Bilderberg Staff Make Last Nervy Tweaks Before Arrival of the Rich and Powerful

You know Bilderberg’s about to begin when you start seeing the guns. The Taschenbergpalais hotel in Dresden is filling up with pistol-packing plainclothes security as the last guests are ushered out. The frowning gunslingers head up and down the corridors with their hotel maps, trying door handles and checking the lay of the land while, down in the hotel lobby, corporate goons gather in muttering huddles.

I don’t know why everyone’s so antsy. According to the local newspaper DNN, at least 400 police officers will be surrounding the venue for the three days of the talks. There’s already a ring of concrete blocks around the entrance. Is that not enough? What are they expecting? The charge of the light brigade? The hotel is being trussed up tighter than Reid Hoffman’s trousers. No one gets in or out without the right lanyard. As Ed Balls remembers only too well, from that awkward business in Copenhagen.

The True Story of the ... Estulin, Daniel Best Price: $4.75 Buy New $13.99 (as of 08:55 UTC - Details) Inside the security cordon, the final nervy tweaks are being made by conference staff. They’ve got to make sure Henry Kissinger’s curtains don’t let any light in. A single ray could be fatal. A hotel manager has been cornered by a conference organiser who’s firing off questions from an iPad:

“And the room for Mr Karp … is it a nice room?”

“It is nice, yes … but it has low ceilings.”

“Hmmm. Does it smell of smoke?”

“It does not smell, but it is on the ground floor. Who is Mr Karp?”

“He’s an American but he’s on our board. He’ll have to move higher up. Maybe the driver can have that room, he’s a driver so it doesn’t matter. You will please show me the other room now.”

And off they dart, to check that Mr Karp’s ceilings are the requisite height.

La verdadera historia ... Daniel Estulin Best Price: $18.22 Buy New $11.87 (as of 08:20 UTC - Details) This Mr Karp is Alexander C Karp, a recently elected member of Bilderberg’s steering committee and the CEO of Palantir, which specialises in data mining and analysis. According to the Wall Street Journal, Palantir is one of the world’s most valuable private companies. It was set up the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, who was one of the first Silicon Valley billionaires to worm his way into Bilderberg’s inner circle. Thiel likes an early jog, so with any luck, we’ll catch him huffing around Dresden with David Petraeus one morning this week.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and tech investor. He sits on the board of Facebook and is the president of Clarium Capital, a hedge fund with $700m of assets under management, and a managing partner in the $2bn venture capital firm Founders Fund, which is “known for prescient bets on some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley” (WSJ).

Karp and Thiel are busy men. Karp has a $15bn CIA-funded company to run. Thiel has speculations to make and Silicon Valley startups to incubate. So the question has to be asked: what on earth are they doing in Dresden? What’s dragging them across the Atlantic to sit for three days in alphabetical rows in a windowless, subterranean conference room? What’s prompting companies like Barclays and Airbus to fund and help run this conference? They’ve got shareholders to answer to: they can’t just say “it bought us a nice chinwag”.

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