"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."
~ David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of the Trilateral Commission, in June 1991
Somehow, I knew it all along. But I got my personal whiff of world empire after my article on Haile Sellassie and the coming Ethiopian revolution appeared on the Op Ed page of the New York Times in 1974. I had been a visiting professor at the Haile Sellassie I University in Addis Ababa and had witnessed the student unrest that ultimately culminated in the overthrow of the monarchy. A number of publishers contacted me, including George Braziller and Putnam, through its editor in chief, Ned Chase (father of Chevy) asking me to submit book proposals. I wrote the proposal and gave it to my agent, John Schaffner.
Braziller came to my house, where he sipped ice tea and waxed euphoric about the proposal. Ned Chase took me to lunch at Billy’s and told me I was the "most exciting writer" of my generation and that he was going to get me a five book contract.
Then, it all went cold. After weeks of silence, Schaffner phoned to tell me that a terrified Braziller tore into his office, threw the proposal on his desk, and fled. Ned Chase then reported that he had lost the proposal and was searching for it. Needless to say, he never found it. Months later, he phoned my agent to tell him he was withdrawing his offer to me.
Ethiopia was in the throes of a Marxist revolution, an event that threatened to tip the balance of power with the Soviet Union. Directly across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia was the home to a major American air force base and MAP installation. It was common knowledge that U.S. air force jets had flown to Saudi Arabia to put down an attempted coup by Saudi air force officers who sought to overthrow the House of Saud and replace it with a Marxist regime. Had this happened, the Russians would have been in control of the world’s largest oil reserves, virtually check mating the Americans.
What I did not know, but which I found out many years later through a routine news report on public radio and small articles in the press, was that the CIA had informed the American publishers that it did not want anything published on the subject of Ethiopia. It was easy for the Agency to do it, since Robie Macauley, a top literary editor at Harcourt, Brace, was, while he functioned in his literary capacity, the head of the CIA Africa desk. I know he was, because he told me so not long before he died. He explicitly said to me that his literary career was his cover. When his obituary appeared in the New York Times, it listed his accomplishments in the literary field, but failed to mention in his real career with the CIA. I rang up the author of the obituary and said, "You left out Robie’s career with the CIA." There was a long pause. Then he said, "We can’t put everything into an obituary."
From failing to report that it knew about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion, to not mentioning Robie Macauley’s CIA career, the Times went along with Agency policy, complicit in the Rockefeller agenda of global domination that culminated in the creation of the Trilateral Commission. The Agency’s tentacles, on behalf of this agenda, reached far and deep, including, in violation of the legislation that created it, domestic snooping and the trashing of American publications that opposed this agenda. Barney Rosset, who ran both Grove Press and Evergreen Review, which had been vocal in its opposition to the war in Vietnam, asked me to examine his CIA file to help him understand what it meant. I told him. When the editors of Grove went on strike and ruined Grove, they were part of a plot instigated by Jay Lovestone, the head of the international office of the AFL-CIA, to bring down Grove. Lovestone was at all times a CIA operative reporting to his CIA case officer, James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was the boss of E. Howard Hunt, who was Buckley’s boss at CIA. Not long ater Grove published The Pied Piper, my biography of Allard Lowenstein, which revealed Lowenstein’s CIA connection, a furious Frank Carlucci, who had served as Deputy Director of the CIA and was close to Lowenstein, had denounced Rosset, who was summarily thrown out as publisher of Grove by its new owners, Ann Getty and Lord Weidenfeld.
I was exposed to the perfidious undercover operations without realizing it. Part of a group of writers and artists in the Hamptons, I would celebrate Christmas at the home of Swedish artist, Hans Hokanson at his home and studio in Northwest Woods in East Hampton. Invariably, the novelist and nature writer, Peter Matthiessen was one of the guests. On the Christmas after I had returned from a year teaching in Barbados, (I was in Barbados when I had written the Times Op Ed piece), I was sitting in a corner of Hokanson’s living room, from which vantage point I could see Matthiessen glaring at me from across the room, his eyes as malignant as those of a poisonous snake.
Hokanson’s wife, Barbara, who had been standing next to Matthiessen, came towards me. She said that Peter wanted me to know something. She said, "Peter wants you to know that you should feel lucky that he doesn’t let you close to him, because he could really hurt you." She turned and left me bemused. Some years later, the Times revealed in a story that Matthiessen had been in the CIA. This was clever of it a subtle enactment of what Rolland Barthes called "the inoculation principle," whereby power reveals a bit of the truth to conceal a bigger lie. The bigger lie, I was to learn even later, was that the Paris Review, which Matthiessen allegedly founded and which was ostensibly funded by Prince Sadruddin Aga Kahn, was his cover and that the money all came from the CIA. His ex-wife Patsy told me everything, as did his closest friend, John Sherry as well as Jamie Linville, the managing editor of the Paris Review. Linville told me that Matthiessen was "haunted by the CIA," and Sherry said he was "tormented," but not enough to come clean directly by himself.
I still wonder how Peter thought he could "hurt me." After all, CIA intelligence officers are bureaucrats of the state. Was he going to do something awful to me in the name of the state, when I was not a criminal and had done nothing illegal? Matthiessen, like William Buckley, the founder the National Review, were, like many in the CIA of that generation, recruited out of Yale, part of the elite corps of intellectuals who were going to run the world along with David Rockefeller. Their goal was a super-state, in which the economy and the culture would be run for the benefit of a handful of the self-appointed chosen.
It is no accident that this has culminated in the American occupation of Iraq, with the plans for world domination set out yet again, after it was derailed by the debacle of Vietnam, in the Project for a New American Century. With George W. Bush, of Yale and Skull and Bones, at the head of the project, the dream lives on. Except it is not a dream. It is a nightmare that turned America into a kind of police state. And it has exploded.
Richard Cummings [send him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author of a new novel, The Immortalists, as well as The Pied Piper — Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, and the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell. He holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He is writing a new book, The Road To Baghdad — The Money Trail Behind The War In Iraq.
