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in the book, and public interest in finding out the real identity of the author continued into 1917... One of the most startling influences was Philip Dru’s creation of a ‘League of Nations’. This would become one of President Wilson’s greatest political aims.” By 1918, Mandell House, Wilson’s closest adviser and a leading light in the Inquiry, had been exposed as the author of Philip Dru: The Administrator. Two years later, on 10 January 1920, Wilson signed the charter of the real League of Nations – the precursor to the United Nations – on behalf of the US government. He “brought the treaty back to Washington”, Burnett and Games recount, “and asked the Senate to ratify it. His hopes for a one-world government were about to come true, with himself taking the de facto position of ‘President of the World’. However, remembering the advice given by the very first American president, George Washington, to avoid foreign entanglements, the Senate refused to ratify the treaty.”

Council on Foreign Relations Otherwise known as the CFR and based in the USA, the Council on Foreign Relations is considered by those who know the workings and influence of secret societies as “the secretive group that may well really run the world”. The foundations of this group are traced to Elihu Root, the US secretary of state under President Theodore Roosevelt, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912. In June 1918, Root became the head of “a select group of New York financiers and international lawyers calling itself the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)”. Its members at the time, standing at a handsome 108, “provided dinner meetings for the purpose of entertaining distinguished foreign visitors and discussing commerce opportunities”. At the 1918 Peace Conference at Versailles in France, Elihu Root led a small CFR delegation to operate alongside Mandell House’s Inquiry team (of 23 scholars) in advising President Woodrow Wilson. As Burnett and Games reveal, “while the major players handled the plenary sessions in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, the Inquiry networked with other foreign experts over tea at the Quai d’Orsay [the French foreign office]”. Not a group to be left out, the Round Table was also at Versailles as advisers to the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. When the Conference ended, members of the Round Table, the CFR and the Inquiry stayed behind in Versailles to talk about cooperation among the three secret societies. They eventually decided to establish a joint Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, but while the Round Table returned home and established its side of the deal – the “Institute of International Affairs” at Chatham House, St James’s Square in London – the Americans (grouped in a “new” coalition between the CFR and Inquiry) backed out of the deal because, as Burnett and Games put it, “they were not keen on sharing any information with the British that might adversely affect commerce”. The coalition saw the CFR swallowing the Inquiry and the two becoming one “new” group whose membership was restricted to Americans only, “on the grounds that [as the official history of the CFR explains] discussions and other meetings, confidential in nature, would be more productive if participants and speakers knew for sure that the others in the room were all Americans”. The new CFR would grow to become “the most influential” secret society of all secret societies. Say Burnett and Games: “When Jimmy Carter was president, the Trilateral Commission [another secret society] appeared to hold sway, but this was only for a short period. A more permanent, yet secret, organisation, lies behind the Trilateral

Right: As a student, Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of America, benefited from African money via the Round Table’s Rhodes Scholarships that helped him to study at Oxford University in the UK. When he became president in 1993, 16 members of his cabinet were from the Council on Foreign Relations Far right: Secretary of State Gen George C. Marshall is credited with launching the famous Marshall Plan that reconstructed Europe after World War II, but the idea was not his – it had been developed by the CFR in a 1946 study called “Reconstruction in Western Europe” Below: Richard Nixon gave Henry Kissinger his first job in government as national security adviser. Nixon and Eisenhower became the first CFR members to be elected president and vice president of the USA. The rest is history.

Commission. It is one which even the Skull and Bones acknowledge. It is the Council on Foreign Relations... The CFR was more powerful than the Skull and Bones.” Burnett and Games continue: “No secret organisation has wielded more influence over succeeding US administrations. From its headquarters in New York, the CFR exerts the kind of power that conspiracy theorists fear, yet perversely admire. Its ability to influence the foreign policy of the United States is the single most important key to understanding how the most powerful nation on the planet can control other lesser nations. There are no aliens, no members of the anachronistic British aristocracy, no secret satanic rituals in black crypts. To secretly run the world, one has to know how international relations actually work. The CFR has practically written the training manuals.” How does the CFR work, then? Burnett and Games give some clues: “If the CFR was to become the influence behind the American government and behind the future world government,” they write, “it needed to engage with foreigners. Obviously membership would be denied, but invitations to speak would always be open. The security surrounding the topics and speakers would insulate the CFR from official criticism. “Through its journal, Foreign Affairs, the CFR would go out into the world and engage more fully... In December 1937, with a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the CFR established smaller subsidiaries in eight cities throughout the United States... Its New York neighbour, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was now president and the committees [or subsidiaries] would provide efficient outlets for the discussion of his policies. Regional members were to be kept in the dark about the State Department source of the material.” Eventually, in 1939, the State Department, under Secretary

14n NEW AFRICAN February 2008