people not thinking how various action groups came to be. Martin Luther King "just was". Greenpeace "just is". They are simply "signs of the times".

Nothing could be further from the truth. These individuals and groups are given life by the elite running the West, through the media, corporations, foundations and street protest that they control. Everything that ends up on television, in the news, and in our bookstores, serves a purpose. And that purpose, in this case, involves the promotion of the earlier-mentioned points.

CFR at the center of USAID, NED, IRI, NDI outsourced CIA operations

In the previous section we focused on CFR-domination of the traditional "liberal CIA" foundations: Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Soros, etc., which fund hundreds upon hundreds of domestic and foreign NGOs protesting in favor of open borders, LGBTQ, feminism, all in a very extremist and propagandist manner and with protection of a (similarly CFR-dominated) media. These ties were summarized in the following chart:

There exists another category of foundation though, active within the CFR, that does not necessarily fall under the "liberal CIA" umbrella. That is because, unlike the Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, or the classic "Big Three", they were never really touted as being champions of "anti-establishment" activism. Despite plenty of overlap, this other, mainly latter-day category of NGOs has generally been much more openly associated with both foreign intervention and-or "the elite", less with "philanthropy", and tends to be more openly affiliated with political elites, often high up in ISGP's superclass index. We're talking here about the following NGOs:

1. 1941: Freedom House.
2. 1961: USAID.
3. 1983: The National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
4. 1983: The National Democratic Institute of International Affairs (NDI).
5. 1983: The National Republican Institute of International Affairs, later known as the International Republican Institute (IRI).
6. 1999: U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

Again, readers can follow the links and find lists of key historical trustees of all these groups, supplemented with sources. USAID does not contain a lot of elites and with the USAGM it varies from time to time, but the other NGOs most certainly have historically contained a ton of big names.

We can be quick with the CFR ties of these groups. They are major and of a similar level as the "liberal CIA" foundations:

These "foreign intervention" NGOs were far from chosen randomly. Readers who go through ISGP's Index of 2,000 NGOs searching for "Freedom House", "USAID", or "NED", will find an ever increasing amount of examples in which these groups have been financing think tanks, action groups and conferences in conflict areas around the world. That is with ISGP never having focused in that index on the financing of NGOs until maybe a year before this article was written.

Hence, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are new developments in this area all the time. New NGOs are added and old ones are analyzed for financial ties. At the moment of this writing, the U.S. Agency for Global Media is tied to a new "color revolution", this time in Iran in relation to protests against wearing a headscarf. 35

To initiate a brief discussion on these "foreign intervention" NGOs, the National Endowment for Democracy is the umbrella organization of the National Democratic Institute of International Affairs (NDI) and, as it was originally known, the National Republican Institute of International Affairs, all of whom were founded in 1983. This was literally an effort of both the Democrat and Republican Party to shift covert funding of the CIA into the public domain, allowing government agencies and multinationals to help out in influencing the politics of countries around the world. While never having been given a huge a amount of (sustained) attention, this aspect has never been denied by the founders and leaders of the organization though. A few relevant citations are as follows:

1. Allen Weinstein, executive director of the study 'The Democracy Program' in 1983-1984 that led to the NED's founding: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." 36


2. 1973-1976 CIA director William Colby (CFR 1975-), whose wife, Sally (CFR 1979-), was a NED director 1983-1992, treasurer anno 1986, and vice chair 1987-1988: "Any of the programs which ... were conducted as covert operations [can now be] conducted quite openly, and consequentially, without controversy." 37


3. Carl Gershman (CFR 1993-), NED's founding president from 1983 to 2021: "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the C.I.A. We saw that in the 60's, and that's why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that's why the endowment was created." 38

These individuals and citations speak for themselves. When the CIA landed in hot water throughout the 1970s with congressional investigations into Watergate, domestic spying, the JFK assassination, MKULTRA, the Phoenix Program, the Chilean coup and other controversies, intelligence operations were being paralyzed. In response, the wife of the active CIA director when all this controversy was going on, Sally Shelton-Colby, played a key role in having Republican and Democrat Party elites, other government departments, and big business take over literally all the work of the CIA that could realistically be seen as "democracy building".

"Democracy building" is an interesting concept of course, because for the most part this just means keeping and making countries around the world suitable for investment from multinationals, the same multinationals the CIA traditionally has worked with in overthrowing left-wing governments and dictators.

Maybe not too surprising either is that multinationals have primarily been financing the right-wing of the NED: the International Republican Institute (IRI).

The IRI has had plenty of very right wing people on the board, from the Knights of Malta and Le Cercle Pinay-tied "Christian conservative" Edwin Feulner to "Rockefeller Republican" Kissinger-proteges Brent Scowcroft (anno 1996-2009) and Lawrence Eagleburger (anno 1996-2009). Kissinger himself sat on the board of the NED form 1985 to 1989, with Zbigniew Brzezinski serving here from 1988 to 1997. The chairman of the IRI for 25 years, from 1993 to 2018, was John McCain, the most national security-tied and highest ranked senator in ISGP's Superclass Index, whose loyalty to the security state can be inferred from him writing the foreword to the 2006 book 'Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts'. The IRI is traditional Republican big business foreign policy, which only after the Cold War let go a bit of its hesitation to join the "liberal" "Eastern Establishment" group the CFR, mainly because the "Christian right" is supposed to be "independent" of that power structure.

In contrast, the IRI's Democrat counterpart, the National Democratic Institute of International Affairs, despite keeping roughly 50% CFR members on the board, fizzled out over the years and decades in terms of major names.

The decades-long major leader of the NDI was top superclass member Madeleine Albright. She served as founding vice chair of the NDI from 1983 until at least 1989. From 1993 to 2001 she served in the Clinton administration, first as ambassador to the United Nations and then as secretary of state. After leaving office in January 2001, she immediately became chair of the NDI and headed the group until her death in March 2022.

Several other major names could be found in the NDI, but the odd thing is that most of these joined in the 1980s, stayed on the board two, three or even close to four decades, but were not consistently replaced by Democrats of equal standing, or for similarly near indefinite terms, in subsequent decades. Prominent names of the Democrat Party joined? Yes, they did. But not a whole lot of superclass men and women involved in dozens of globalist think tanks and conferences. Susan Rice, a protege of Madeleine Albright; and James Wolfensohn, for example, only were at the NDI for a limited number of years.

Much of that may have to do with the fact that there are less Democrats among America's top superclass elites, with (official) Democrats as Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Woolsey and even a Paul Volcker, not being particularly known as European-style "social democrats". In contrast to the IRI, and even a lot of the early neocon foundation funding of the NED, the NDI has largely been dependent for funding on labor unions, the State Department, the United Nations, liberal-socialist European countries and a large number of "liberal CIA" foundations, which may or may not play a hand in the selection of Democrats with a relatively soft, "dovish" image. A number of major multinationals do donate to the NDI, but it is not nearly as much as to the International Republican Institute (IRI). The NED itself gets even less multinational financing, indicating multinationals really want to make sure their funds are being used by a Republican entity.

This is also where we see the most fascinating kind of split. Looking at who has gotten invited to NDI meetings (and also NED conferences), we not only find protest organizers in favor of "private enterprise" against such elements as the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but also a long list of political leaders that have been opposing right-wing CIA-Mossad-backed death squads and dictators. This involves opponents to Pinochet in Chile, the military dictatorships in Argentine, Noriega in Panama, Somoza in Nicaragua, the Kuomintang in Taiwan, and Samuel Doe in Liberia. 39 Benazir Bhutto, invited in 1985, opposed the ISI in Pakistan that was working with the CIA in training and arming Islamic militants in Afghanistan, with opium apparently paying for some of these operations.

None of this necessarily means that the persons invited to NDI meetings were genuine "Democrats". Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, invited in 1986, was a Harvard-educated World Bank and Citibank banker who served as finance minister under slightly-nationalistic-but-still-oligarchical Liberia president William Tolbert, fleeing before Tolbert was overthrown and killed by the big business/CIA-backed Samuel Doe. Subsequently Sirleaf became a supporter of the Gadaffi-backed emerging genocidal warlord Charles Taylor in his civil war against Doe starting in 1989. Despite becoming the first female president Liberia from 2006 to 2018, she ended up being criticized over this.

In another example, Shulamit Aloni was invited to the NDI in 1986. 40 She was chair of Israel's "liberal CIA" Meretz Party from 1992 to 1996, campaigning against the CIA-allied Likud-Mossad death squad clique of politicians as Shamir, Sharon and Netanyahu. The Meretz Party, criticized as it has been in Israel alongside the UN, EU and "liberal CIA" foundations as Ford and Rockefeller, has always taken a rather pro-Hamas, pro-Palestine and pro-"refugee" stance. We can find similar peculiarities with other "left wing" political activists having been invited to NDI meetings.

This author has less information on political activists being invited to the International Republican Institute (IRI), but from what has been found it is not as extreme as the Cold War-era American Security Council, which regularly invited CIA-tied drug traffickers and death squad leaders; or the related ultraright group Le Cercle Pinay, with its deep ties to the intelligence services and all kinds of fascist "strategy of tension" operators. For the most part it seems to focus on center-right candidates that are still acceptable in the eyes of the public. An example of possibly it's most right-wing association is Antonio Saca, the president of El Salvador from 2004 to 2008 who was part of the "moderate" wing of ARENA, a party founded by CIA death squad and cocaine trafficking Contra Roberto D'Aubuisson - who was invited to the American Security Council. Saca was sent to prison in 2018 for laundering $260 million of public funds.

Going through the annual reports of either the NDI, IRI, or the NED for that matter, can still be a bit of a shock though in terms of the vastness of systemic foreign intervention. A few excerpts from the 2001 annual report of the IRI, with just a few of the countries discussed cited here:

"BELARUS: IRI opened an office in Vilnius, Lithuania to better facilitate programs for Belarusian political activists as they prepared for the September 9 presidential election... IRI used trainers from other Central and Eastern European countries to provide practical advice on door-to-door campaigning and get-out-the-vote activities. ...

"BULGARIA: IRI assisted Bulgaria’s main political parties in developing their campaigns for the June 2001 parliamentary elections. IRI also trained candidates and campaign managers in grassroots organization. IRI launched a voter education Web site, www.daglasuvame.org ("let’s vote"), targeted at youth. ...

"Following the parliamentary elections, IRI conducted a series of polls and focus groups... IRI trained local party leaders in party organization, internal communications and youth organization. For the [anti-communist alliance] Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) [headed by the heavily pro-NATO 1997-2001 Bulgarian PM Ivan Kostov], IRI conducted a study ... Although the study was highly critical of the party, UDF's leaders accepted its accuracy and used the findings...

"MACEDONIA: IRI assisted the president’s communications team in its development of an effective strategy to explain the peace accord to the public. ... In preparation for the 2002 parliamentary elections, IRI began training Macedonia's main political parties.

"TURKEY: IRI made significant headway in its youth participation programs. ... IRI continued to assist Turkish partner organizations in their efforts to raise public awareness of the social costs of corruption in Turkey." 41

These are just random examples. The same operations were, and are, going on in all neighboring countries and all across Asia, Africa and Latin America. On top of that, the exact same operations all across the second and third World are going on through more "left-wing" candidates that the NDI has been partnering with, although the NDI too has not shied away from inviting more right-wing candidates either. Without saying if it's good or bad (it definitely has its good aspects), it has to be acknowledged that the NED-IRI-NDI structure constitutes the most blatant global meddling in other country's affairs imaginable. The conspiracy is "open", because it's "openly" acknowledged in annual reports, but at the same time no media or school book draws attention to it. As a result, people simply have no clue what exactly is going on, except in the vaguest of suspicions.

This is also where, once again, we see the controlled opposition left-right, conservative-liberal, Republican-Democrat model, which clearly is being exported to the entire world through the NED, NDI and IRI, and seemingly at a much, much larger scale than the CIA's budget and capabilities ever allowed for on its own. This is exactly what NED's founding president Carl Gershman indicated as well. With that, the creation of the NED, IRI and NDI, in combination with the "liberal CIA" foundations as Rockefeller, Soros, Carnegie and Ford and parallel big business funding seems to have created a kind of CIA-allied monster of global foreign and domestic influence forming.

In the end though, we can still tie all these elements, and more, to a single organization, the CFR:

A burning question, of course, that many readers will still have is what exactly the influence is of the CIA over the NED, IRI, NDI and allied "liberal CIA" foundations, not to mention the CFR itself. One would assume that the CIA uses these networks to glean intelligence from and establish contact points for any additional recruiting and action that is truly covert. It may also serve as counter-intelligence force and an enforcer to prevent double-dealing and infiltration. In that regard it is fascinating that every institution and individual identified here as a CIA-CFR-affiliated entity secretly had their mail snooped on by the CIA... 42 It's likely the heads of the foundations in question and their chief lieutenants have been fully recruited as national security assets and know exactly how to run their organizations in partnership with the CIA.

For example, how does one not regard George Soros CIA? Whether he is in an official or unofficial sense only matters in terms of convenience and clarity to outsiders. All his actions show he is a very conscious player in a global CIA-type organization. We just don't know if that organization still calls itself "CIA" or, due to all the privatized and outsourced elements, has moved beyond that name.

Not a housewife at all.

Certainly Sally Shelton Colby wasn't the only CIA (and CFR)-tied individual helping to run the NED in the early years. Another CIA tie ran through founding NED chairman John Richardson, Jr. Not only was Richardson a former lawyer at the Dulles brothers' Sullivan & Cromwell in the 1940s and 1950s, he also ended up as director (1955-1961) and president (1960-1961) of the CIA-tied International Rescue Committee (IRC), and then president of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe from 1961 to 1968. 43 His position as founding chair of the NED from 1983 to 1992 thus appears to have represented a long agenda of the CIA, starting already under Allen Dulles' 1953-1961 CIA directorship, of outsourcing and "opening up" intelligence operations. Or, as some would simply say, of creating "front organizations" with CIA agents in them. Certainly if such a pattern would be observed by western media involving companies and individuals tied to the KGB/FSB, they would be protesting loudly along these lines.

Seeing "above CIA" agents as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, joining the NED in the late 1980s, also doesn't alleviate "suspicions" of the NED, IRI, NDI, etc. operating as full-blown extensions of the deepest aspect of the U.S. security state. In that case the same would go for the CFR, Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission. The question that quickly emerges then, of course, is, "What constitutes "CIA"?" Because it certainly involves a lot more than just the bureaucratic organization, which at any point could be dissolved and reorganized into a wholly new entity with roughly similar powers. In that case the exact same (CFR) establishment would still be in charge of it, and using it as it sees fit.

In this regard, we certainly have to conclude that the New York Times - with its known CFR and CIA history, with the newspaper basically operating as a "liberal CIA"-type, pro-immigration, pro-globalist entity - was covering for this "invisible establishment-based security state" when it explained to its readers that the NED represents "political pluralism, broader than the CIA’s goals of fostering pro-Americanism." 44

Fact is, the CIA too has a long history of sponsoring not just the most right-wing death squad leaders, but also a variety of anti-communist leftists, both in European countries and other parts of the globe. An example of that from the 1960s and 1970s would be the CIA building ties with President Jomo Kenyatta, who thanked his education to the Rockefeller Foundation; as well as Kenyatta's main anti-communist socialist rival, Tom Mboya, in turn the mentor of future U.S. president Barack Obama. Obama's parents too were deeply tied to "foreign intervention" and "liberal CIA" foundations, in particular known CIA front the Asia Foundation, USAID and the Ford Foundation. The career of Obama himself ran through "liberal CIA" outfits as NYPIRG, the Gamaliel Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Woods Fund, Annenberg Foundation and even Bill Ayers and the peculiar "Weathermen". Obama's wife ended up on the board of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in the years before her husband became president.

These ties have already been discussed and sourced in ISGP's 'Liberal CIA; Rock Music' article in relation to the parents and life of Rage Against the Machine founder Tom Morello, whose father was an important United Nations diplomat for President Jomo Kenyatta. The ties discussed there boggle the mind and once again make it clear that we're dealing with much more than merely a bureaucratic CIA and that we need to investigate the exact nature of the alliance between CIA covert action and the Rockefeller-Kissinger core of the globalist movement, including the CFR.

CFR PERVASIVENESS IN EDUCATION

CFR university trustees 1973-2022; Harvard from 40% to 0%; Yale 48% to 12%, Columbia 39% to 14%

Certainly with the 1954 Reece Committee, best known for its key researcher Norman Dodd, foundations as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford were criticized for seeking "globalist" and "internationalist" control of American foreign policy through think tanks as the Foreign Policy Association and Council on Foreign Relations. 45 In the same report, these foundations were criticized for using pressure tactics to change the American education system in ways that they saw fit:

"The Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations aligned themselves behind the "progressive educators" and financed, to the tune of several hundreds of millions of dollars, measures which were intended to reform the colleges and universities. [Much is] highly commendable, in the sense that the standards in institutions and higher learning were effectively raised.

"We question, however, whether foundations should have the power even to do good in the coercive manner which was employed. ... Grants and pensions [for professors] were not available unless the arbitrary standards set by foundations were accepted. Thus, the foundations grew to be the comptrollers of higher education in the United States, its directors and molders." 46

Talk of a cover up of this issue - quite rightly so, despite the sources - has been going on in ultraright political and activist circles ever since. From KKK- 47 and John Birch Society-tied congressmen 48 to Norman Dodd himself 49 and a variety of Council for National Policy (CNP) and John Birch Society-affiliated authors as G. Edward Griffin 50 and Gary Allen. 51

By the mid 1960s it was found out that these very same Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford foundations - which continued to finance universities across the country - were fronting for the CIA, an issue discussed in previous sections. In the same period, in the 1960s and 1970s, it was slowly found out that the CIA:

1. was influencing university life by spying, amongst others, on left-wing and anti-war students 52;
2. was covertly funding the National Student Association 53 and World University Service 54;
3. infiltrated and undermined Ramparts magazine, which exposed the CIA-NSA leadership in 1967;
4. spied on other domestic activists and publications such as the The Berkeley Barb and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) 55, spreading disinformation in the process of "foreign (communist) funding" 56, through all this overstepped its mandate to only concern itself with foreign policy 57, but was nevertheless protected by the senate 58;
5. could depend on universities as fronts for spy operations in places as Vietnam 59;
6. could depend on university leadership such as those at Stanford to help with the placement of professors working on black projects for the CIA 60;
7. could depend on university leadership such as those at UCLA to create networks of CIA-friendly professors 61;
8. was lobbying universities to only promote foreign-traveling scholars that were willing to talk to CIA debriefers 62;
9. had actively recruited "several hundred" university professors, soon with worries emerging about emerging conflicting interests, propaganda dissemination and informing on left-wing students 63;
10. continued these activities even after the 1967 LBJ administration ban for the CIA to finance domestic education institutions, this because it did not ban individual ties 64;
11. had former senior personnel set up Columbia University's School of International Affairs and its affiliated Africa Studies program, quickly headed by a director of the heavily CIA-funded African-American Institute 65;
12. was financing study centers at universities, from the Research Council outfit at Princeton 66, to the Center for International Studies at MIT 67, to rumors of CIA-funding surrounding the Henry Kissinger- and Zbigniew Brzezinski-tied Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) just outside Georgetown University. 68

The overlap between the CIA and the "Big Three" foundations - Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie - quite regularly is visible in the above examples of CIA activity at universities. The African-American Institute, tied to Columbia's School of International Affairs and Africa Studies program through Professor L. Gray Cowan 69, saw its CIA backing being taken over by these foundations. With MIT's Center for International Studies the following was reported:

"The Center for International Studies at [MIT] was originally financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, the institute indicated today.

"[But today] two-thirds of the center's operation is financed by such major foundations as Ford, Rockefeller and the Carnegie Corporation... The remainder comes from research contracts with ... the C.I.A., the Agency for International Development [USAID], the State Department, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee." 70

Putting all these facts and accusations together - which likely is far from all what was going on - and it appears that the influence of the CIA on university life was considerable. Then we see that:

1. much of the original top CIA leadership had an older history in the CFR, and almost exclusively came from elite universities;
2. presidents and trustees of elites universities were members of both the CFR and the Pilgrims Society;
3. CFR- and Pilgrims-tied "liberal CIA" foundations continued to be major financiers of not just American universities, but also internationally.

At that point it is not hard to see how at least *some* obvious questions were raised about the ties between all of them.

We see one of these suspected associations expressed in the 1977 book 'Imperial Brain Trust', which we referenced earlier as having "liberal CIA" authors who somehow managed to get almost all their provided numbers wrong with regard to the number of CFR members on the "liberal CIA" foundation boards.

Unfortunately, it's no different with the numbers the authors gave on the CFR presence at university boards for 1973. In fact, the inexplicable mistakes here are even worse. Below the table from 'Imperial Brain Trust' can be seen, with the corrected numbers from ISGP. Anyone can grab a CFR membership list copy attached to this article, look up historical university boards, and confirm these corrections:

We could speculate why the CFR numbers went down so rapidly and drastically, but the basic idea seems to be that Harvard, Yale and Columbia in particular have attempted to divest themselves from their "elite" image as much as possible. Maybe they have been thinking that having so many "white", "privileged" CFR members on the board would be an easy way to spark "woke" protests on campus. It is also noteworthy that certainly Harvard still had 22% CFR members on its board during and immediately after the ("liberal CIA"-backed) November 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. That's really not long ago. It's speculation, but these events could well be tied into decisions to lower the number of CFR members on the board. It's just too obvious a way to demonstrate that Harvard is for "elitists" only.

Considering the Council on Foreign Relations membership roster has continued to grow exponentially, it certainly is an interesting question to ask where all these new members are recruited from, looking at all these free spots on university boards.

88% of top 20 English superclass anno 2023 an Oxford or Cambridge graduate

As discussed in ISGP's Pilgrims Society article, universities are a major, major part of the establishment, with a number of universities strongly popping out. That definitely is not fully synonymous with the so-called "Ivy League" universities, if only because some are less focused on law and economics, the professions that appear to be ruling the West. Historically, among the Anglo-American Pilgrims, almost all members graduated from one of the following universities:

• Harvard, in Boston.
• Yale, just north of New York City, in New Haven.
• Princeton, just south of New York City, in New Jersey.
• Columbia, in Manhattan, New York City.
• Oxford, just to the north-west of London.
• Cambridge, just north of London.

Also when ones analyzes the top of ISGP's Superclass Index for England and the United States in the early 21st century, this observation fits. Let's first take a brief look at the British/English superclass, because it is the quicker narrative.

Top British superclass anno 2023:

1. Sir Evelyn de Rothschild: Cambridge.
2. Lord Jacob de Rothschild: Oxford.
3. Nat Rothschild: Oxford.
4. Tony Blair: Oxford.
5. Niall Ferguson: Oxford.
6. David Miliband: Oxford and MIT.
7. Lord Peter Mandelson: Oxford.
8. Jonathan Mandelson: Oxford.
9. Lord Charles Powell and brother Jonathan: Oxford.
10. Lord Mark Malloch Brown: Cambridge and University of Michigan.
11. Lord Kerr of Kinlochard: Oxford.
12. Lord Nicholas Stern: Oxford.
13. Dame Pauline Neville-Jones: Oxford.
14. Sir Martin Sorrell: Cambridge and Harvard.
15. Lord Chris Patten: Oxford
16. Lord David Simon: Cambridge.
17. Lord Norman Lamont: Cambridge.

20 people and families are listed in the Superclass Index for Britain anno 2023. That makes for a total of 23 people. 19 of these are British, of which 17 either graduated from Oxford or Cambridge. That is 89%. The only exceptions here are Sir Richard Branson, who suffered from dyslexia and ADHD at the private school he attended in his youth; and Sir John Major, who never attended university. Major though is a former prime minister, his purpose simply being to appeal to the public.

The remaining four British superclass members were born in Scotland (3) or Ireland (1), which is where they received their respective educations. The same goes for Sir Peter Sutherland, a top-ranked superclass member from Scotland until his death in 2018.

67% of top 60 U.S. superclass anno 2017 a background at Harvard (27%), Yale (13%), Princeton (13%), Columbia (8%), or Oxford (12%)

Now let's look at the top 60 Superclass Index of the United States. We set the time back, for the most part, to 2017, when David Rockefeller died, but many of his closest allies were still alive. Hence, the names here include both recently deceased members of the Rockefeller-Kissinger clique; and those at the top still alive. Cambridge has been removed here, because among top American U.S. superclass only John Lehman went here.

Initially Stanford was included, but this too only resulted in one additional "positive" result, as all the other Stanford graduates also attended the famous East Coast universities. Nevertheless, Stanford is a prestigious university among West Coast elites.

NON-Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Oxford of the top-60 Superclass Index for the United States of the early 20th century:

1. U.S. president Jimmy Carter: U.S. Naval Academy.
2. Sen. Sam Nunn: Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory.
3. Congressman Lee Hamilton: DePauw and Bloomington.
4. Congressman Newt Gingrich: Emory and Tulane.


5. Colin Powell (black): City College of New York and George Washington University.
6. Vernon Jordan (black): DePauw University and Howard University.
7. Condoleezza Rice (black): Phi Beta Kappa, University of Denver. Ford Foundation-funded fellow at Stanford.


8. John Lehman: Cambridge and University of Pennsylvania.


9. Maurice Greenberg: University of Miami and New York Law School.
10. George Soros: London School of Economics.
11. Joseph Stiglitz: MIT.
12. Thomas Pickering: Tufts and a Fulbright scholar to the University of Melbourne.
13. David Rubenstein: Duke University and University of Chicago.
14. Richard Armitage: U.S. Naval Academy.
15. Irving Kristol: City College of New York, although his son went to Harvard.
16. Richard Burt: Cornell and Tufts.
17. Paul Wolfowitz: Cornell and University of Chicago.
18. Francis Fukuyama: Stanford.
19. William Perry: Stanford and Penn State.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge-graduates of the top 60 Superclass Index for the United States of the early 20th century:

1. David Rockefeller: Harvard, London School of Economics and University of Chicago.
2. Henry Kissinger: Harvard Phi Beta Kappa.
3. George Shultz: Princeton.
4. James Woolsey: Yale and Oxford Rhodes Scholar.
5. Madeleine Albright: Johns Hopkins University and Columbia.
6. Zbigniew Brzezinski: Harvard.
7. Paul Volcker: Princeton and Harvard.
8. Lynn Forester de Rothschild: Columbia.
9. Brent Scowcroft: Columbia.
10. John Whitehead: Harvard.
11. Peter Peterson: University of Chicago.
12. George H. W. Bush: Yale Skull & Bones and Phi Beta Kappa.
13. George W. Bush: Yale Skull & Bones and Harvard.
14. James Baker III: Princeton.
15. Donald Rumsfeld: Princeton and Georgetown.
16. Frank Carlucci: Princeton and Harvard.
17. Dov Zakheim: Columbia and Oxford.
18. Alexander Haig: Columbia.
19. Jeffrey Sachs: Harvard.
20. Larry Summers: Harvard.
21. Carla Hills: Yale and Stanford.
22. Paula Dobriansky: Harvard and Georgetown.
23. Richard Perle: USC, London School of Economics and Princeton.
24. William Kristol: Harvard.
25. Dick Cheney: Yale University (no degree) and the University of Wyoming.
26. Michael Chertoff: Harvard and London School of Economics.
27. David Petraeus: Princeton.
28. Joseph Nye: Princeton and Harvard.
29. Richard Haass: Oxford.
30. Robert Zoellick: Harvard.
31. Michael Bloomberg: Johns Hopkins University and Harvard.
32. Strobe Talbott: Yale and Oxford.
33. Bill Clinton: Georgetown, Oxford and Yale.
34. Hillary Clinton: Yale Law School.
35. John Kerry: Yale Skull & Bones.
36. Anne-Marie Slaughter: Princeton, Oxford and Harvard.
37. Bill Gates: Harvard (dropped out, but his close friend there and future Microsoft successor, Steve Ballmer, graduated).
38. Gen. Wesley Clark: Oxford Rhodes Scholar.

This gives us the following total result for the top 60 U.S. superclass:

1. 27%: Harvard.
2. 13%: Yale.
3. 13%: Princeton.
4. 12%: Oxford.
5. 8%: Columbia.
6. 7%: University of Chicago.
7. 5%: London School of Economics.
8. 4%: Stanford.
9. 3%: Johns Hopkins University.

This corresponds very well with earlier observation regarding the Pilgrims Society. None of these additional universities necessarily are inferior. The London School of Economics has a heavy socialist history through the Fabian Society, yet also a libertarian one through Friedrich von Hayek, and everything in between, from John Maynard Keynes to Lionel Robbins. The University of Chicago, founded by the Rockefellers, has a well-known neoliberal and libertarian tradition with many famous economists in that arena having studied and taught here.

Nevertheless, it remains fascinating that anybody going to a university outside of this very small handful, stands no chance of making it to the top of society. That raises questions as to what exactly is going on at this handful of top universities in terms of covert recruitment and grooming processes.

Was the CIA indeed "top Ivy League"-dominated in the 1950-1970s?

Maybe we can use this opportunity to dig a little into long-standing claims that the early CIA was dominated by "Ivy League" and "Wall Street" graduates. Earlier in this article we determined that 13 out of 23 - or 57% - of CIA directors between 1950 and 2023 were members of the CFR before receiving that appointment. Below we have the same list, with OSS and subsequent Strategic Services Unit (SSU) heads added to it, with us now looking at their educational background. The "Top Ivy League" graduates who were educated at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, or Cambridge are highlighted.

1. William J. Donovan: Columbia.
2. Gen. John Magruder: Virginia Military Institute.
3. Gen. William Wilson Quinn: National War College.


4. Vice Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter: U.S. Naval Academy.
5. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith: Butler University, Indianapolis (dropped out).
6. Allen Dulles: Princeton and George Washington University.
7. John McCone: University of California, Berkeley.
8. Richard Helms: Institut Le Rosey and Williams College.
9. James Schlesinger: Harvard.
10. William Colby: Princeton and Columbia.
11. George H. W. Bush: Yale Skull & Bones.
12. Adm. Stansfield Turner: Amherst, Oxford and Harvard.


13. William Casey: Fordham (Jesuit) and St. John's University (Catholic).
14. William Webster: Amherst and Washington University.
15. Robert Gates: Georgetown.
16. James Woolsey: Stanford, Oxford and Yale.
17. John Deutch: Amherst and MIT.
18. George Tenet: Georgetown and Columbia.
19. Porter Goss: Yale Book & Snake.
20. Gen. Michael Hayden: Duquesne University (Catholic).
21. Leon Panetta: Santa Clara University (Jesuit).
22. Gen. David Petraeus: Princeton.
23. John Brennan: Fordham and University of Texas.
24. Mike Pompeo: Harvard
25. Gina Haspel: University of Kentucky, Louisville and Northeastern.
26. William J. Burns: La Salle University (Catholic) and Oxford.

Conclusion? 12 of 26 - or 46% - of all past OSS, SSU and CIA directors were educated at "top Ivy League" universities. Now let's look at all historical CIA deputy directors:

1. Kingman Douglass: Yale. DD/CIA March - July 1946. Banker.
2. Gen. Edwin Kennedy Wright: Oregon State College.
3. William Harding Jackson: Princeton and Harvard Law School.
4. Allen Dulles: Princeton and George Washington University. Attorney.
5. Gen. Charles Cabell: West Point. Deputy director 1953–1962.
6. Gen. Marshall Carter: MIT.
7. Richard Helms: Institut Le Rosey and Williams College. DD/CIA 1965-1966.
8. Adm. Rufus Taylor: U.S. Naval Academy. DD/CIA 1966-1969.
9. Gen. Robert Cushman, Jr.: U.S. Naval Academy.
10. Gen. Vernon Walters: Only Stonyhurst boarding school (Jesuit).
11. E. Henry Knoche: University of Colorado.
12. John F. Blake: George Washington University and National Defense University.
13. Frank Carlucci: Princeton and Harvard.
14. Adm. Bobby Ray Inman: Phi Beta Kappa at Tyler Junior College; and University of Texas.
15. John McMahon: College of Holy Cross (Jesuit).
16. Robert Gates: Georgetown, trained in history.
17. Richard James Kerr: University of Oregon.
18. Adm. Bill Studeman: George Washington University.
19. George Tenet: Georgetown and Columbia, trained in foreign affairs.
20. Gen. John Gordon: University of Missouri, Naval Postgraduate School and New Mexico Highlands University.
21. John McLaughlin: Wittenberg University in Ohio and SAIS, Johns Hopkins University.
22. Vice Adm. Albert Calland III: U.S. Naval Academy and Industrial College of the Armed Forces.
23. Stephen Kappes: Ohio State University.
24. Michael Morell: Georgetown.
25. Avril Haines: University of Chicago and Georgetown.
26. David S. Cohen: Cornell and Yale Law School.
27. Gina Haspel: University of Louisville and Northeastern.
28. Vaugh Bishop: Northwestern University.

This time we see that 5 of 28, or 18%, of historical CIA deputy directors went to a "top Ivy League" university, with no less than 3 of the first 4, or 75%, of deputy directors having graduated here. Quite shockingly, 0% of CIA deputy directors between 1953 and 1995, spanning 14 deputy directors, were not educated at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Oxford, or Cambridge.

Before we draw any conclusions, let's look at some of the better-known historical CIA operatives, most of them of the "ranking" kind. Again, the the CIA officers in bold came from a "top Ivy League" background, as it is defined in this article.

1. James Jesus Angleton (CIA/CI 1954-1975): Yale and Harvard background, but only graduated from Yale. Counterintelligence chief for the OSS in Italy during and immediately after World War II, notoriously recruiting Prince Junio Valerio Borghese into the CIA's Stay Behind / Gladio anti-communist network. CIA counterintelligence chief from 1954 to 1975.


2. Frank Wisner (CIA/DDO 1951-1958): University of Virginia School of Law. OSS veteran. Member CFR 1946-. Head CIA-OPC 1948 to 1950. CIA deputy director of operations 1951-1958, with Richard Helms serving as his main assistant. Close to the Grahams of the Washington Post and part of the whole Georgetown Set.


3. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (CIA covert operations officer 1950-1958): Groton and Harvard. OSS during WWII. CIA-OPC recruit of Wisner 1950-. Key plotter of the 1952 Iran coup. Left the CIA in 1958 and received positions in American oil and defense firms. Also stayed in contact with the Shah of Iran.


4. Richard M. Bissell, Jr. (CIA/DDO 1958-1962): Groton, Yale and London School of Economics. History and economy. His brother, William, was Skull and Bones. He himself rejected membership. Recruited from the Ford Foundation by Frank Wisner. From 1954 to 1958 in charge of the development and operation of the U-2 spy plane, for which he picked Area 51. Subsequently, from 1958 until the Bay of Pigs incident in 1962, Bissell oversaw the CIA's covert operations, working under Allen Dulles. Known to recruit CIA agents at Yale. 71


5. Tracy Barnes (ass. CIA/DDO 1960-1961, chief of domestic ops 1961-1968): Groton (with Bissell), Yale Scroll and Key and Harvard. Married Janet Innis Lawrence, earlier married to a member of the Peabody clan, and whose mother at one point was the daughter-in-law of Rockefeller-inlaw Senator Nelson Aldrich. Second cousin of the influential Pilgrim and CFR member John Hay "Jock" Whitney. OSS veteran, deputy director of the Psychological Strategy Board in the early 1950s, and covert operations expert who helped oversee the 1954 Guatemala coup and 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in the latter case as assistant deputy director of operations under Bissell 1960-1961. Founder and chief of the CIA's Domestic Operations Division 1961-1967. After Helms got Barnes removed from the CIA, he (somewhat controversially) worked for Yale president Kingman Brewster - a Pilgrim and former Nelson Rockefeller aide in government - in managing student relations at a time of the Black Panther crisis and women being admitted. Died from a heart attack in 1972 at age 60.


6. Desmond FitzGerald (CIA/DDO 1965-1967): Harvard Law School. Married a granddaughter of Rev. Endicott Peabody, who founded the Groton School with the Morgan and Peabody banking families, with Endicott tutoring a young FDR here. OSS and CIA-OPC veteran, operating in the Far East. Head of the Cuban Task Force tasked with assassinating Castro 1962-1964, chief of the Western Hemisphere Division 1964-1965, and deputy director of operations 1965-1967. Died from a heart attack in 1967 at age 57. Well-liked by Allen Dulles. Tried to oust James Angleton, but was not supported in this by Helms.


7. Thomas Karamessines (CIA/DDO 1967-1972): Columbia University Law School. OSS and CIA-OPC veteran. CIA station chief in Rome 1959-1963, involved in Piano Solo, an operation to use fascist security state elements to suppress the communists. Assistant deputy director of operations under Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald 1963-1967, deputy director of operations 1967-1972. Resigned from the CIA in 1973, in solidarity with Helms, who was removed by Nixon over Helms' (curious) refusal to cover up the Watergate affair. Died from a heart attack in 1978 at age 71.


8. Cord Meyer, Jr. (ass. CIA/DDO 1967-1973): Yale Scroll & Key. Part of the founding UN conference in 1945. Member CFR 1947-. President United World Federalists 1947-1949, followed up by Alan Cranston. After being recruited by Allen Dulles in 1951, head of the CIA's International Organizations Division 1954-1962. Head of the Covert Action Staff of the CIA's directorate of operations 1962-1967. Assistant deputy director of operations under Helms' protege Thomas Karamessines. CIA station chief London 1973-1976.


9. William F. Buckley, Jr.: Yale Skull and Bones, chair Yale Daily News and FBI informer in the 1945-1950 period. The family fortune was heavily tied to a 1938-signed oil exploration partnership in Venezuela with the Rockefeller's Standard Oil of New Jersey. 72 Worked at Yale as a Spanish instructor until being recruited by the CIA and sent to work under CIA-OPC Mexico City station chief E. Howard Hunt in the 1951-1952 period. 73 Continued his career as "conservative godfather" after that, reportedly not having any CIA ties anymore. Did become godfather of E. Howard Hunt's children though. One of his original works, 'God and Man at Yale', complained that Yale was "atheist" and "collectivist", typical right-wing propaganda. In 1954, Buckley and his brother-in-law, decades-long "conservative CIA" propagandist L. Brent Bozell Jr., published 'McCarthy and His Enemies', a defense of the ultraright senator who criticized the State Department and various "liberal" CFR and Pilgrims as Dean Acheson of being "communists", events that even led to the creation of Bilderberg. Founder and editor-in-chief of National Review 1955-1990.


10. E. Howard Hunt: BA from Brown University, which is considered "Ivy League". Son of an attorney and Republican Party official. High school classmate of Howard J. Osborn, the CIA's director of security 1964-1974, who was forced out over Watergate. Prolific author of fiction since before, during and after joining the CIA. War correspondent for Life magazine in 1943 74, before joining the OSS.
    
    CIA-OPC October 1949-. Stationed in Paris using Averell Harriman's Economic Corporation Administration as cover 1948-1949. 75 Mexico City station chief 1950-1953, where he recruited future "conservative godfather" William Buckley Jr. (see above), who later became godfather of Hunt's three children. Involved in the planning of the 1954 Guatemalan coup, later commenting he "worked ... as a member of the CIA team that ousted Jacobo Arbenz." 76 Knew the Somoza family from Nicaragua. 77
    
    Consultant to CIA director Allen Dulles, considered a "close friend" 78, and the DOD 1960-1965. Helped Dulles write his book 'The Craft of Intelligence' (1963). 79 Liaison to Brigade 2506 80 and assigned to prepare Cuban exile leaders within this group for government positions in preparation for the (failed) 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
    
    Despite new CIA director Richard Helms having his spy novels all over his office 81, Hunt was told in 1968 that he was unlikely to receive anymore promotion in the CIA 82, quite possibly due to his limited education, his conservative views, the issues the State Department had with him over activities in Uruguay 83, or possibly his involvement in the preparations for the Bay of Pigs, etc. Despite being a prolific and snobby "status-seeker" 84, apparently he never was invited to the elite Metropolitan Club 85 for roughly similar reason: not enough formal education held him back in his career.
    
    In 1970 he went to work as a PR writer for the CIA- and Republican-tied 86 Mullen company, with letters of recommendations from Richard Helms and William Buckley Jr. Mysterious billionaire Howard Hughes was among the clients of the Mullen company although Hunt was not allowed to deal with clients, apparently due to his lack of people skills. 87 He was bored with the work, but in 1971 was hired as a consultant to President Nixon through presidential special counsel Charles W. Colson, who he first met in 1966 at a Brown University Club meeting.
    
    This consultancy job quickly progressed into running a very illegal spy and dirty tricks squad for the Republican Nixon administration, through which he played a key role in organizing the 1972 break-in in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, leading to the Watergate scandal. Despite not being a CIA officer anymore, Hunt received a peculiar amount of access to CIA resources for spy equipment in the period leading up to the Watergate break-in. Helms himself eventually cut him off from access to CIA resources, but at a lower level Hunt kept enjoying access. 88 This is quite similar to the whole Edwin Wilson - Frank Terpil affair of the late 1970s.


11. Ted Shackley: University of Maryland. CIA station chief in Miami 1962–1965. Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division 1972-1976. Associate deputy director for operations 1976 - Dec. 1977, with the Carter administration removing him for involvement with Edwin Wilson's deep cover pro-terrorist operations. Officially left the CIA in 1979.


12. George Joannides: City College of New York and St. John's University School of Law.


13. Felix Rodriguez: No university. Controversial covert operations officer in the Far East and Latin America.


14. Joe Alsop: Groton (with Bissell) and Harvard. Related to U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt and James Monroe. Journalist who moonlighted for the CIA.


15. Stewart Alsop: Groton and Yale. Brother of Joe. Journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek who moonlighted for the CIA.

It has to be said, the list of "better-known historical CIA operatives" - which in hindsight largely consists of counterintelligence chief James Angleton and successive leaders of the operations branch - kinda cinched it: Certainly when you (half-)include Richard Helms, the CIA directorship and the leadership of the Counter-Intelligence and Operations departments were dominated by "top Ivy League" graduates during the 1950s and 1970s.

Looking at the amount of acknowledged and unacknowledged controversy these CIA operatives are tied to, one wonders how much the CIA Directorate of Operations and Counter-Intelligence branch were operating as an independent operation from the cabinet and "outside" CIA directors as John McCone, with only unofficial Eastern Establishment oversight -- an Eastern Establishment centered around the CFR, the Pilgrims and the Rockefeller clique.

With that, maybe the CFR is and has been operating as a kind of "super CIA" covertly managing the U.S. government and the core of the globalist movement.

Notes

---

1. 2004 annual report, CFR, p. 44.).
2. Bilderberg funding:
   • 1957, 1958: Rockefeller Foundation:
     • 1957 annual report, Rockefeller Foundation, p. 325: "Carnegie Endowment ... Bilderberg Group: expenses of American participants: $5,000."
     • 1958 annual report, Rockefeller Foundation, p. 462: "Carnegie Endowment ... Bilderberg Group: expenses of American participants: $10,000"
   • 1957, 1959 and 1963: Ford Foundation:
     • 1957 annual report, Ford Foundation, p. 84: "Carnegie Endowment... Bilderberg conference in the United States: $30,000."
     • 1959 annual report, Ford Foundation, p. 139: "Carnegie Endowment... Bilderberg conference among Atlantic community relations: $48,000."
     • 1963, Ford Foundation, 'Ford Foundation Grants in New York', p. 30: "Bilderberg Conference program among Atlantic-community nations: $85,345."
3. March 31, 1980, Trilateral Commission, 'Current and Former Major Financial Supporters in the United States (since the founding of The Trilateral Commission in 1973)' (PDF).
4. Usage of the term "internationalist":
   • 1959, Cornelius "Neil" Vanderbilt, Jr. (IV; 1898–1974), 'Man of the World', pp. 258-264: "[Some] were to be met at my mother's house--wealthy industrialists, internationalists of the royalist persuasion..."
   • December 2011, Volume 41, Issue 4, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Dolores Janiewski, 'Eisenhower's Paradoxical Relationship with the "Military-Industrial Complex"': "Taking Joseph McCarthy's side in his battle with John Foster Dulles, Wood ascribed the clash to "internationalists and pinks" among Eisenhower's advisors..."
   • Nov. 21, 1971, New York Times, 'The Council on Foreign Relations— Is It a Club? Seminar? Presidium? 'Invisible Government'?': "Raymond Vernon, a Council member who is a professor at the Harvard Business School, says: "Certainly the Council is influenced by the fact that its membership and financial support are drawn heavily from the internationalist wing of American business. It draws a box in which the Council operates.""
   • 1974, Warren Hinckle for Ramparts, 'If you have a lemon, make lemonade', p. 178: "The next day, in Washington, the same arguments were made by other NSA [National Student Association] leaders to Sol Stern, who was writing the story [why its CIA relationship shouldn't be exposed]. They actually advanced the intriguing contention that such a disclosure would be damaging to the enlightened men of the "liberal" internationalistic wing of the CIA who were willing to provide clandestine money to domestic progressive causes."
   • 2002, David Rockefeller, 'Memoirs', p. 405: "[Conspiracy theorists are] characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
   • Dec. 17, 2002, UN.org, 'Remarks at the book signing by David Rockefeller' (un.org/sg/en/content/sg/press-encounter/2002-12-17/remarks-book-signing-david-rockefeller (accessed: Aug. 22, 2022): "Press encounter by the Secretary-General [Kofi Annan] upon arrival at UNHQ (unofficial transcript): ... "I think without internationalists like you, the international system that we have been trying to build, the international system that we have today wouldn't be here. So thank you very much, David [Rockefeller].""
   • December 5, 2015, Irish Times, 'Peter Sutherland: Moral Merkel. Fragile Europe. 'Sneering' Ireland': ""[Sutherland:] "I am absolutely an internationalist.""
   • June 2, 2006, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas interview with Gregory Dalton at the Commonwealth Club of California (transcribed from YouTube posted interview): "I mean, people who are internationalist, in general, rarely are people who say I want to go bomb the f–k out of some other country, right?"
5. cfr.org/historical-roster-directors-and-officers (accessed: April 27, 2020): "Members of the Board: ... David Rockefeller 1949–85... Chairmen of the Board: ... David Rockefeller 1970–85."
6. Feb. 15, 2002, C-Span Live from a CFR meeting that opened the CFR's Geoeconomic Center, David Rockefeller to speaker Dick Cheney: "Vice president, I just watched your whole speech, but I was particularly pleased that you gave such a strong endorsement for the Free Trade Agreement for all the Americas, a subject that has been of great concern to me for many years..."
7. *) Ibid.
   *) Feb. 15, 2002, presidency.ucsb.edu, 'Richard B. Cheney: Former Vice President of the United States: Remarks by the Vice President to the Council on Foreign Relations': "Les [Gelb] and Pete [Peterson], I want to thank you all for the warm welcome today. I see a lot of old friends in the room. And it's good to be back at the Council on Foreign Relations. As Pete mentioned, I have been a member for a long time, and was actually Director for some period of time. I never mentioned that when I was campaigning for reelection back home in Wyoming [laughter]...
   I also especially want to thank the Council, and especially Hank Greenberg, for initiating the Center for Geoeconomic Studies. ...
   MODERATOR: ... David [Rockefeller] played a key role in the formation of this Geoeconomic Center, with ideas and with his generosity as well."
8. Ibid. "Q: Fred Bergsten from the Institute for International Economics..."
9. *) iie.com/administ/board.htm (accessed: Dec. 13, 2002): "Board of Directors: *Peter G. Peterson, Chairman... Conrad Black ... Stanley Fischer ... Maurice R. Greenberg. *Carla Hills. Nobuyuki Idei ... Lee Kuan Yew ... Karl Otto Pohl ... David Rockefeller. David M. Rubenstein. Renato Ruggiero. *Stephan Schmidheiny. ... George Soros. Lawrence H. Summers. Peter D. Sutherland. Jean CLaude Trichet ... Paul A. Volcker ...
   Ex officio: *C. Fred Bergsten. ...
   Honorary Directors: ... Alan Greenspan ... George P. Shultz. ...
   Advisory Committee ... Jacob A. Frenkel ... David D. Hale ... Paul R. Krugman ... Jeffrey D. Sachs. Nicholas H. Stern. Joseph E. Stiglitz."
   *) iie.com/institute/board.cfm (accessed: Aug. 15, 2007): "David Rockefeller [and most names above] ... Mario Monti ... Victor Pinchuk ... Jacob Wallenberg..."
   *) iie.com/institute/board.cfm (accessed: Oct. 29, 2009): "Victor Pinchuk ... David Rockefeller [and most other names above]. Lynn Forester de Rothschild [the year she joined]..."
   *) iie.com/institute/advisory.cfm (accessed: Aug. 15, 2007 - April 15, 2016): "Paul R. Krugman ... Thierry de Montbrial ... Jeffrey D. Sachs. Nicholas H. Stern. Joseph E. Stiglitz."
10. Nov. 25, 1999, New York Times, 'Outspoken Chief Economist Leaving World Bank': "[After raising] pointed questions about the effectiveness of conventional approaches to helping poor countries. ... . Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers praised Mr. Stiglitz as a "major creative and intellectual force," and administration officials said the United States had not sought Mr. Stiglitz's removal."
11. April 29, 2011, Greg Palast for the Guardian, 'IMF's four steps to damnation': "Here in Washington we conducted exclusive interviews with Stiglitz, for The Observer and Newsnight, about the inside workings of the IMF, the World Bank, and the bank's 51% owner, the US Treasury."
12. 1977, Laurence Shoup and William Minter, 'Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy', pp. 44, 96: "... the Corporation Service. Begun in 1953... Various Council members often took turns soliciting firms in their industries to join the Corporation Service. Particularly active was David Rockefeller, who helped initiate the service with appeals to the banking and oil industries."
13. Nov. 21, 1971, New York Times, 'The Council on Foreign Relations— Is It a Club? Seminar? Presidium? ‘Invisible Government'?': "Corporate executives participate in the Council either as members or through its Corporation Service. The service provides subscribing com panies with a twice-yearly seminar for business executives and a dinner for company chairmen and presidents. This off-the-record dinner has been addressed in recent years by two Treasury Secretaries and the director of the C.I.A. ...
    Whether the Corporation Service provides businessmen with something substantive or just a sense of being on the inside, it provides a major source of revenue for the Council. Last year, 123 subscribing companies paid a total of $265,000 (more than one-fifth of the organization's general-fund income)."
14. The following names have all been checked manually by this author by comparing CFR membership lists with Bilderberg's original 1954 visitor list. Conclusion: At least 14 of 15 (93% of) founding U.S. Bilderberg persons already belonged to the CFR, with only John Coleman possibly joining a year later. The most dominant visitor for the next 70 years, David Rockefeller, was the only CFR director among this group.
    Initial 1954 BB visitors alongside CFR director David Rockefeller: Nelson Dean Jay (CFR member 1942-; director J.P. Morgan & Co.) | George Nebolsine (CFR member 1944-) | Gardner Cowles Jr. (CFR member 1945-) | George Bingham (CFR member 1946-) | George Ball (CFR member 1948-) | Paul Nitze (CFR member 1949-) | C.D. Jackson (CFR member 1950-) | H.J. Heinz II (CFR member 1952-; father Howard: CFR member 1924-) | J. D. Zellerbach (CFR member 1952-) | George McGhee (CFR member 1953-) | Cola Parker (CFR member 1953-) | George Perkins (CFR member 1953-) | Joseph Spang Jr. (CFR member 1954-) | John Coleman (CFR member mid 1954- or 1955-; commissioned by C.D. Jackson to organize the initial Bilderberg participants in 1953-1954).
    Others involved in the Bilderberg founding, but who did not visit the original meeting: Walter Bedell Smith (CFR member 1952-; CIA director 1950-1953 who co-founded Bilderberg, but did not attend) | Dwight Eisenhower (CFR member 1949-; was interested in using the Bilderberg plan in his 1952 presidential campaign, but various organizers disapproved of the publicity; agreed that (incoming) administration officials worked on the bilderberg plan) | Averell Harriman (CFR member 1924-; didn't want to touch the Bilderberg plan during the 1952 elections, because it was "[political] dynamite".).
15. The Bilderberg steering committee rejected the idea of David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski to reform Bilderberg to include Japan. No details exist on who voted against (politicians are suspected), but the fact is that on the founding Trilateral Commission membership list, we find countless of David Rockefeller's closest big business Bilderberg steering committee associates. These names are:
    1. George Ball of Lehman Brothers.
    2. Fiat boss Gianni Agnelli
    3. Shell chieftain John Loudon.
    4. Otto Wolff von Amerongen, tied to the Thyssen interests.
    5. Kurt Birrenbach, a representative of the Thyssen fortune.
    6. Lord Eric Roll of S.G. Warburg.
    7. Max Kohnstamm.
    8. Baron Daniel Janssen of Solvay.
    
    
16. Nov. 21, 1971, New York Times, 'The Council on Foreign Relations— Is It a Club? Seminar? Presidium? 'Invisible Government'?': "How much leverage such corporations thus have on the Council's program is difficult to determine. Raymond Vernon, a Council member who is a professor at the Harvard Business School, says: ''Certainly the Council is influenced by the fact that its membership and financial support are drawn heavily from the internationalist wing of American business. It draws a box in which the Council operates. The question is whether that box unduly constricts decisions or whether it is big enough to allow many different options.""
17. Sep. 18, 2019, pacificcouncil.org, 'Trump Names Robert C. O’Brien as National Security Advisor': "O'Brien has been a Pacific Council member since 2007."
18. July 14, 2017, Washington Post, 'Lessons in disaster: A top Clinton adviser searches for meaning in a shocking loss': "He ran through a list of his early mentors... Leslie H. Gelb, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Sullivan had spent time as a summer intern, assigned by happenstance to Gelb's office. ... Strobe Talbott, who runs the Brookings Institution."
19. April 10, 2018, Congressional Record - Senate, Vol. 164, No. 57, S2026: "Just yesterday, 53 former senior U.S. officials sent the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence a letter in which they expressed their wholehearted support for Ms. Haspel. This group includes former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz..."
    *) The full list at intelligence.senate.gov includes: "Cofer Black ... John O. Brennan ... James R. Clapper, Jr. ... David Cohen, Former Deputy Commissioner New York Police Department (Intelligence) and former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence. [Former DDCI] David S. Cohen... Henry A. Crumpton ... Porter J. Goss ... General Michael V. Hayden ... Stephen R. Kappes ... Bob Kerrey ... Henry A. Kissinger ... A.B. ["Buzzy"] Krongard ... Mike McConnell ... Admiral William H. McRaven ... Michael J. Morell ... John Negroponte ... Leon Panetta ... James L. Pavitt ... George P. Shultz ... George J. Tenet .. Greg Vogle ... William H. Webster ... Pete Wilson."
20. October 20, 1977, Carl Bernstein for Rolling Stone, 'The CIA and the Media'.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid. Article extensively cited in ISGP's Pilgrims Society article.
23. Ibid.
24. March 17, 1978, Washington Post, 'Former CIA Aide Dons Pundit's Hat'.
25. April 27, 1976, New York Times, 'C.I.A. Secretly Owned Insurance Complex and Invested Profits in Stock Market'.
26. This is on memory of the author involving old newspaper articles or congressional reports. The source in question still has to be located.
27. laurenceshoup.com/ ?page_id=24 (accessed: accessed: Dec, 8, 2022): "I left Los Angeles only after college, when I went into the U.S. Peace Corps to teach in Ethiopia for two years ... receiving my PhD in U.S. history in 1974. ... I have been a people’s movement activist for five decades, beginning with the 1960s anti-Vietnam war and civil rights struggles. I marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and participated in numerous protests against U.S. wars during that and subsequent decades. ... My inspiration [is] Howard Zinn’s vision... I have also run for political office as a Green Party candidate twice, for Oakland City Council (1996) and for California Secretary of State (2002)."
28. amazon.com/William-Minter/e/B001JP263O/ (accessed: accessed: Dec, 8, 2022): "William Minter is the editor of AfricaFocus Bulletin (http://www.africafocus.org). He has been a writer, researcher, and activist since the mid-1960s, focusing particularly on southern Africa and international issues. He studied at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria in 1961-62 and taught in Tanzania and Mozambique at the secondary school of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in 1966-68 and 1974-76. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology and a certificate in African studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. ...
    Minter worked as a writer, editor, and researcher at Africa News Service (now http://allafrica.com) in Durham, N.C. in 1973 and 1976-82. Based in Washington since 1982..."
29. Ibid.
30. allafrica.com/whoweare.html (accessed: Aug. 15, 2000): "AllAfrica is built on the legacy of the non-profit Africa News Service..."
    *) 1986 annual report, Ford Foundation, p. 70: "U.S. FOREIGN POLICY: ... Other actions included further support ... to Africa News Service, which produces print and radio reports on African affairs..."
    *) 1990 annual report, Rockefeller Foundation, pp. 47-48: "The [Rockefeller] Foundation's Special Interes and Explorarions (SIE) Fund... Other SIE grants included support for: - continuation and expansion of Africa News service..."
31. africafocus.org/about.php (accessed: Dec. 8, 2022): "AfricaFocus Bulletin, launched in November 2003, is an independent publication edited and produced by William Minter."
32. africafocus.org/sponsors/osi_africa.php (accessed: Dec. 8, 2022; first web.archive.org: Aug. 26, 2010); africafocus.org/sponsors/sponsors-list.php (accessed: Dec. 8, 2022; first web.archive.org: Dec. 27, 2010): "Open Society Foundations in Africa http://www.soros.org/ regions/africa..."
33. 1987 annual report, RBF, David Rockefeller, p. 13: "I should like to make special mention of Henry Kissinger, who retired as a trustee at the same time Bill Dietel and I did [this year]. Henry's guidance, wisdom, and friendship as a member of the board were for me without equal."
34. rbf.org/about/transparency/annual-reviews (accessed: Dec. 12, 2022).
35. Sep. 28, 2022, english.almayadeen.net, 'Dirty money: Meet the US agent driving the CIA-led riots in Iran': ""I’m leading this movement,” [Masih] Alinejad, 46, told The New Yorker on Saturday. "The Iranian regime will be brought down by women. I believe this." ... Operating from an FBI safehouse, Alinejad has been living in the US for the past decade working as a full-timer for VOA Persia - or, Voice of America, Persia - Washington's propaganda mouthpiece funded directly by the Broadcasting Board of Governors [former name of the USAGM] ... Between 2015 and 2022, the US Agency for Global Media [USAGM] paid Alinejad over $628,000...".
36. Sep. 22, 1991, Washington Post, 'Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups'.
37. Repeatedly cited source: March 14, 1982, Washington Post, 'Colby: Political Action—in the Open'. The original cannot be confirmed, as it does not appear in the Washington Post's digital archive. However, it can be found cited and sourced here though: 1982, Freedom House, 'Freedom at Issue' , p. 19.
38. June 1, 1986, New York Times, 'Missionairies for Democracy: U.S. Aid for Global Pluralism'.
39. *) Winter 1989, NDI Reports, p. 8: "International visitors..."
    *) Dec. 1986, NDI's newsletter The International Democrat, p. 7: "International Visitors to NDI..."
    See the NDI entry in ISGP's Index of NGOs for biographical information on the mentioned visitors.
40. Ibid.
41. 2001 annual report, International Republican Institute (IRI), pp. 10-17.
42. *) Sep. 25, 1975, Washington Post, 'CIA Opened Mail of Humphrey, Nixon, Kennedy'.
    *) Sep. 25, 1975, Kennebec Journal, 'CIA Opened Nixon's Mail': "Chairman Frank Church ... of the Senate Intelligence Committee [said], "We want to know why the CIA opened the mail of organizations such as the Ford Foundation, Harvard University, and the Rockefeller Foundation or why mail to and from persons such as (Federal Reserve Chairman) Arthur Burns, Rep. Bella Abzug, Jay Rockefeller, Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon himself, Hubert Humphrey and Edward Kennedy .. should have been regularly opened and scrutinized by the CIA."
43. *) Jan. 6, 2015, yfuusa.org, 'YFU Mourns Loss of Democracy Advocate, Activist and YFU Leader John Richardson Jr.': "President and CEO of YFU from 1978-86. ... A Wall Street lawyer (Sullivan and Cromwell) and investment banker (Paine Webber), Richardson changed direction in 1956 through personally organizing airlifts of medical supplies during the Hungarian Revolution. ... John Richardson was CEO of Radio Free Europe (1961-68), Assistant Secretary of State for Education and Cultural Affairs (1969-77). [A] founding board member and chair of the National Endowment of Democracy, president of the International Rescue Committee, on the boards of the American Forum for Global Education, the Council on Foreign Relations..."
    *) Jan. 12, 2015, Washington Post, 'John Richardson Jr., activist and former president of Radio Free Europe, dies at 93'.
44. June 1, 1986, New York Times, 'Missionairies for Democracy: U.S. Aid for Global Pluralism'.
45. May-July, 1954, U.S. Congress: House, Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations (Reece Committee), 'Tax-Exempt Foundations - Part 1', pp. 175-177.
46. Ibid., pp. 135.
47. April 7, 1971, Congressional Record, Congressman John R. Rarick of Louisiana (a secret KKK member), 'Tax Free Foundations Lobby Illegally for Socialism, Subversion, and Communism'.
48. 1972, Gary Allen, foreword by Congressman John G. Schmitz, 'None Dare Call It Conspiracy', Chapter 2: "In 1953, one of these men, Norman Dodd, headed the Reece Committee's investigation of tax-free foundations."
49. 1982. G. Edward Griffin interview with Norman Dodd. Video clips to be found on YouTube, or transcripts in search engines.
    Youtube.com/watch?v=gyBrd74EJ-g (accessed: May 25, 2023).
50. Ibid.
51. See three notes back.
52. *) Jan. 27, 1967, Associated Press, 'CIA Snooped At 3 Colleges': ""Operation Chaos" ... Boston University, Brown and Utah State."
    *) Dec. 22, 1974, New York Times, 'Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years': "At least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the C.I.A. that was reporting directly to Richard Helms...".
53. Feb. 16, 1967, Washington Post, 'Foundation Cited As Conduit of CIA to Finance NSA'.
54. April 26, 1967, New York Times, 'Another Student Group Said to Have C.I.A. Ties'.
55. Jan. 11, 1975, Seymour Hersh for the New York Times, 'Ex-Army Agent Says He Briefed C.I.A. in 1967 on Radicals in U.S.'.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. May 19, 1967, New York Times, 'School-C.I.A. Link Denied at Inquiry: Michigan State Head Says There Is Still No Proof'.
60. May 20, 1971, Stanford University Chaparral, 'CIA Operates at ... Stanford'.
61. Feb. 20, 1078, Los Angeles Times, 'CIA Documents Disclose History of Contacts With University of California'.
62. March 11, 1971, Minnesota Daily, 'CIA, FBI cooperation alleged; Faculty 'spies' condemned'.
63. May 6, 1976, Washington Post, 'Professors Decry Recruiting by CIA'.
64. Feb. 16, 1976, Village Voice, 'The CIA Report the President Doesn't Want You to Read', p. 74: "c. Colleges and Universities: ...". An additional source on this from the 1970s has been lost by the author.
65. Jan. 25-Feb 7, 1969, Ramparts (special edition), 'A Muckraker's Guide to 1968 & Other Horrors'.
66. March 11, 1971, Minnesota Daily, 'CIA, FBI cooperation alleged; Faculty 'spies' condemned': "The Research Council [was] founded by Hadley Cantril, the late chairman of the Princeton University psychology department, and his associate, Lloyd Free, derived nearly all its income from the C.I.A. in the decade in which it was active.
    “They were considered an asset because we paid them so much money,” a former C.I.A. man said. Mr. Free confirmed that he 2nd Dr. Cantril, an acknowledged pioneer in public opinion polling, had "just sort of run" the council for the C.I.A."
67. June 30, 1964, New York Times, 'M.I.T. Hints Unit had links to C.I.A.; Indicates Study Center Was Once Financed by Agency'.
68. Sep. 8, 1972, Washington Post, 'Think Tank Party': "When the Rev. R. J. Henle began his presidency of Georgetown Univerity three years ago, students demanded he shut down the university's Center for Strategic and International Studies "because they thought it was supported by CIA funds, a tool of the military-industrial complex and because it was conservative and fascist," he said last night."
69. Jan. 25-Feb 7, 1969, Ramparts (special edition), 'A Muckraker's Guide to 1968 & Other Horrors'.
70. June 30, 1964, New York Times, 'M.I.T. Hints Unit had links to C.I.A.; Indicates Study Center Was Once Financed by Agency'.
71. Jan. 23, 2007, Andrew Glass for Politico, 'In Wilderness of Mirrors, Reflections Fade to Gray': "Hardly anybody remembers Richard M. Bissell Jr. anymore. But I remember the spring day in 1957 when the shy and bespectacled Bissell came to New Haven to recruit Yale seniors for the CIA. ... After Bissell was forced out, his large bevy of Yale recruits stayed on. Their boss became Richard Helms... Porter Goss, R-Fla., who arrived at Yale from Hotchkiss in my senior year, fit this mold. The CIA recruited him in 1959, in his junior year, after he was “tapped” by Book and Snake, a Yale secret society."
72. 1961, The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, p. 110: "Buckley, William Frank [Sr.], oil executive [born on] July 11, 1881. ... In 1915, after selling out his interest in the Mexican Investment Co. he and Edmund L. Buckley founded the Pantepec Oil Company, C.A., of Mexico. Again joined by Edmund, he founded Pantepex Oil Company, C.A., of Venezuela in 1924, and began oil operations in that country, after a temporary political condition had forced his withdrawal from Mexico two years earlier. He served as president of the Pantepec Oil Company from 1924 to 1943, in the meantime residing in France during 1929-33. In 1938 he entered into a contract with the Standard Oil Company of Venezuela to explore and develop certain of the Pantepec properties, which led to the discovery of the Mulata and El Roble oil fields in Venezuela, and in 1944 he entered into a contract with the Atlantic Refining Company for the exploration of other Pantepec concessions, resulting in further discoveries at Tucupido, Ruiz, Aguasay, and Pirital. Specializing in exploration for oil in foreign countries, Buckley began in 1945 to expand his operations beyond Venezuela, and in 1948 he initiated a series of reorganizations that..."
73. *) 2007, New York Times, 'E. Howard Hunt, Watergate Figure, Dies at 88': "He moved to Mexico City, where he became chief of station in 1950. He brought along another rookie C.I.A. officer, William F. Buckley Jr., later a prominent conservative author and publisher, who became godfather and guardian to the four children of Mr. Hunt and his wife..."
    *) More sources on the Hunt-Buckley-CIA relationship are given in ISGP's CFR article, in the section 'Was the CIA indeed "top Ivy League"-dominated in the 1950-1970s?'.
74. 1972–1973, 'Who's Who In America: 37th Edition' (as cited by the New York Times on June 3, 1973): "HUNT, EVERETTE HOWARD, Jr., pub. relations exec., author, govt ofcl.; b. Hamburg, N.Y., Oct. 9, 1918; s. Everette Howard and Ethel Jean (Totterdale) H.; A.B., Brown U., 1940; ... Movie script writer, editor March of Time, 1942-43, war corr. Life mag., 1943; screen writer, 1947-48: attache Am. embassy, Paris, France, 1948-49, Vienna, Austria, 1949–50, Mexico City, 1950–53; polit. officer Far East Command, Tokyo, Japan, 1954–56; 1st sec., consul Montevideo, Uruguay, 1957–60; cons. Dept. Def., 1960–65; with Dept. State, Washington. 1968–70; v.p., dir. Robert R. Mullen & Co.. Washington, 1970–71; cons to the Pres., 1971—. Served with USNR, 1940-42; to 1st It. USAAF, 194346, Guggenheim fellow. 1946. Clubs: Brown University (N.Y.C.); Army and Navy, Lakewood Country (Washington). Author 44 novels, 1942—, pseudonyms Robert Dietrich, John Baxter, Gordon Davis. Contbr fgn affairs and polit jours."
75. Aug. 16, 1976, Norman Mailer for New York Magazine, 'A Harlot High and Low: Reconnoitering Through the Secret Government', p. 32: "Before joining the CIA Hunt had ... been a war correspondent for Life, had a Guggenheim Fellowship for one of his novels ... had been in Europe for the ECA under Averell Harriman. Later, within the CIA, he collaborated with Allen Dulles in the writing of The Craft of Intelligence. He also worked closely with Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Dick Helms, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barner, Tom Karamessines... From 1966 to 1970, when Hunt neglects to describe what he is doing for the Company, and the assumption, since he is stationed in America, is capers, domestic capers."
76. 1973, E. Howard Hunt, 'Give Us this Day', p. 23.
77. June 3, 1973, New York Times, 'Beyond the Howard Hunt of June 17'.
78. Very seldom mentioned. 1980, Harrison Evans Salisbury (New York Times journalist), 'Without Fear Or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times', pp. 578, 597: "Long before Hunt left his New York post (he was a close friend of Allen Dulles and went to Washington in the early fifties and then to Paris, where he stayed through 1958 in charge of clandestine operations) the arrangement started to run down. ...
    I am particularly indebted to Carl Bernstein and former CIA Directors William Colby, John McCone and Richard Helms and so many CIA officials (more past then present)... James Angleton ... Howard Hunt..."
79. Aug. 16, 1976, Norman Mailer for New York Magazine, 'Later, within the CIA, he collaborated with Allen Dulles in the writing of The Craft of Intelligence.." Also mentioned in 1974 by The ATlantic, with the original source being Tad Szulc.
80. 1978, Ninety-fifth Congress, Second Session, Volumes 10-12, House Select Committee on Assassinations, pp. 65-67: "E. Howard Hunt, once assigned liaison duties with the brigade, claimed later [it hated JFK]."
81. Feb. 8, 1974, Tad Szulc for the New York Post, 'The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt: Compulsive Spy'.
82. June 3, 1973, New York Times, 'Beyond the Howard Hunt of June 17'.
83. Ibid. And the source before the previous.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.: "Hunt retired from the C.I.A. on April 30, 1970. The next day, he went to work for Robert R. Mullen & Company, a public-relations firth with intimate Republican party ties. It may have been a coincidence that Robert R. Mullen, the firm's owner, served as the E.C.A.'s Information Director between 1949 and 1952, when Hunt was in Europe [the final year, undercover for the CIA]."
87. Feb. 8, 1974, Tad Szulc for the New York Post, 'The Strange Careeer of E. Howard Hunt: Compulsive Spy': "As for the Mullen firm, it was extremely close to Republican power in Washington [and also did] represent in Washington the interests of Howard Hughes, the elusive billionaire."
88. Oct. 14, 1979, New York Times, 'An American Spy Story': "[CIA director] Helms ... accommodated the White House plumbers when they needed spook equipment for E. Howard Hunt. ... "It was going too far [at a certain point],” Helms testified, But he also admitted that the C.I.A. never asked Hunt why he needed the wigs and other paraphernalia. ... The Helms-Cushman decision to cut off Hunt “was not disseminated throughout the agency."" Discussed in more detail in June 3, 1973, New York Times, 'Beyond the Howard Hunt of June 17'.