Them

by Jon Ronson

  “Oh, Jon,” said Omar, sadly. “You know me. I had nothing to do with the posters.”

  “But your phone number was printed at the bottom,” I said.

  “Some terrible person must have found my number,” said Omar.

  “But why would they do that?” I asked.

  “To frame me,” said Omar. “To get me into trouble. I had nothing to do with the posters. I promise you that. We are not at war with the Jewish community but with the terrorist state of Israel. The posters were nothing to do with me.”

  “Oh, Omar,” I said.

  “What?” said Omar.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  What else was there to say?

  ♦

  I continued dutifully to write to Bilderbergers, although I held out no hope of a breakthrough.

  And then, one Tuesday morning, the phone rang. It was the instantly recognizable voice of a Bilderberg founder member, for thirty years one of their inner circle, their steering committee, a Bilderberg agenda setter, a head-hunter – a secret ruler of the world himself, should you choose to believe the assorted militants I had spent the last five years with.

  It was Denis Healey.

  ♦

  “How can I help you?” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “would you tell me what happens inside Bilderberg meetings?”

  “OK,” he said, cheerfully.

  There was a silence.

  “Why?” I said. “Nobody else will.”

  “Because you asked me,” he said. Then he added, “I’m an old fart. Come on over.”

  ♦

  Once Lord Healey had agreed to talk to me – and I had circulated this information far and wide – other Bilderberg members became amenable too (albeit on the condition of anonymity).

  These interviews enabled me to, at least, piece together the backstage mechanics of this most secret society.

  So this is how it works. A tiny, shoestring central office in Holland decides each year which country will host the next meeting. Each country has two steering committee members. (The British ones have included Lord Carrington, Denis Healey, Andrew Knight, the one-time editor of The Economist magazine, and Martin Taylor, the ex-CEO of Barclays Bank).

  They say that each country dreads their turn coming around for they have to raise enough money to book an entire five-star hotel for four days (plus meals and transport and vast security – every packet of peas is opened and scrutinized, and so on). They call up Bilderberg-friendly global corporations, such as Xerox or Heinz or Fiat or SmithKline Beecham or Barclays or Nokia, who donate the hundreds of thousands of pounds needed. They do not accept unsolicited donations from non-Bilderberg corporations. Nobody can buy their way into a Bilderberg meeting, although many corporations have tried.

  Then they decide who to invite – who seems to be a ‘Bilderberg person’.

  ♦

  The notion of a Bilderberg person hasn’t changed since the earliest days, back in 1954, when the group was created by Denis Healey, Joseph Retinger, David Rockefeller and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands (a former SS officer while he was a student – ironic that a former Nazi, albeit a low-ranking and half-hearted one, would give birth to an organization that so many would consider to be evidence of a Jewish conspiracy).

  “First off,” said a steering committee member to me, “the invited guests must sing for their supper. They can’t just sit there like church mice. They are there to speak. I remember when I invited Margaret Thatcher back in ‘75. She wasn’t worldly. She’d probably never even been to America. Well, she sat there for the first two days and didn’t say a thing. People started grumbling. A senator came up to me on the Friday night, Senator Mathias of Maryland. He said, ‘This lady you invited, she hasn’t said a word. You really ought to say something to her.’ So I had a quiet word with her at dinner. She was embarrassed. Well, she obviously thought about it overnight because the next day she suddenly stood up and launched into a three-minute Thatcher special. I can’t remember the topic, but you can imagine. The room was stunned. Here’s something for your conspiracy theorists. As a result of that speech, David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger and the other Americans fell in love with her. They brought her over to America, took her around in limousines, and introduced her to everyone.

  “I remember when Clinton came in ‘91,” he added. “Vernon Jordan invited him along. He used it as a one-stop-shop. He went around glad-handing everyone. Nobody thought they were meeting the next President.” (Of course, Jim Tucker would contend that they all knew they were meeting the next President – for they huddled together that weekend and decided he would be the next President.)

  At times I become nostalgic for when I knew nothing. There are so few mysteries left, and here I am, I presume, relegating Bilderberg to the dingy world of the known.

  The invited guests are not allowed to bring their wives, girlfriends or – on rarer occasions – their husbands or boyfriends. Their security officers cannot attend the conference and must have dinner in a separate hall. The guests are expressly asked not to give interviews to journalists. Rooms, refreshments, wine and cocktails before dinner are paid for by Bilderberg. Telephone, room service and laundry bills are paid for by the participants.

  There are two morning sessions and two afternoon sessions, except for on the Saturday when the sessions take place only in the evening so the Bilderbergers can play golf.

  The seating plan is in alphabetical order. It is reversed each year. One year Umberto Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat, will sit at the front. The next year Norbert Zimmermann, chairman of Berndorf, the Austrian cutlery and metalware manufacturer, will take his place.

  Whilst furiously denying that they secretly ruled the world, my Bilderberg interviewees did admit to me that international affairs had, from time to time, been influenced by these sessions.

  I asked for examples, and I was given one:

  “During the Falklands War, the British government’s request for international sanctions against Argentina fell on stony ground. But at a Bilderberg meeting in, I think, Denmark, David Owen stood up and gave the most fiery speech in favour of imposing them. Well, the speech changed a lot of minds. I’m sure that various foreign ministers went back to their respective countries and told their leaders about what David Owen had said. And you know what, sanctions were imposed.”

  The man who told me this story added, “I hope that gives you a flavour of what really does go on in Bilderberg meetings.”

  ♦

  This is how Denis Healey described a Bilderberg person to me:

  “To say we were striving for a one world government is exaggerated but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on for ever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”

  He said, “Bilderberg is a way of bringing together politicians, industrialists, financiers and journalists. Politics should involve people who aren’t politicians. We make a point of getting along younger politicians who are obviously rising, to bring them together with financiers and industrialists who offer them wise words. It increases the chance of having a sensible global policy.”

  “Does going help your career?” I asked Denis Healey.

  “Oh yes,” he said. Then he added, “Your new understanding of the world will certainly help your career.”

  “Which sounds like a conspiracy,” I said.

  “Crap!” said Denis Healey. “Idiocy! Crap! I’ve never heard such crap! That isn’t a conspiracy! That is the world. It is the way things are done. And quite rightly so.”

  He added, “But I will tell you this. If extremists and leaders of militant groups believe that Bilderberg is out to do them down, then they’re right. We are. We are against Islamic fundamentalism, for instance, because it’s against democracy.”

  “Isn’t Bilderberg’s secrecy against democracy too?” I asked.

 
“We aren’t secret,” he snapped. “We’re private. Nobody is going to speak freely if they’re going to be quoted by ambitious and prurient journalists like you who think it’ll help your career to attack something that you have no knowledge of.”

  I noticed a collection of photo albums piled up on his mantelpiece. Denis Healey has always been a keen amateur photographer, so I asked him if he’d ever taken any pictures inside Bilderberg.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “Lots and lots of photographs.”

  I eyed the albums. Actually seeing the pictures, seeing the set-up, the faces, the mood – that would be something.

  “Could I have a look at them?” I asked him.

  Lord Healey looked down at his lap. He thought about my request. He looked up again.

  “No,” he said. “Fuck off.”

  ∨ Them ∧

  13

  The Clearing In The Forest

  The fog rolled in over the giant redwoods of northern California and settled for the night outside my motel room in the logging town of Occidental, giving the place a menacing air which became less menacing when the fog lifted the next morning and I saw that the motel’s restaurant specialized in low-cholesterol egg alternatives and breakfast smoothies.

  I spent the day sitting in my car and watching limousines pick elderly men up from lear jets at the nearby Santa Rosa airport. I followed them along Bohemian Highway to a lane that read ‘NO THROUGH ROAD’. There, the limousines disappeared up the hill.

  This was the lane that led to Bohemian Grove, the clearing in the forest where, it had long been said, the rulers of the world, President Bush, for instance, and Bilderbergers Kissinger and Rockefeller, dress in robes and hoods and burn effigies at the foot of a giant owl. As far as Randy Weaver and Alex Jones and David Icke and Thom Robb and all the others were concerned, the very heart of Luciferian globalist evil lay at the top of this hill.

  I wanted to attempt the impossible. I wanted to somehow get in, mingle, and witness the owl burning myself. After all I had heard about the global elite these past five years – the claims and the counter-claims – and I believed this to be the only tangible way I could finally learn the truth. What were they doing in there?

  I had no clear idea how to accomplish this. My original plan had been to enter the forest alone, perhaps climb up some hills, and basically just scout around until I found it. Recognizing that this was an ill-conceived strategy, I telephoned some of the anti-New World Order radicals I had met during my travels to ask their advice.

  David Icke warned me against it. He said the reptilian bloodlines transform themselves back into giant lizards at Bohemian Grove. Furthermore, he said, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, Walter Cronkite and the male members of the British royal family routinely sexually abuse their harem of kidnapped sex slaves – brainwashed through the MKULTRA trauma-based mind-control programme – at the Grove. I asked David how he knew this, and he explained that one of the sex slaves, a woman called Cathy O’Brien, escaped and wrote a chilling memoir about her experiences called the TranceFormation of America.

  “If you read Cathy O’Brien’s book,” said David, “you’d know not to go anywhere near the place. People disappear in those forests.”

  I called Alex Jones, the radio and TV talk-show host I had met while visiting Texas with Randy Weaver. He instantly invited himself along.

  “That place is sick,” he yelled. “You’ve got presidents and governors and prime ministers and corporate chieftains running around naked. They have orgies. They worship their devil owl. I’ll smuggle a camera in and get right up in their faces.”

  “I think stealth might be a better approach if we want to witness the owl-burning ceremony,” I said.

  “You’re right,” said Alex, thinking aloud. “Let’s liken it to Indiana Jones. Getting in their faces will be like going for the little emeralds along the way to the big ruby in the head of the idol, which would be to actually witness the owl burning itself.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  I was glad Alex was joining me. He struck me as someone who would behave fearlessly in the face of danger. He also had five million listeners. He was a high-profile person. He had personally organized the rebuilding of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian church at Mount Carmel in Waco. He had a can-do attitude. I could not imagine that, with Alex around, they would dare to do anything should we be caught.

  I had arranged to rendezvous with Alex, his girlfriend Violet and his producer Mike at the Occidental Motel on Wednesday evening, but they didn’t show up. Instead they telephoned me from somewhere along the road at 10 p.m.

  “It’s all fogged out,” yelled Alex, “so thick you can’t see. Weaving roads. Deer jumping in front of us. I’ll tell you, the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up.”

  Alex called again at 11 p.m. to report on their progress.

  “There’s fog everywhere,” he yelled, “and there’s all these strange people, old men and old women just standing on the side of the road watching us. I know the Bohemian Grovers have their snitches all over this forest. We’re going to take a more circuitous route down side roads. I’ll call you back.”

  At midnight, I received a final call from Alex’s increasingly crackly mobile phone.

  “A jeep has come off the side road and has started following us. We’re going to turn around. Oh my God, it’s turning around too! It’s following us back down the road. Write this down. A red jeep. Newer model. Write down the licence plate. Hang on a minute.”

  Alex handed the phone to his producer, Mike.

  “If something happens to us make a big stink about it!” yelled Mike. “Promise me that.”

  “I promise,” I yelled.

  I did not hear from them again that night. The motel receptionist informed me at breakfast that their beds had not been slept in.

  ♦

  I spent the morning leaving concerned messages on Alex’s mobile phone. Then I shrugged and thought, well, life goes on, and I paid a visit to Mary Moore, a local anti-Bohemian Grove activist who lived a mile from my motel. Mary was once a beauty queen, the winner of the 1953 San Luis Obisbo County Fiesta, but she became radical in the 1960s and moved to Occidental. Mary protested the Grove every summer for three decades, holding up placards, yelling at the warmongers cruising past in their limousines, but now she is sixty-five and retired. Her cabin was decorated as a monument to her participation in left-wing causes. There were posters and bumper stickers pinned everywhere reading ‘NUCLEAR WAR? NO THANKS’ and ‘WHO KILLED KAREN SILKWOOD?’ and ‘SPLIT WOOD NOT ATOMS’ and ‘VOTE JESSE JACKSON’.

  “Is it dangerous to try and get into Bohemian Grove?” I asked her.

  “Yes, if you get caught,” she said. “They do not want publicity. But I will tell you this. Getting in is easier than most people think.”

  She paused, and added, with a cryptic smile, “Easy when you know how to do it, that is.”

  I asked her if she’d help me, but she said she had been burned in the past. In 1991 she had gone to great lengths to help a journalist from People magazine smuggle himself in – she had co-opted her deep throats and her people who knew people – but he was spotted inside by two executives from Time Warner, People’s publishers. They called security and had him removed. His article never appeared.

  “I don’t know who your On High is,” said Mary. “I don’t want to get burned again.”

  We talked for an hour. She gave me a detailed map of the Grove that had been published by the Bohemians themselves. The Grove’s 2,700 acres do not appear on any normal map of the region. She warned me of the nearby Russian River’s treacherous currents and the surrounding sheer rocky canyons. She said that penetration via the encircling terrain was not a good idea.

  She showed me the lists of Bohemian attendees she had managed to surreptitiously acquire over the years. They read much like a Bilderberg roll-call, with Kissinger and Rockefeller, alongside Presidents Bush and Reagan and Ford and Nixon. There were movies stars like C
lint Eastwood and Danny Glover, the ex-Tory cabinet minister Chris Patten, Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve and Caspar Weinberger and George Shultz.

  “What do you know about the owl-burning ceremony?” I asked her.

  “They call it the ‘Cremation of Care’,” she said. “Is it deeply occult as many people think? Some say they’re killing children up there and sacrificing them on the altar. Maybe they are. But I doubt it. I think we’d have heard about it by now, at least locally.”

  Mary rifled through her filing cabinet and she found a copy of an old ‘Cremation of Care’ programme from the 1980s. One of Mary’s deep throats had smuggled it out to her. The front cover depicted a cartoon of a giant red owl with a snarling grin clutching a small man in its claws, about to throw him into a giant fire.

  “Goodness,” I said.

  “Make of that what you will,” said Mary.

  Mary said there was much evidence of prostitutes from San Francisco being flown in en masse to the nearby village of Monte Rio to service the all-male encampment for the two-week duration, reports of a great deal of alfresco urination against the redwood trees – even though the campsite was equipped with a great many toilets – and world leaders wandering around in drag, with giant fake breasts.

  I tried to remain objective, but it all seemed uncommonly strange and unexpected and hard to rationalize.

  “The truth is,” said Mary, “I couldn’t care less about what they do in their private lives. I don’t care what their sexual habits are. Men are men. That’s not news to me. I care about the networking. This is where the ruling class bonding happens. This is the ultimate back room.”

  Mary told me about the ‘lakeside talks’, the unofficial power-meetings that occur in an open-air amphitheatre in the grounds of the Grove. One of these lakeside talks, said Mary, had conceived the Manhattan Project, which gave birth to the first US atomic bomb. In 1978, she added, the chief of the US Airforce gave a lakeside talk in which he directly pled for, and later received, congressional approval for the B2 Stealth bomber. Mary said that the future of the world is discussed at the Grove by men like Henry Kissinger who have the power to change the course of history, men who actively thrive on secrecy, hence the mystique that has grown up around any secret society Kissinger belongs to, especially if that very same secret society undertakes berobed ceremonies involving owl effigies.