the stories soon drifted down-page, leaving behind the impression that jealousy had been the motive for the shooting of the womanising financier.
The cable-car was repaired; fresh snow settled in the valley.
In certain more esoteric circles no such calm was discernible.
In Washington, William Danby, head of the CIA, considered recalling Anderson and assigning the plum Bilderberg assignment to another agent. But, even if he had screwed up the perfect opportunity to feed Moscow with inspired misinformation, Anderson was still the man for the job. He was established.
Nevertheless, Danby did not refrain from informing Anderson, recovering in hospital from a dislocated vertebra in his neck, of his views on the loss of the turned Russian spy. Even more explosively, he made his views known to Leonard Ballard, head of MI6, effectively shattering Anglo-American co-operation in the field of Intelligence.
Helga Keller disappeared completely from Zurich. George Prentice gratefully accepted the offer of an extended leave, completed his investigations on Mrs Claire Jerome for Paul Kingdon, closed up his Zurich apartment and flew to Rio de Janeiro.
Lying in a hospital bed with his neck in a cast, Anderson reflected that he was lucky to have kept the Bilderberg job – any job, for that matter. And, because he had been told to relax as much as possible, he tried not to think about George Prentice (who ludicrously claimed that it wasn’t he who shot Danzer) or Helga Keller who had unwittingly lured Danzer to his death.
To assuage the anger that boiled inside him when he thought about either of them, he comforted himself by reflecting that the Russians certainly hadn’t succeeded in infiltrating any other agents into Bilderberg.
In that assumption he was entirely wrong.
Bilderberg, according to an article in The Times of London, ‘is best known for the fact that no one knows anything about it.’ Not strictly true, of course. A lot of people know a lot about Bilderberg; but they keep it to themselves.
Among them was Owen Anderson. Sitting up in bed in his apartment (now paid for) in New York, doing his homework for the 1975 Bilderberg at Cesme in Turkey, Anderson gained little satisfaction from his inside knowledge. As always, it seemed to him that they were setting themselves up to be destroyed.
It was only a matter of time. The American way of death. Clandestine manoeuvring followed by suicidal, well-publicised soul-baring. Like the God-awful Watergate mess ….
What the American people didn’t seem to realise, Anderson brooded as he swung his legs out of the paper-littered bed and made his way to the kitchen to make coffee, was that by over-indulging the democratic processes they were destroying democracy. Playing into the hands of tyrants who sat back and enjoyed the suicidal ceremonies ….
Could anyone imagine Leonid Brezhnev being served with subpoenas for refusing to release Kremlin tape-recordings?
Anderson tightened the belt of his white robe and drank some coffee, hoping it would drown the disillusion. He gazed out of the window at the windswept February morning. Far below, office-bound crowds strode the sidewalks, heads ducked into the wind blowing in from the East River. Not one of them, Anderson was willing to bet, was aware that in two months time a hundred or so men – and a couple of women – would meet secretly to discuss policies that would control their lives ….
So, in a way, by protecting those who attended the convention, he was protecting the people on the sidewalks beneath him. If the logic was flawed, then Anderson chose not to analyse it. He returned to the bedroom with his coffee, sat on the edge of the bed and began to read what little had been written about Bilderberg.
* * *
It was born in the early ’50s when a Polish philosopher, Joseph Retinger, and an American, George W. Ball, approached the urbane Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and asked him to preside over a series of conferences.
The aim amounted to an attempt to re-unite European-American relations that had been thrown out of gear by the Cold War. Not everyone agreed that the intent was so innocent ….
The first meeting was held at the Bilderberg Hotel, near Arnhem, in Holland, from May 29–31,1954. And one of the first critics to voice an opinion about the Bilderbergers, as they were subsequently called, was the syndicated American columnist Westbrook Pegler.
Pegler picked on the fifth conference at St. Simon’s Island, off the coast of Georgia, after a reader had told him that an almost deserted hotel there was crawling with FBI and Secret Service. Pegler immediately compared the meeting with a conference held on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in 1908 when the currency of the United States and the world was secretly ‘manipulated’. Pegler claimed that at the 1908 meeting, convened by Senator Nelson W, Aldrich, of Rhode Island, the Federal Reserve System was secretly hammered out.
Anderson knew about that meeting. It had been chronicled in a book by B. C. Forbes, former editor of Forbes magazine, in a book Men Who Are Making America published in 1917. And it was true that a new currency system had been written on the aptly named Jekyll Island. A government outside the government …. Just what the critics claimed Bilderberg was.
Of the 1957 Bilderberg, Pegler wrote: ‘The public knows substantially nothing about the meeting nor even who selected the company to attend or on what qualifications.’
Well, the guest-list was drawn up by an international steering committee, and Bilderberg had a Secretariat located at Smidswater 1, The Hague, Holland.
The bedside telephone buzzed and Anderson reached for it.
‘Mr Anderson?’ The nasal voice of the janitor.
‘Speaking. What is it, the bathroom?’
‘ ’Fraid so, Mr Anderson, another complaint from the folk underneath.’
‘How many times is that?’
‘About ten, I guess.’
‘Well fix it, goddam it,’ Anderson said with the full authority of a man who owned a property. He cradled the phone, drank some cold coffee and picked up a sheaf of ammunition supplied by the Liberty Lobby.
The Liberty Lobby, with offices at 300, Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington D.C., was the sworn enemy of Bilderberg. Over the years they hadn’t achieved much; small wonder when they were pitted against the power-elite of the West. But they were a thorn in the sides of Prince Bernhard and the other participants.
Anderson ran one finger down the list of Bilderberg meeting places ….
1955 – Barbizon, France, and Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany; 1956 – Fredensborg, Denmark; 1957 – St. Simon’s Island and Fiuggi, Italy; 1958 – sleepy little Buxton in England; 1959 – Yesilkoy, Turkey; 1960 – Burgenstock, Switzerland; 1961 – Quebec, Canada; 1962 – Saltsjobaden, Sweden; 1963 – Cannes, France; 1964 – Williamsburg, Virginia; 1965 – Lake Como, Italy ….
Anderson, who hadn’t become the Bilderbergers’ guardian angel until 1971, was sorry he had missed that one. They had stayed, of course, at the best hotel, the baronial Villa d’Este, said by some to be the best hotel in Italy. And the guest list had, as always, been impressive. Among those present, the Duke of Edinburgh, George W. Ball, one of the two innovators and Under-secretary of State, David Rockefeller (a regular), Lord Louis Mountbatten, Denis Healey, Britain’s Minister of Defence and Manlio Brosio, secretary of NATO.
Writing about the Lake Como get-together, Walter Lucas of The Christian Science Monitor, had commented: ‘But there is nothing mysterious or sinister about it all.’
A good Christian conclusion, Anderson thought. If a little naive ….
1966 – Wiesbaden, Germany; 1967 – Cambridge (surely a dangerous location!), England;