The Pilgrims Society: A study of the Anglo- American Establishment; Rockefeller, Mellon, Luce, Rothschild, Cecil, Windsor, the Federal Reserve, WWII, the CIA, and So Much More

"There are several curious things about these Pilgrims functions. In the first place there is present at these dinners an array of notables such as it would be difficult to bring together under one roof for any other purpose and by any other society... Among the guests were John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and other members of the House of Morgan... We are entitled to know what the Pilgrim Society is, what it stands for, and who these powerful Pilgrims are that can call out the great to hear a British Ambassador expound to Americans the virtues of a united democratic front."

John T. Whiteford asking very reasonable questions in his 1940 pamphlet 'Sir Uncle Sam: Knight of the British Empire'.

Sources for membership identification only appear in the membership list.



Pilgrims of Great Britain dinner, January 9, 1951. Logo and flags in background. Pilgrims of Great Britain dinner, January 9, 1951. Logo and flags in background.

"[The aim of the international bankers was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences."

Professor Carroll Quigley, 'Tragedy & Hope', p. 324. Can the Pilgrims Society, which the famous Quigley never mentioned, verify his story of an Anglo-American Establishment?





"[Senator Goldwater] was a new ideological force in the Republican Party. Until then, the Eastern Establishment view based on historic models of European history was the dominant view of foreign policy. This new foreign-policy view was more missionary; it emphasized that America had a mission to bring about democracy—if necessary, by the use of force."

August 19, 2015, The National Interest, 'The Interview: Henry Kissinger'. Kissinger is a vice president of the Pilgrims Society.

Notes beforehand

To avoid confusion in the future, this is the first article ever that has done a complete analysis of the Pilgrims Society and made photocopies of membership lists available. The story that comes out here is one that is infinitely more detailed than anything that has been written in the past.

As with numerous other ISGP articles, basic Wikipedia entries were created soon after this article was published. Just a couple of years ago, one wouldn't be able to find 5 percent of the information on the Pilgrims that is provided here. That's important to know, because it's only a matter of time before a person or media outlet raises the question: "The Pilgrims are mentioned on Wikipedia, so what's the secret?".

The secret is probably that a complete analysis will prove that:

yes, an Anglo-American establishment, including an Eastern Establishment, has existed for well over a century; a truly amazing amount of influence is concentrated within the Pilgrims; and most leading members have supported or sponsored domestic and foreign fascism at one point or another.

The article you see here today is version III of the original. Version I was written in 2005 and only was a couple of pages long. It was replaced in 2008 by a vastly expanded version II, after a number of membership lists and executive officers lists were obtained. In 2017 this article again was vastly expanded to a version III. I was only able to acquire lists from 1990 to 2014, as well as countless older lists, at the last stages of writing version III. Key updates have been made and a few additional ones might follow in the future, but for now it looks as if version III+ will be the final version of this article.

Equally important: at the time version I and II of this article were written I had not yet developed my four establishment model - or three establishment if one merges the American (mixed religion) and European (Vatican-Paneuropa) conservative establishments. In this article we are primarily discussing the core of the liberal establishment. The basic differences between the liberal and conservative establishment are along the following lines:

Liberal establishment Conservative establishment Pro-containment Anti-containment Pro-detente Anti-detente Anti-roll back Pro-roll back Anti-SDI (Star Wars) Pro-SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) Pro-United Nations Anti-United Nations Anti-tactical nukes Pro-tactical nukes Pro-Arab (for oil) Pro-Arab (new right) / anti-Arab (neocons) Pro-Afghanistan invasion Mixed feelings over Afghanistan invasion Mixed feelings over Iraq invasion Pro-Iraq invasion Pro-CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Anti-CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Moderately religious, atheist or new age Usually religious in very rigid ways.

However, as this article demonstrates in Part III, various key Pilgrims most definitely have had a hand in the rise of neoconservatism.

Intro

Most people have at least vaguely heard of the term "Eastern Establishment". This is a reference to a group of people in the northeast of the United States which to many appears to wield a disproportionate amount of influence over the nation's politics. This influence, which goes back even further than the days of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and J. P. Morgan, Sr., has been illustrated by the fact that a great number of individuals working in the senior positions of government have come from a select number of universities, banks, insurance companies, law firms, think tanks and foundations, only to return to this network after their public term came to an end. Often these individuals served as political appointees or "independent" advisors to a number of presidents, with proteges at universities and think tanks continually showing up in later administrations. Together with a number of other peculiarities - think of controversial policies, suspected cover ups, ignored conflicts of interest, lack of media attention, etc. - some people have become suspicious of what at times appears to be a kind of permanent establishment controlling the machinations of government, no matter who the public is allowed to vote for. A 1962 newspaper column voiced these suspicions in the following manner:

"There is an establishment in the United States. The word "establishment" is a general term for the power elite in international finance, business, the professions largely from the Northeast, who wield most of the power regardless of who is in the White House.



"Most people are unaware of the existence of this "legitimate Mafia." Yet the power of the establishment makes itself felt from the professor who seeks a foundation grant, to the candidate for a cabinet post or State Department job. It affects the nation's policies in almost every area.



For example, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, subsidized by Rockefeller interests since 1927 boasts a membership of at least 90 per cent establishment figures." [1]

We will be getting back to the person who wrote this column later in this article.

The WASP elite

The origin of the Eastern Establishment is hardly part of accepted, official history. When not ignored, authors writing about this subject have generally been criticized; sometimes for seeing things that aren't there; other times for cherry picking evidence and ignoring the complexities of government and society as a whole. While to a degree there is some merit to these arguments, at the same time it appears these discussions exist because there really exist powerful political and business elites which like the way their system of private, behind-the-scenes conference meetings and policy-influencing is working for them.

What sets an elite apart from the regular population is influence: influence in domestic politics and economy, and influence in foreign politics and the world economy. This influence in many cases is hereditary, because within establishment circles it's as much about who you know - and who your parents know - as it is about what you know. In the modern age education is crucial, and in case of the Eastern Establishment of the United States, the vast majority of members send their children to Yale, Harvard, or Princeton to get a law degree or MBA. Members of the British establishment usually go to Oxford, with Cambridge coming in second. As soon as these young students graduate they are free to join the family bank, an establishment business, or key think tank or NGO. Outsiders can join "the club" by going to the right universities and allowing themselves to be groomed by members of the establishment.



The London Bush house, built in 1919 with funds provided by U.S. Pilgrim Irving T. Bush. Inscribed above the door is the text, "To the friendship of English Speaking Peoples". The two men represent the United States and Great Britain, holding a torch to symbolize their everlasting friendship. The London Bush house, built in 1919 with funds provided by U.S. Pilgrim Irving T. Bush. Inscribed above the door is the text,The two men represent the United States and Great Britain, holding a torch to symbolize their everlasting friendship.

The Eastern Establishment is a so-called "WASP" establishment - meaning "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant". The term specifically refers to Americans of British descent, even though there's a similar WASP establishment in Great Britain surrounding the royal family, which is closely associated with its American counterpart.



The term WASP when applied to America's elite is somewhat inadequate. Usually its Anglo-Saxon descent and Protestant values are emphasized, followed by a general description of the historic influence of this group. Whenever the question comes up if this establishment still has great influence today few, if any, scholars come up with clear and definitive answers. Much further than throwing around terms like "Ivy League" and "old boys networks" they usually won't go.



Now, anno 2008, let's change this and write down a detailed list of characteristics which fully describes the traditional Eastern Establishment (or WASP elite):

It is a social elite centered around a number of universities, a group of banks, insurance companies and law firms, and a group of influential, privately-funded foundations and think tanks.



It is centered in and around New York, even though at any moment a large portion of this group is active within the government and non-government institutions in Washington.



There is a close relationship with the British aristocracy and the British royal family via diplomatic officials, individual contacts, and private clubs.



The dominant religion is Protestant, in particular the Episcopal (Anglican) and Presbyterian churches, which overall have no problem with Darwinism.



British branches of Freemasonry and Templar orders are still quite popular.



This is the group behind the globalization process and members are generally great supporters of the United Nations and the sustainable development movement.



Catholic and especially Zionist interests are not very much appreciated, although diplomatic ties are always maintained.

The reader has probably heard some of these points before and may or may not agree with them. So how can ISGP prove that this list is correct? To do that we need to begin our discussion of the Pilgrims Society.

Pilgrims history

Official Pilgrims logo. "Hic et Ubique" means "here and everywhere", apparently a reference to the idea that the United States and Great Britain should stand together side by side everywhere. The eagle represents the United States; the lion Great Britain.

At the turn of 20th century a number of influential persons were interested in bringing the establishments of the United States and Great Britain closer together. The St. George's Society in New York, the American Society in London, and the growing network of Anglo-American League branches in England (founded by a good number of later Pilgrims Society members), were seen as inadequate, so the idea arose to form a new, elitist society with branches in both London and New York. This became the Pilgrims Society, which organized regular meetings in such prestigious hotels as the Victoria, the Waldorf Astoria, the Carlton Ritz, and the Savoy.

The idea of setting up what ultimately became the Pilgrims Society was first discussed by a number of Americans working in London. One of them was Lindsay Russell, a well-connected lawyer from New York, who regularly visited London in those days to set up his law firm Alexander and Colby. It was Russell who got together with General Joseph Wheeler (on a visit in London), General Lord Roberts, and Sir Harry Brittain. Together they organized the original meeting of the Pilgrims of Great Britain at the Carlton Hotel on July 11, 1902. The meeting was a success and two weeks later Lord Roberts was elected president of the Pilgrims. Lord Grenfell and Admiral Hedworth Lambton became vice presidents. Two other vice presidents were the Americans Senator Chauncey M. Depew (Yale Skull & Bones 1856; lawyer to Cornelius Vanderbilt; member of J.P. Morgan's elite Corsair Club, together with William Rockefeller) and General Joseph Wheeler. Sir Harry Brittain became secretary and the Archdeacon of London, William MacDonald Sinclair, was elected chairman of the executive committee. [2]

At the July 11 meeting the attendants also discussed their plans of setting up a branch in New York. Lindsay Russell and Chauncey Depew went back to the United States and approached such men as Bishop of New York Henry Codman Potter, J. P. Morgan, Sr., and Morgan family friend and former U.S. president Grover Cleveland. Under the leadership of Bishop Potter, the Pilgrims of the United States organized their first formal diner on February 4, 1903. The two societies have been organizing meetings ever since. [3]

The Pilgrims network

Over the years more and more influential persons joined the Pilgrims Society, including virtually all the well known bankers, robber barons and their associates. Going through membership lists of the Pilgrims of the United States one will find the following families:

Astor Duke Mellon Schiff Aldrich (Copeland) Du Pont Meyer Schroder Belmont Gould Morgan Stillman Baker Harkness Peabody Vanderbilt Carnegie Harriman Pyne Warburg Dillon Lamont Reynolds Watson Dodge Lodge Rockefeller Whitney Drexel Loeb Sassoon Windsor

Within the ranks of the British Pilgrims one comes across a great many Barons, Viscounts, Earls, Marquisses, and Dukes. Members of the British royal family have been patrons of the Pilgrims Society since its inception and regularly attend meetings. Here also well known banking families as Baring, Hambro, Harcourt, Keswick, Rothschild, Kleinwort, Loeb, and Warburg can be found, just as the heads of Barclays and the British managers of U.S. banks as Chase Manhattan and J. P. Morgan - banks that later merged into JPMorgan Chase.

At the moment of this writing the membership list compiled by ISGP contains 1496 names, the vast majority of them from the United States (rough estimate: about 82% or 1227). Analyzing the biographies of these members doesn't just show that the Pilgrims are part of the WASP elite - they are the WASP elite. The following banks, law firms, and insurance companies have been headed by Pilgrims Society members - usually for generations:

Banks

Am. Securities Corp. Federal Reserve Kidder, Peabody and Co. Morgan Joseph & Co. Inc. Banker's Trust Fidelity Int. Trust Kleinwort Benson New York Savings Bank Bank of England Fifth Avenue Bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. N.M. Rothschild & Sons Barclays Bank First Boston Corp. Lazard Oppenheimer & Co. Barings Bank First National Bank Lehman Brothers Paine, Webber Blackstone Group Fourth Nat. Bank of N.Y. Loeb, Rhoades & Co. Rockefeller Center, Inc. Bowery Savings Bank Goldman Sachs Manufacturers Hanover Rockefeller Family & Ass. Brown Brothers Harriman Gotham National Bank Marine Midland Salomon Brothers Bullock Fund Hambro Mellon Bank S.G. Warburg Chase National Bank Harriman National Bank J. P. Morgan & Co. Shearson Loeb Rhoades Chase Manhattan US/UK Internat. Banking Corp. J. P. Morgan Chase U.S. Trust Corp. of N.Y. Chemical Bank Irving Trust Morgan Grenfell (UK) * Citibank J. G. White & Co. Morgan Guaranty Trust * Drexel & Co. J. Henry Schroder & Co. Morgan Stanley *

Law firms and insurance companies

Breed, Abbott & Morgan Carter, Ledyard & Milburn Coudert Brothers Cravath, Swaine & Moore Davis, Polk & Wardwell Debevoise & Plimpton Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy Herbert Oppenheimer Nathan & Vandyk Shearman & Sterling Sullivan & Cromwell Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam & Roberts AIG Equitable Life Assurance Society Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Mutual Life Insurance Life Insurance Co. Lloyds of London Royal Globe Insurance Group

Other businesses

Chrysler Forbes * ICI R.J. Reynolds Corning Glass Works General Electric Int. Nickel Co. of Canada Rio Tinto De Beers/AngloAmerican General Motors Jardine Matheson U.S. Steel Dodge IBM Phelps-Dodge W.R. Grace & Co. * other media companies not mentioned here

Looking at these tables, it is clear that the major banks of New York and London have been very prominent in the Pilgrims Society, closely followed by a group of influential law firms and insurance companies. A number of corporations have also maintained a considerable presence in the Pilgrims, comparable to some of the law firms and smaller banks. The most prominent of these might well be IBM, of the Watson family - but the founders and owners of Chrysler, Dodge, Jardine Matheson, W.R. Grace & Co., Reynolds, Corning Glass, and Forbes have all been Pilgrims. A vast range of other corporations have been represented by Pilgrims, but do not appear to have been part of the core of the Anglo-American establishment.

U.S. media I: print and television

Except for Forbes, we deliberately left out large media companies in this last section, as their presence in the Pilgrims Society and influence on society deserves to be discussed separately.

The New York Times and Time magazine have been the news publications most intimately tied to the Pilgrims of the United States over the years. Since 1896 the New York Times has been owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, members of which have been generational members of the Pilgrims since the very beginning. Orvil E. Dryfoos, who married a daughter of Arthur Sulzberger and rose to president of the New York Times in 1957 and publisher in 1961, was another member of the Pilgrims. A number of outside Pilgrims held senior positions in the New York Times too over the years. Among them were John William Harding, George McAneny, Philip Du Val, Cyrus Vance and Charles H. Price II.



Pilgrims-dominated U.S. publications. Some outside media are still very much in line with the Anglo-American Establishment. In case of CNN it seems that billionaire country boy Ted Turner, with his one billion dollar grant to United Nations causes, really wants to be part of an establishment for which he doesn't have the background. Pilgrims-dominated U.S. publications. Some outside media are still very much in line with the Anglo-American Establishment. In case of CNN it seems that billionaire country boy Ted Turner, with his one billion dollar grant to United Nations causes, really wants to be part of an establishment for which he doesn't have the background.

Time magazine was founded in 1923 by Henry Luce, whose name featured on Pilgrims Society membership lists in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Key co-founders and financiers of his magazine were also Pilgrims: J.P. Morgan partners Thomas W. Lamont and Dwight Morrow, as well as the Harriman and Harkness families. Among the Pilgrims that have held senior positions in Time Magazine are Paul Gray Hoffman (OSS-CIA), Philip G. Howlett, William J. Cross, Hedley Donovan, Donald M. Elliman, Jr., George A. Heard, Roy E. Larsen, Samuel W. Meek and Frank Pace, Jr. To top things off, Henry Luce III became president of the U.S. Pilgrims in 1997.



Another important Pilgrims-affiliated publication used to be the New York Herald Tribune, owned by the Reid family and dissolved in 1966. Whitelaw Reid, Whitelaw Reid II, Ogden Mills Reid, Ogden Rogers Reid and several other family members have all been members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1958, John Hay Whitney, a vice president of the U.S. Pilgrims, took over the newspaper from the Reids.



Although not extremely prominent within the Pilgrims Society, some of Reader's Digest most senior and long term managers have been Pilgrims, spanning the period from the 1940s all the way to the early 2000s. Among them have been William John Cross, C. Robert Devine, Walter Wood Hitesman, Kent Rhodes and Russell Twisk.

News stations are considerably less prominent in the Pilgrims Society. One of the exceptions has been the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), located in Rockefeller Center and one of the most dominant broadcasting companies from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Morgan banker Owen D. Young founded the RCA in 1919. Young was chairman of General Electric, which took a controlling interest in the RCA. For the next fifty years, until 1970, the company was headed by James Harbord, Frank Folsom, and David Sarnoff. All these men, including Young, were members of the Pilgrims Society. In 1970, Sarnoff's son, Robert, took over the chairmanship of the RCA, but couldn't prevent the company from going into a permanent decline. Robert was ousted in 1975 and in the years after the RCA was taken over by other media conglomerates not particularly tied to the Pilgrims.

RCA, in cooperation with General Electric and Westinghouse, formed NBC in 1926, which became its main broadcasting arm. By the late 1930s, NBC had become so dominant on the airwaves that the FCC forced it to split into two companies, one becoming the significantly less influential ABC. At this moment it appears that successive heads of NBC and ABC weren't invited to the Pilgrims anymore. In 1985 a minor bit of controversy arose, however, about ABC when Cap Cities bought it. Cap Cities was controlled by a group of Pilgrims Society members as Lowell Thomas, Thomas Dewey and Alger Chapman who were decades-long partners of CIA director William Casey and very close as well to former CIA director Allen Dulles, another Pilgrim.

As for NBC, the Pilgrims of RCA obviously continued to exert their influence over NBC for many years. Influence has also always been maintained through stock ownership and executive and advisory boards. One relevant person in this respect is John Brademas, a director of RCA/NBC. Brademas is a perfect example of a WASP elitist: a member of both the American and British Pilgrims, a Rhodes Scholar, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, an advisory board member of the David Rockefeller Fellowships, a director of the Aspen Institute, a governor of the American Ditchley Foundation, a member of the CFR and a member of the Trilateral Commission. Brademas also served on a number of Carnegie commissions.

Charlie Rose, a Pilgrim by 2014, started out as an employee of "liberal CIA" asset Bill Moyers at PBS in 1974. Even tually became a top CBS news anchor and 60 Minutes presenter. Interviewed just about every elitist and has visited Bilderberg.

In 1986 NBC was bought by General Electric, another company dominated by Pilgrims. More than a dozen Pilgrims, both executives and ordinary members, are known to have been directors, presidents, CEOs and chairmen of General Electric on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 20th century. Names include Lord Carrington, Harry Morgan, a son of J.P. Morgan, Jr.; 1st Baron McGowan, Sir Ronald Grierson, Owen D. Young, Philip D. Reed, Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., Raymond Seitz, Clarence Woolley, Walter Wriston and more.

The other exception of a broadcasting company that has been represented in the Pilgrims Society is CBS. Over the years several Pilgrims have been directors of this New York-based company, among them Henry Kissinger and Marietta Peabody Tree (vice chair Pilgrims; great-granddaughter of George E. Peabody, the famous Morgan partner). William S. Paley, the founder and continuous owner of CBS until his death in 1990, was a member of the Pilgrims Society. So was "the most trusted man in America", Walter Cronkite, the famous anchorman for CBS Evening News from 1962 to 1982.

U.S. media II: CIA Mockingbird and Washington ties

In the 1970s, after a number of scandals in which the CIA was implicated, several reports emerged about a working relationship between the CIA and a number of major media outlets. One source was the 1979 book Katherine the Great, written by investigative author Deborah Davis, who for her book interviewed numerous individuals in Washington over the course of three years, right when the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was looking into the death of President John F. Kennedy. Davis described the Washington Post's relationship with the CIA and even gave a name to the CIA's effort to establish contacts with the major media: Operation Mockingbird. Unfortunately, virtually no one was able to read the book at the time, because it was immediately forced off the market, only to be republished in 1991. About Paley and Cronkite at CBS, Davis wrote:

"Paley's own friendship with Allen Dulles is now known to have been one of the most influential and significant in the communications industry. He provided cover for CIA agents, supplied out-takes of news film, permitted the debriefing of reporters, and in many ways set the standard for cooperation between the CIA and the major broadcast companies which lasted until the mid-1970s... The [Washington] post men continued to see Paley and Cronkite every Christmas at a dinner given by Allen Dulles at a private club called the Alibi... membership is limited to men in or close to intelligence and is by invitation only." [4]

Walter Cronkite, "the most trusted man in America" - a Pilgrim, together with his main employer, William Paley.

Like Paley and Cronkite, Allen Dulles, head of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, was a Pilgrims Society member. In fact, he was an executive member until his death in 1969. His brother, John Foster Dulles, was a member until his own death in 1959. An uncle of the brothers, William Dulles, was also a member of the Pilgrims Society. Membership definitely ran in the family, which isn't too unexpected considering the family's life-long close association with the Rockefellers.

In contrast to the Pilgrims, the Alibi Club was part of the "Georgetown Set" in Washington, D.C., an elite, liberal social group with strong anti-communist feelings and close connections to the New York WASP establishment. Members of the Georgetown Set included many senior CIA officers: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, James Angleton, Cord Meyer, Frank Wisner, and others. Washington Post owners Philip and Katherine Graham were part of this group, and so was their long-time editor Benjamin Bradlee. CIA-employed journalist and Katherine Graham and Henry Kissinger friend Joseph Alsop is another well known example. Walter Cronkite clearly belongs in the same category. [5]

Davis actually was a late-comer. The most important reporter on the relationship between the CIA and reporters is famous Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. The CIA rated reporters among the best spies, because they could go almost anywhere and ask questions without raising suspicions. At the same time reporters could be used to disseminate anti-communist propaganda, something which the major media outlets were only too happy to support the CIA with. As Newsweek's foreign editor, Harry F. Kern, a decades-long member of the Pilgrims Society, stated to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein in October 1977: "The informal relationship was there. Why have anybody sign anything? What we knew we told them [the CIA] and the State Department.... When I went to Washington, I would talk to Foster or Allen Dulles about what was going on. ... We thought it was admirable at the time. We were all on the same side." [6] In the same October 1977 article for the "new left"/"liberal CIA" Rolling Stone magazine, Bernstein unveiled countless other interesting facts involving CIA cooperation with the media:

"Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company [ABC], the National Broadcasting Company [NBC], the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune... By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc...



"A few executives—Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times among them—signed secrecy agreements. But such formal understandings were rare: relationships between Agency officials and media executives were usually social—"The P and Q Street axis in Georgetown," said one source. ... "[Sulzberger] was very eager, he loved to cooperate." On one occasion, according to several CIA officials, Sulzberger was given a briefing paper by the Agency which ran almost verbatim under the columnist's byline in the Times. ...



"Allen Dulles often interceded with his good friend, the late Henry Luce, founder of Time and Life magazines, who readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience. For many years, Luce's personal emissary to the CIA was C.D. Jackson...



"Malcolm Muir, Newsweek's editor from its founding in 1937 until its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, said ... "Whenever I heard something that I thought might be of interest to Allen Dulles, I'd call him up.... At one point he appointed one of his CIA men to keep in regular contact with our reporters, a chap that I knew but whose name I can't remember. I had a number of friends in Allen Dulles' organization." ...



"When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. "It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from," said a former deputy director of the Agency. "Frank Wisner dealt with him." Wisner, deputy director of the CIA [1950-1965] was the Agency's premier orchestrator of "black" operations, including many in which journalists were involved. Wisner liked to boast of his "mighty Wurlitzer," a wondrous propaganda instrument he built, and played, with help from the press. Phil Graham was probably Wisner's closest friend .



"[However,] information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees... Katharine Graham, Philip Graham's widow and the current publisher of the Post, says she has never been informed of any CIA relationships with either Post or Newsweek personnel. In November of 1973, Mrs. Graham called William Colby and asked if any Post stringers or staff members were associated with the CIA. Colby assured her that no staff members were employed by the Agency but refused to discuss the question of stringers. ...



"According to CIA officials, ABC continued to provide cover for some CIA operatives through the 1960s. ... At the time of the Senate bearings, Agency officials serving at the highest levels refused to say whether the CIA was still maintaining active relationships with members of the ABC News organization. ... These same sources professed to know few specifies about the Agency's relationships with NBC, except that several foreign correspondents of the network undertook some assignments for the Agency in the 1950s and 1960s. ...



"James Angleton, who was recently removed as the Agency's head of counterintelligence operations, ran a completely independent group of journalist operatives who performed sensitive and frequently dangerous assignments; little is known about this group for the simple reason that Angleton deliberately kept only the vaguest of files." [7]

The Washington Post, despite not being located in New York City, is as liberal establishment and close to the Pilgrims Society as newspapers come. Pilgrims vice president Henry Kissinger, for example, was one of the best friends of decades-long Post owner Katherine Graham. Long-time editor Ben Bradlee was close to CIA director Richard Helms (with both coincidentally playing a key role in exposing Watergate), whose father and older brother were Pilgrims, as well as notorious CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, a future American Security Council co-chairman.

Even before Watergate, Graham used her newspaper to pressure Nixon into implementing crime-reducing programs, as Nixon had originally promised. This included the first experimental methadone programs, which were abandoned again under Reagan.

Many of the above media owners have appeared in the membership lists of the Pilgrims Society. In addition to the earlier-mentioned owners of the New York Times, Time magazine, the New York Herald Tribune, RCA/NBC, and CBS who were involved with this prestigious Anglo-American society, Barry Bingham, Sr. of the Louisville Courier­Journal, Jack R. Howard of Scripps-Howard, and the Muir family of Newsweek also were Pilgrims.

This last publication, Newsweek, from 1937 to 1961 was dominated by Pilgrims Society members. Besides the Muir and Harry Kern influence, Newsweek was owned by the Astor Foundation, named after a family with whole generations of members in both the British as the American Pilgrims. Among the directors of the Astor Foundation also was Pilgrims Society member Gates W. McGarrah. [8] McGarrah had been chairman of the Rockefellers' Chase National Bank, a U.S. member of the General Council of the German Reichsbank, chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, and the first president of the Bank for International Settlements. He also was a grandfather of CIA director Richard Helms, whose older brother could also be found in the Pilgrims.

In 1961, Newsweek was taken over by the Washington Post, the establishment newspaper from Washington, D.C. whose owners and editors we just described as being part of the Georgetown CIA clique. The only reason no Washington Post men can be found among the U.S. Pilgrims is because the society primarily is centered around New York high society. There actually were plans in the early years to open other Pilgrims clubs in cities as Washington and Paris, but these ideas never materialized. [9] Interestingly, once considered one of the most "reliable" Mockingbird newspapers, in 1992 the Washington Post revealed to its readers the contents of an internal CIA memorandum, written the year before. In part it read:

"A. Media. 1) Current program: a) PAO [CIA's Public Affairs Office] now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods." [10]

In a practical example of that, at one point CIA director Richard Helms provided one of his subordinates, Howard Hunt, with information gathered on Soviet spying and told him "I've got a couple of files here. I want you to do a story, about 800 words, and I'll try it out on Cy Sulzberger." [11] Sulzberger, of course, was the owner of the New York Times and, like Helms' family, a member of the Pilgrims Society.

Lookout magazine, a major rival of Luce's Life magazine, and other (old) publications of the Cowles family of the Pilgrims Society. Cass Canfield of the Pilgrims ran the Harper's publishing firm and helped set up the CFR's Foreign Affairs. Both Canfield and Cowles were trustees of the CIA's Farfield Foundation, discussed in the Rockefeller CIA chapter, and thus part of the CIA's "Cultural Cold War".

It appears indeed that with Mockingbird we were mainly dealing with an informal relationship between the top of the CIA and the top of various media corporations. Because the CIA essentially was not infiltrating and subverting the existing national media, it is often pretended that there was no problem here. But what if one of these top people would come out and say: "We hate socialism. We hate labor unions - certainly when they get too influential. We're all like-minded corporate fascists. We like to have our independence, so we're not going to do everything the CIA wants us to do (we're a free capitalist society after all!), but at the same time we're all on the same side. We're friends and acquaintences, we socialize, we do favors for each other, and certainly in areas of mutual interest - our own big business interests - we band together." Would that get people thinking? One would hope so.

The fact is, there have never been any truly independent major news outlets. All of them were financed by major business tycoons with their own interests tightly locked into the national establishment and often the government. If a truly independent media outlet were to arise, or one that is a little too rebellious, the CIA and major media outlets wouldn't hesitate to band together and undermine it.

A good example of this has been incorporated in an ISGP article that discusses the Dutch establishment surrounding Prince Bernhard and some of his 1001 Club members, which overseas has included David and Laurance Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Robert McNamara, the British and French Rothschilds, Paul Mellon and other major names, many of them Pilgrims. Back in the 1960s consternation arose among Dutch conservative and liberal elites about a certain major newspaper drifting too far to the left. Instantly conspiracies were organized to halt this course:

"[1001 Club member Frits] Philips had been approached by H.A. Lunshof, who was on a crusade against the leftist tendencies in the liberal press. The controversial Lunshof was columnist and chief editor of Elsevier. His position was in jeopardy, however, because the anti-communist course of the weekly magazine under his leadership wasn't doing the subscription growth any good. ...



"In the advisory board meeting of 25 March 1964 [1001 Club member Sidney] van den Bergh said that he had heard from [Philips director] Guepin that at Philips 'serious consternation has arisen about the editorial course of the NRC and that they were willing to make funds available to change this course.' According to van Lennep these same feelings towards the NRC could also be found in Rotterdam business circles.



"In a next meeting Van den Bergh, who at that point could hardly still take Lunshof serious, said that Lunshof claimed to have gotten insight in dossiers of the German secret service through German president [Heinrich] Lubke. From these it became clear to him that the communists were trying to infiltrate the Dutch newspapers and that they had succeeded in this at the Handelsblad and the NRC with several young editors. So the worries of Lunshof and the NRC did not just go for the NRC, but also, to a lesser extent, the Handelsblad, of which 'many prominent Amsterdammers', according to Lunshof, thought 'there was a threat that it would move too far into leftist water, especially due to deputy editor Hofland.' To increase the pressure, Lunshof hinted to Van den Bergh of a potential withdrawal of Elsevier as publisher of the Handelsblad and the erection of a rival newspaper.



"Van den Bergh and other commissioners of the Handelsblad didn't trust the manipulative Lunshof one bit, but did share his worries about the "red ideas" of the NRC. However, in discussions with the NRC management and their colleagues the commissioners of the Handelsblad were quickly satisfied after finding out that over there they also were not interesting in the red virus and that banning leftist ideas from the newspaper could be seen as a joint objective. " [12]

Large picture: "New left"/"liberal CIA" icon Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation with her father William vanden Heuvel, a one-time Pilgrims Society member who more recently sat on the board of the Pilgrims Foundation, together with Henry Luce III, the Drexels, former OSS chief David Bruce, former Opus Dei arms dealer Prince Michel de Bourbon, Bernadette Casey Smith, the daughter of Reagan's CIA director William Casey; and former CIA special operations expert General John Singlaub.

Small picture: William vanden Heuvel with Happy Rockefeller, the widow of Pilgrims Society member Nelson Rockefeller.

We can also look at the left-wing Ramparts magazine of the 1960s, which supported anti-Vietnam War protestors, took a skeptical stance on the John F. Kennedy assassination, and exposed the role of the CIA in the National Student Association. What did the CIA do? It ran a covert operation against the magazine that included blackmail and successfully undermined it. The details are mentioned in ISGP's "liberal CIA" article/oversight, which also lists numerous modern "new left" media outlets that are supported by big Pilgrims-ran foundations as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, MacArthur, Soros and others. Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, NPR, PBS and other outlets all belong to this elite-backed "new left" network. As explained in the same article, ISGP suspects these foundations are coordinating their efforts and effectively act as a branch of the CIA - but only if this liberal establishment gets along with the CIA director and the White House. Essentially these foundations and their private networks form the "above government" network conspiracy theorists have been talking about since the beginning of time.

For the most part it appears that the Eastern Establishment, and really the international Liberal Establishment, is acting like one big family. Sometimes family members agree, sometimes they don't, and almost on a continuous basis they manipulate public opinion to have things go their way as much as possible. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the conservative establishment - which happens to be much more primitive in its thinking than its liberal counterpart - has been doing the exact same thing. Despite that, it's important to realize the establishment warfare aspect and the establishment influence in general in domains as the progressive media, weed and psychedelics legalization, spirituality, the green movement and even exposes as the Pentagon Papers, MKULTRA, Watergate, Iran Contra, Occupy Wall Street and the Edward Snowden NSA spying affair. However, until we have modern post-1980 full membership lists of the Pilgrims, it is not too productive to discuss many of these affairs. For the time being ISGP has been developing the "liberal CIA" article for that. Rest assured though that the "new left" movement to a large extent falls under the Pilgrims umbrella as the most liberal aspect of an already liberal establishment. It will just take a little more time to prove that.

British media and MI5/MI6 infiltration

In the earlier-discussed 1977 Rolling Stone article of Carl Bernstein, he mentioned one British-based news agency (with an important New York department) that has been significantly influenced by Pilgrims: Reuters. Among the Pilgrims who have held senior positions in Reuters are Sir Christopher Chancellor, general manager from 1944 to 1959; Lord William Barnetson, chairman from 1968 to 1979; Sir Denis Hamilton, chairman from 1979 to 1985; and directors Lord Thomson of Fleet and Sir David Walker. Information on British Pilgrims is still quite scarce compared to its American counterpart, so this list of senior executives will undoubtedly grow as more biographies of historical members are analyzed.

British media influenced by Pilgrims.

Among the British news outlets that have been influenced by the Pilgrims are The Observer, for a long time a rather "new left" newspaper of the Astor family; The Financial Times, The Economist, and especially The Times and the Commonwealth Press Union. The press baron Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the widely circulated Daily Express, is known to have visited the Pilgrims at least once in 1941, but is not very likely to have been a member of the Pilgrims as he was not particularly interested in an Anglo-American partnership.

Pilgrims have also headed the world famous Encyclopedia Britannica. Examples are Senator William Benton, Philip M. Kaiser and Elmo Roper.

The British publishing house William Collins, Sons was represented in the Pilgrims by its head, Sir William A. R. Collins, from 1951 until the mid 1970s. William Collins, Sons was founded in 1819 and eventually, in 1990, merged with Harper & Row to form HarperCollins, to this day one of the "big five" English-language publishing firms alongside names as Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster.

Britain appears to have had some sort of Mockingbird program similar to the United States. In 1994 Private Eye magazine reported how in 1976 John Snow, a well known newscaster, had been approached by a representative of British intelligence. Snow was asked if he would provide the security services with information on the political activities of his colleagues. His salary of 3,600 pound sterling would be matched and there wouldn't be any problems with Inland Revenue. Snow refused, but Private Eye suspected that most large newspapers and media stations employed persons who had been more susceptible to this kind of approach. The magazine also wondered aloud if a recent story about the Guardian's owner, Richard Gott, falsely tying him to the KGB, had been written by journalists on the payroll of British Intelligence. At the time Gott's newspaper was digging into the affairs of Jonathan Aitken, a person with numerous ties to hard right national and international intelligence people. [13]

Additionally, in 1995 a person named Gerald James published his rather controversial book 'In the Public Interest'. James had been a banker at Barings Brothers (a Pilgrims bank) and a member of the aristocratic Monday Club. He knew many people in intelligence, including the former deputy head of MI6, George Kennedy Young (who became a banker at Kleinwort). James was also chairman of the arms company Astra Holdings. In his biography/expose James wrote how a cabal of City bankers and intelligence men were running the major illegal arms deals, had infiltrated and corrupted smaller companies, and collapsed a number of them after fearing exposure in the wake of the Iraqgate scandal. James's Astra Holdings was among these "front companies" that had been collapsed, prompting James to write a book in an effort to clear his name. This turned out to be not entirely without risk: journalists he talked to were intimidated and several important witnesses died under suspicious circumstances. Relevant here is page 138 of his book, in which James describes his experiences with the British media:

"I have been involved with a number of journalists in researching this story [arms-to-Iraq affair]. At any one time there might be as many as half a dozen following up this or that line of inquiry and we keep constantly in touch by telephone. It is to our mutual benefit, except that the relationship, which has now been going on for nearly five years, has frequently been marked by sudden changes of policy by newspaper editors or the unexplained removal of a journalist from the case or even from the paper (sometimes to a more exalted position on another where the arms-to-Iraq inquiry is not part of the brief.)... It never really surprised me until I was amazed to receive, from one of my other sources, a list of journalists with affiliations to MI5, on which were posted some of my own contacts in the press, indeed some who had at the beginning made something of a name for themselves on the back of the arms-to-Iraq affair." [14]

British Pilgrims can hardly be tied to this British "Mockingbird" program, probably because there's too little information available on the collusion between British intelligence and the press. The exception might be some of the more reactionary aristocrats in the British Pilgrims, like Sir Frederick Bennett, Lord Chalfont, Lord William Rees-Mogg and their ally in the United States, John Train, though a discussion of these people will have to wait a good number of chapters.

Universities and fraternities

Harvard University.

Education is the key to success, and this is no different for Pilgrims. The majority of U.S. Pilgrims have studied at Harvard, Princeton or Yale and majored in either law or economics - if not both. It might not be a surprise then that at any time the boards of these three universities are filled with Pilgrims Society members. There are a few other universities from which Pilgrims have graduated. They include New York University, Columbia University, Dartmouth and a few prestigious European universities. Believe it or not, the prestigious Wharton School of Business is almost non-existent in the biographies of Pilgrims Society members. MIT, on the other hand, is popular among the small number of scientists that have joined the Pilgrims. Additionally, a good number of Pilgrims have been on the board of the American Academy in Rome, a New York-based school for artists. Of course, this is not a mainstay of the average Pilgrims education. It is more a reflection of the Pilgrims influence on aspects of New York social life.

In England the situation is even simpler: the vast majority of future Pilgrims go to Oxford and to a lesser extent, Cambridge University - or they come to the United States to study at Harvard, Princeton or Yale. It's incredible, but it really seems to be mandatory to have studied at one of these universities in order to be handed some of the absolute top positions in government, especially in the State Department. It is at these universities that the leaders of the country are being groomed at many different levels of society.

Oxford University, England.

We see a similar trend in mainland Europe. France, for example, has the INSEAD Executive School, where many leading bankers in Europe are educated, as well as the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) for politics. In 2014 it was reported that "nearly every French high ranking politician or diplomat has attended Sciences Po since its inception [in 1872 and houses] 14 of the current CEOs of France's 40 largest companies." [15] The remaining portion of these CEOs largely went to INSEAD or the earlier-mentioned universities in the United States and England.

In another example, in 2010 it was reported in the Netherlands that "at least two-thirds of influential Holland has been a member of a fraternity... ten percent [comes from] Minerva, one of the foundations of our ruling elite." [16] We see the same trend among American elites, with Yale fraternities as Book and Snake, Scroll & Key, and especially Skull & Bones sticking out as fraternities that have produced quite a few leaders of society. However, overall of absolute prime importance is the university a person graduated from - not the fraternity they have been accepted into. Don't be fooled by all the propaganda surrounding Skull & Bones. It's just a fraternity for children of well-to-do families. Essentially it can be seen as a small aspect of the much more elderly Pilgrims Society network.

Yale University, home to Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key, all part of the Pilgrims network.

In fact, many of the leading Skull & Bonesmen have also been Pilgrims. Vanderbilt lawyer and Pilgrims Society co-founder Chauncey Depew is one of them. Daniel Coit Gilman, who incorporated Skull & Bones into the Russell Trust and co-founded the Carnegie Institution, is another. Former U.S. president William Howard Taft, a son of a key Skull & Bones founder and himself Skull & Bones, is known to have visited the Pilgrims, with his brother, Henry, another Skull & Bones member, having been a full member of the Pilgrims. Then there's John Beckwith Madden, a Brown Brothers Harriman banker from 1946 to 1988 who managed the Russell Trust Association for the bank, who is another. There are many other examples, also for Scroll & Key.

Recently I actually ran into the story of Charlotte Iserbyt, a rather nutty old right conservative McCartyite popular on the Alex Jones Show, but one who is actually responsible for leaking the Skull & Bones lists to author Antony Sutton for his famous 1983 book America's Secret Establishment on Skull & Bones. Iserbyt's father and grandfather were Skull & Bones and looking at her father's two most influential Bones' classmates, Charles D. Hilles, Jr. and General Charles M. Spofford, they and a number of family members later were invited to the Pilgrims Society as well.

Cultural, scientific and revolutionary societies



October 26, 2007, Pilgrims headquarters. Entrance behind cars on the right. October 26, 2007, Pilgrims headquarters. Entrance behind cars on the right.

Next to the influence the Pilgrims have over the major East Coast universities, the Pilgrims are also involved in a wide range of cultural and educational institutes in New York. They include the Museum of Modern Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Royal Society of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Zoological Society (renamed Wildlife Conservation Society), the National Institute of Social Sciences, the Smithsonian, the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Pierpont Morgan Library.

Many American Pilgrims are members of societies commemorating the revolutionary wars and the founding fathers, and since membership is usually based on achievements of ancestors, genealogical societies are not far behind. The Society of the Cincinnati is extremely popular among Pilgrims; so is the Society of Colonial Wars or the Sons of the American Revolution. The Pilgrims headquarter in New York is actually home to a whole range of societies, even though the sign at the door only reads "New York Genealogical and Biographical Society", which is generally also headed by a Pilgrim. Following is a full list of other societies located at 122 East 58th Street:

Daughters of the Cincinnati

Huguenot Society of America

Military Order of Foreign Wars

New England Society

St Nicholas Society

Holland Society

Society of Mayflower Descendants

Society of Colonial Wars

New York Genealogical Society

New York Genealogical & Biological Library [17].

Religion

Ever since the 16th century reformation movement began, the countries of Europe have mainly been divided between Catholicism and different branches of Protestantism. In Great Britain the Protestant branch became known as the Anglican Church. The church came under the patronage of successive Protestant royal families, a tradition that was interrupted now and then, but managed to survive until the present day. Since the British aristocracy to a large extent still is a "cradle to grave dependence on and relationship with the monarchy," as Lord Weidenfeld - a Pilgrim - put it [18], it shouldn't come as a surprise that members of the British royal family are patrons of the Pilgrims of Great Britain while most of these Pilgrims belong to the Anglican Church.

At the time of the American Revolution and the wars against the British Empire, the Anglican Church in the United States was separated from its British counterpart, forming the Episcopal Church. This change had been necessary, as all the Anglican clergy had to swear allegiance to the British monarch. The Episcopal Church did retain its classical Anglican theology. Today, both branches have almost the same tolerance for Darwinism, explaining why the Pilgrims also dominate the American Museum of Natural History and related science-oriented groups.

The ranks of the Pilgrims are filled with members of the Episcopal Church, among them the Morgans and Vanderbilts. Neil Vanderbilt once gave a brief description of these two families' weekly Sunday visits to St. Thomas's, the Episcopal church at Fifth Avenue, New York:

"Father [Cornelius Vanderbilt III, a Pilgrims executive] had business friends whom Mother did not invite to parties at the house--at least, not until she found they were accepted, as sometimes happened, by people she liked in England. Then there were people who liked Mother but not Father. One of these was J. P. Morgan the elder [a Pilgrim]... At St. Thomas's on Sunday, when the Morgan car drove up behind ours--their footmen in dark blue, ours in maroon--Mr. Morgan would call Mother by her first name but hardly speak to Father." [19]

Canterbury Cathedral in London and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, both staffed by Pilgrims Society members.

Although the Episcopal Church of the United States officially is independent from the Anglican Church and the British Royal family, this shouldn't be taken too strictly. There has been a long tradition of inviting the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England, and the Episcopal Bishops of New York, to senior positions in the Pilgrims Society. As discussed before, one of the primary founders of the Pilgrims of the United States was Bishop Henry C. Potter. This was the Bishop of New York from 1887 to 1908 who regularly went to England to preach at Canterbury Cathedral, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Chapel Royal. Having many important friends at both sides of the Atlantic, in 1895 Bishop Potter officiated at the wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt and the 9th Duke of Marlborough. Potter was also president of the Pilgrims of the United States from 1903 to 1907.

Next to the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterians are also well established in the Pilgrims. The Presbyterian Church is descended from the Scottish branch of the reformation.

A few of the Pilgrims have been of French descent which explains the fact that the Huguenot Society sometimes shows up in the biographies of members. The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France.

Catholics have formed a small minority within the Pilgrims. They include a number of Knights of Malta. Examples of the latter are Myron C. Taylor, Joseph Kennedy, Dean Rusk, Elmer Bobst, J. Peter Grace, Alexander Haig, Lord Lothian and Lord Mowbray. Haig is on the executive committee of the Pilgrims since 1983. The Dukes of Norfolk, probably the most distinguished Catholic family in England and representatives to the Vatican for centuries, have also been occasional visitors of Pilgrims gatherings.

Why would Catholics be allowed in such a strong Protestant milieu as the Pilgrims? One obvious reason would be to avoid accusations of discrimination; another to maintain good relations with the Vatican. For a group so tightly linked to diplomacy and the State Department, it would make little sense to ban Catholics altogether. This is not the 16th century anymore or even the early or mid 20th century. However, traditionally the Anglo-American establishment has not been fond of Catholics holding high office. In the following example Neil Vanderbilt describes the reaction of the Anglo-American establishment when FDR appointed Joseph Kennedy as U.S. Ambassador to England, a position traditionally held by a Pilgrim:

"Nevertheless I feel sure that if Roosevelt were alive today he would disagree with Senator Kennedy [JFK, a Catholic] about the desirability of Catholics in high places. True, FDR nominated Al Smith and made Joseph Kennedy, the young Senator's wealthy dad, our ambassador to England. But Smith eventually took a famous walk, and I'm not sure that the Kennedy appointment was made with any degree of enthusiasm; it was partly to please Jimmy Roosevelt, a business associate of Joe Kennedy's. Certainly the English raised a terrific hue and cry over the appointment. And in private FDR did not hesitate to mention Catholic connections as a bar to political trust. Among high churchmen, the only one he trusted was Cardinal Stritch." [20]

Although both FDR and the Anglo-American establishment were extremely wary of Catholic influence, Joseph Kennedy was treated with respect during his visits to the British Pilgrims while Roosevelt tried to maintain a good relationship with the Vatican by appointing Knight of Malta Myron C. Taylor as his personal representative to the Vatican. The Catholic Taylor, a Pilgrim and J. P. Morgan man, had already established a working relationship with the Holy See. At one point Cardinal Pacelli (Pope Pius XII from 1939 to 1958) stayed at Taylor's home, and for dinner Taylor invited some of his most influential friends. These included the Rockefellers, the widow of Andrew Carnegie, the Bakers (Morgan partners) and members of the Ogden Mills family - all Pilgrims by the way [21]. Roosevelt at one point explained to his friend Neil Vanderbilt why he was reaching out to the Vatican. It is likely that the Pilgrims allow a small number of Catholics and Knights of Malta for similar diplomatic reasons:

"Non-Catholic churches here put up a big howl [after FDR appointed Myron C. Taylor as ambassador to the Vatican]. Mr. Roosevelt told me one evening in the Lincoln Study at the White House why he had done this. He told me, first of all, he had wanted to make peace with the Catholic Church in the United States as represented in his cabinet by James Farley, the postmaster general, and with various other high Catholic personages, such as Archbishop Stritch of Chicago and Spellman of New York. But in addition, he said, he had appointed Mr. Taylor because the best intelligence system in the entire world, better even than the British, was the intelligence system of the Catholic Church, as received through its priests and high church personnel throughout the entire world. I remembered my reference to the Vatican dossier back in the twenties, and agreed." [22]

Templar and Masonic orders

Apart from membership in the regular Protestant churches or membership in honorary Templar orders as the Knights of the Garter, the Knights of the Thistle (Scotland) and the Order of St. John, a good number of Pilgrims have also been Freemasons. More interestingly, a small percentage of Pilgrims have been involved in rather exotic royalist Templar orders. We aren't talking here about highly irregular and esoteric lodges as Memphis Misraim or the Synarchist and Martinist Order, but more about symbolic and historical societies as the Order of the Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priest and the Order of the Merovingian Dynasty. These still sound very mystical though. Here is a longer list of the orders different Pilgrims have been involved in:

Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Order DeMolay Descendants of the Knights of the Garter Order of the Holy Royal Arch Knight Templar Priest Grand Lodge of the State of New York Shriners International Society Fraternal Chief Executives Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia Knights Templar United Grand Lodge Knights of Pythias Order of Plantagenet Masonic Brotherhood Foundation Order of the Merovingian Dynasty "Mason" Order of the Crown of Charlemagne

Among the literally hundreds of institutes the British royal family are patrons of is the United Grand Lodge. The legend is that Freemasonry has descended from the rituals of the Knights Templar, which had a peculiar obsession with Solomon's Temple and were said to be involved in certain occult or ritualistic practices. The Knights Templar were active in France until their persecution by the Papacy in 1307. Some of these Templars allegedly fled to Scotland where they were accepted by fellow crusaders Robert de Bruce and the Sinclair family. Connected or not, some time after these Templars arrived, the Sinclair family began to build Rosslyn Chapel, which is supposed to be a replica of Solomon's Temple; accounts of Rosicrucian initiations began to surface, and an apparently Rosicrucian-connected Martin Luther set off the reformation against the Vatican [23].

As for Freemasonry, is it really linked to Templarism and Rosicrucianism? To a degree they are all intertwined, but this is a whole different subject which descends into mystery and obscurity the further one looks back. For this article it is sufficient to note that all the traditional secret societies in the West ultimately have taken their inspiration from the Middle-East, particularly Egypt, and that the men heading these different societies today seem to have a pretty good idea of that. The average Freemasonry lodge makes a person feel as if he or she went back in time to Ancient Egypt. As for Templars, the highest level of the York Rite of Freemasonry is a Knights Templar order, which is a layer above the Royal Arch Masons and the Cryptic Masons. The Scottish Rite has a similar system. The following excerpt comes from the text Masonry Beyond the Third Degree, written by the Supreme Council, 33° in the United States:

"The Scottish Rite degrees give insight to the expansion of Masonic legends. The Lodge of Perfection, 4°–14°, is concerned with events following the murder of Hiram Abiff [linked to the sacred geometry architects of the Cult of Dionysis]: burying him; capturing and punishing his murderers; finding a new master builder; and discovering treasurers buried under King Solomon's temple. The 15° and 16° explain the return of Zerubbabel from Babylon to rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. The 17° and 18° center around re-instituting the word under the Law of Love as taught by Jesus and other religious reformers. The 19°–30° culminate with the Degree of Knight Kadosh, a spiritual knighthood similar to the Knight Templar, and develop the Scottish Rite's myth of Masonic succession from crusading knights." [24]

It appears that these romantic Templar stories have become part of the history and culture of Britain. They are essentially part of the Arthurian legends, like King Arthur, Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, and even the Holy Grail. Knights, royalty, and ancient "secret" knowledge have always combined well, and this should especially be the case in the British upper classes whose direct ancestors have often been the source for these legends. In other words, British aristocrats involved in royalist, Freemasonic and Templar organizations appear to be doing nothing more than upholding their heritage, even if this heritage to some extent is a romantic fairy tale. The "pagan" Celtic groves, in which even senior members of the Anglican Church have become members, is a similar example. [25] Another example of the influence of Arthurian legends is a club named the Society of Knights of the Round Table which is filled with aristocrats and top military figures. This society regularly meets at the prestigious Army and Navy Club. [26]

Interestingly, besides membership in a number of templar organizations, among the Pilgrims have been the 20th century descendants of the two most legendary templar-related families. These are David Kirkpatrick Este Bruce, who was a vice president of the society, his brother, and William MacDonald Sinclair, a member of the executive committee of the Pilgrims who played a significant role in setting up the American branch of the society. This may well be one more example of the British upper classes' interest in keeping the Arthurian legends alive.

The big interests and major think tanks

We have taken a little bit of a detour here. From banking, business and media we soon ended up discussing revolutionary societies and templar orders. This is all part of who the Pilgrims are, but many of the most important institutes and interests haven't been discussed yet. So let's get back to the core issues: politics and business.

There are a lot of private institutes and a number of big interests which repeatedly show up in the biographies of Pilgrims. The following table lists these institutes and interests, together with how many persons in ISGP's expanded membership list of 1,800 have been involved with them. Keep in mind that there have been at least 2,500 additional Pilgrims which we either don't know about or haven't written a biography of. Also, there are many other political institutes Pilgrims have been involved with that have been left out for practical reasons. The IISS, the Atlantic Councils, the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs and the Aspen Institute are all examples of this.

CFR members 235 This means that about 18% of the US Pilgrims are CFR members. CFR executives 47 About half of total leadership until late 1980s, including all four chairmen and all vice chairmen until at least 1991. All presidents until 1971, except Norman Davis. Rockefeller interests 108 Includes executives from Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan, and the foundations, but also family members and close friends of the Rockefellers. Museum of Modern Art trustees not included, even though this museum is almost exclusively loaded with close Rockefeller associates. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Percy Avery Rockefeller, James Stillman Rockefeller, and William Rockefeller (d. 1990) were all members of the Pilgrims Society. Morgan interests 105 Includes executives from all the different Morgan banks, trustees of the Pierpont Morgan Library, and also family and close friends of the Morgans. J. P. Morgan, Sr., J. P. Morgan, Jr., Harry Morgan and Junius Morgan were all Pilgrims. United Nations posts 84 Ambassadors or other representatives to the United Nations, including a number of founders. Also board members of the private UN Association. The League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, was also dominated by Pilgrims. Carnegie network 53 Includes anyone associated with the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment, and also family and close friends of the late Andrew Carnegie. The Carnegie Corporation gives huge research grants to virtually all the major universities in the United States and southern Africa. Andrew Carnegie was a member of the Pilgrims Society. Ditchley 44 Mostly governors of either the American or British Ditchley Foundation. Ditchley is an important Anglo-American discussion group. Federal Reserve 33 The vast majority of these have been senior officers in the New York branch or the overall Federal Reserve Board. Trilateral Commission 27 Didn't specifically look for this, so there are probably more. Bilderberg 26 Didn't specifically look for this so there are probably more. However, many of the most important Pilgrims also tend to be important Bilderberg members. Bilderberg chairmen Lord Carrington and Lord Roll are among the Pilgrims. Foreign Policy Association 24 Directors. Atlantic Institute of International Affairs 11 Executive level members. There are likely quite a number more among the Pilgrims, as not that many names of the AIIA are known. The AIIA appears to be mainly a think tank for NATO, the OECD and European integration along the lines of Jean Monnet (who was sponsored by a clique of Pilgrims bankers).

None of these institutes and big interests should really come as a surprise, as they have been talked about for decades; and not only in more recent conspiracy and patriotic circles. The Morgans' all-powerful influence on the U.S. economy in the late 19th and early 20th century was known everywhere. During World War I the bank was accused of war profiteering. In the late 1930s, just before World War II, the Morgans were continually attacked for being in league with the British, because they were part of the campaign to bring the United States into the war on the side of England. Not only the public, but also officials in FDR's administration, including FDR himself, kept a close eye on the Morgan bank, trying to make sure it would not profit from the war as it had done in the first World War. [27] FDR fully realized that the Morgans, Rockefellers and New York high society in general "often represented important forces or areas of influence". [28]

The Pilgrims also reckoned the Morgans and Rockefellers as major interests which shouldn't be carelessly tossed aside. Frederick Cunliffe-Owen, chairman of the Pilgrims of the United States in 1920, wrote a letter on February 8, 1924 in which he clearly identified the influence of the Morgans and Rockefellers:

"That bounder Charles Sherrill [who had been forced to resign as chairman of the Pilgrims]. By his tactlessness and indiscretion, he had queered himself with everybody, with the Government at Washington... with the British Embassy... as well as with the French Embassy, with the Morgans, the Standard Oil people and all the big interests including the Chamber of Commerce of New York..." 29]

The influence of the Morgan family largely ceased to exist with the death of Jack Morgan in 1943. Jack's son, Henry S. Morgan, did remain a partner in the investment branch, Morgan Stanley, until his death in 1982, but by that time the influence of the Morgan Bank had little do anymore with the family.

The Rockefeller influence continued to exist after their huge Standard Oil monopoly was broken up in 1911. It actually made John D. Rockefeller, Sr. the richest man on the planet, leaving the family free to maintain a significant interest in several of the new companies. Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey) was the most important of these and was dominated by the Rockefellers until at least the late 1980s. [30] John D. Rockefeller, Jr. continued to oversee his father's business and philanthropic interests, but it was his oldest son, Nelson Rockefeller, who rose to some of the most important posts in the U.S. government. Nelson was the de facto ruler of Latin America during World War II, was influential in setting up the United Nations, briefly oversaw some of the most classified special operations under Eisenhower and was vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford from 1974 to 1977. After Nelson died, his younger brother David became the most visible face of the Rockefeller family. Instead of being active in regular politics, David has been an important player in some of the most important private NGOs the world has seen; from the CFR and Bilderberg to the Trilateral Commission, the Americas Society and the Atlantic Institute; you name it. Nelson's main focus was anti-communism while David has been more concerned with the globalization process.

There are many other aspects of the Rockefeller family that can be discussed, but the main purpose here is to show that these Rockefeller family interests and the Morgan bank have continued to be dominant forces in the Anglo-American Establishment. The table above which lists the Rockefeller and Morgan interests within the Pilgrims Society already makes a strong cases along these lines, but just to be sure it might be helpful to focus on the Morgan and Rockefeller ties of the more recent Pilgrims Society leadership.

For this analysis ISGP has used nineteen annual Pilgrims of the United States officers list dating from 1973 to 1995. There are a total of 54 different people on these lists. Added to this list is Thomas L. Pulling, whom we know was an executive officer in the late 1990s. Also added are 9 more presidents, vice presidents and secretaries listed on 2004 and 2006 tax returns of the Pilgrims. This brings us to a total of 64 Pilgrims of the United States officers since 1973 that we know about. The table below shows 24 officers among these 64 with rather obvious connections to the Rockefeller interests or the Morgan bank. That comes down to 38 percent.

Hulbert S. Aldrich 1907-1995 Cousin of the Rockefellers. President of Greer School with Mrs. David Rockefeller (1942-1947). Vice chairman and a director the Chemical Bank New York Trust Company. Winthrop W. Aldrich 1885-1974 Uncle of Nelson Rockefeller. Early member CFR. President and chair of Chase National Bank. Hoyt Ammidon 1909-1988 Personal-investment manager for Vincent Astor in the 1950s. Chair U.S. Trust Co. Fellow Pierpont Morgan Library. His son became managing director of Chase Manhattan Investment Bank and shared a board with Peter C. Rockefeller. Kingman Brewster 1919-1988 Special assistant in the governmental office of Nelson Rockefeller. Member CFR. Trustee Carnegie Endowment. Eli Whitney Debevoise 1899-1990 Heir to the Rockefeller-Whitney Standard Oil fortune through his mother. Associate of Winthrop W. Aldrich, an uncle of Nelson Rockefeller. Trustee of Rockefeller University. Member CFR. C. Douglas Dillon 1909-2003 Schoolmates had included Nelson, Laurance and John Rockefeller III. Director and later chair of Dillon, Read & Co. which financed the Nazis. Chairman Rockefeller Foundation. Board member Chase Manhattan Bank. Vice chair CFR. Associated with many other important people and institutions. John R. Drexel III 1919-2007 The Drexel banker firm historically were partners of J.P. Morgan. The Astors, Aldriches and Rockefellers were among John Drexel's friends. John's son, John R. Drexel, IV, also became a Pilgrims executive. John W. Gardner 1912-2002 Associate of Nelson Rockefeller. Director or advisor of Rockefeller Brothers Fund and Rockefeller University. President of the Carnegie Corporation and Carnegie Foundation. Member CFR. Thomas S. Gates 1906-1983 CEO and chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust. Member CFR. S. Parker Gilbert alive Son and godson of two J. P. Morgan partners who were early CFR members. Chairman of Morgan Stanley and trustee of the Morgan Library who still keeps a close eye on the traditional Morgan interests. CFR member. Alfred Hayes d. 1989 Employee. National City Bank. Chair Morgan Stanley. Member CFR. Henry Kissinger b. 1923 The undisputed number 1 in ISGP's Superclass Index . Decades-long close associate of David Rockefeller in groups as the CFR, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and Le Cercle. He also used to be extremely close to Nelson Rockefeller. Robert V. Lindsay b. 1926 Assistant vice president J.P. Morgan & Co. Chair Morgan Guarantee Trust. Director Americas Society. Member CFR. John M. Meyer, Jr. d. 1996 Chair and CEO of J.P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Guaranty Trust. Member CFR. Henry S. Morgan 1900-1982 A son of J.P. Morgan, Jr. Partner in J. P. Morgan & Co. and co-founder Morgan Stanley. Trustee of the Morgan Library. Early member CFR. OSS during WWII, together with his brother. Ellmore C. Patterson 1913-2004 Married into the Choate family, which was intimately connected to the Rockefeller and Morgan interests, just as the Pilgrims. Chair J.P. Morgan & Co. Shared at least two boards with Laurance Rockefeller. Member CFR. Pulling, Thomas L. alive Assistant treasurer J.P. Morgan & Co. Inc., New York City, 1962-1968. Retired as a managing director of Citigroup in 2006. Eben W. Pyne 1917-2007 President and director of National City Trust and senior vice president National City Bank. William Rockefeller 1918-1990 Son of William Avery Rockefeller and descendant of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Chair Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation. Dean Rusk 1909-1994 Rhodes Scholar. President Rockefeller Foundation. Co-founder Club of Rome. CFR member. Paul Volcker b. 1927 Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index and a decades-long close associate of David Rockefeller. Economist Chase Manhattan Bank 1957-1961, and vice president 1965-1968. Director Institute for International Economics with David Rockefeller, George Shultz, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, etc. Also: chair J. Rothschild, Wolfensohn & Co. 1992-1995. Warner, Miner b. 1942 Vice president Salomon Brothers. Director Merrill Lynch. In the early 1990s on the advisory board of the Americas Society, which was founded by David Rockefeller. John C. Whitehead alive Near the top of ISGP's Superclass Index and a long-time friend of David Rockefeller. Director Rockefeller University. John Hay Whitney 1904-1982 Brother-in-law of Vincent Astor. Worked on inter-American cooperation with Nelson Rockefeller during WWII. Chair of the Museum of Modern Art, which has a very strong Rockefeller influence. Trustee Carnegie Foundation.

At any one time from the 1970s to the early 2000s there was a dominant presence of Morgan and Rockefeller men on the board of the Pilgrims of the United States, leading to the obvious conclusion that these interests - the Rockefellers, at least - still represent the cornerstone of the Anglo-American Establishment. The old Carnegie foundations are also quite strongly represented among the recent Pilgrims leadership, just as most of the other think tanks listed earlier in this paragraph.

Rockefeller, Morgan and other big interests in Great Britain

It is also possible to spot the Rockefeller and the older Morgan interests in the mid to late 20th century leadership of the Pilgrims of Great Britain. Viscount William Harcourt, for example, who was an executive member of the Pilgrims of Great Britain until his death in 1979, was the great-grandson of Junius S. Morgan and the great-nephew of J.P. Morgan. After having been educated at Oxford, Harcourt spent two months at J.P. Morgan & Co. and Morgan Stanley in New York. Eventually, in 1968, he became chairman of Morgan Grenfell, the British branch of J.P. Morgan.

Lord Carrington, president of the Pilgrims of Great Britain since 1983, used to be a member of the international council of the Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank.

There are a few other, less important examples of British Pilgrims representing Morgan and Rockefeller interests. Sir Evelyn Baring, a British executive member, had his traineeship at J.P. Morgan in New York. Pilgrim Bill Mackworth-Young was head of Morgan Grenfell from 1980 until his death in 1984. Pilgrim John M. Wallace was head of Chase National Bank's London offices while also vice president of Equitable Trust Company. More examples will probably surface when more British Pilgrims are analyzed.

We also find British Pilgrims representing U.S. corporations, mainly in Great Britain, as IBM (Watson family), General Electric, Blackstone and a few others.

The officers and regular members of the Pilgrims of Great Britain have represented a greater variety of key banks than their friends on the other side of the ocean. The most important English banks in the Pilgrims of Great Britain, next to Morgan Grenfell and to some extent Chase, have been Lazard, Barings, Barclays, Hambros, J. Henry Schroder, S. G. Warburg and probably also National Westminster. The families and individuals heading these banks at the same time have dominated the Bank of England for generation after generation. To illustrate, the following 18 Bank of England governors/directors are known to have been members of the Pilgrims of Great Britain:

Sir Evelyn Baring: J.P. Morgan, IMF, World Bank, IBM. Laurence John Cadbury: Cadbury Bros, Eugenics Society. Lord Thomas Catto: Morgan Grenfell, Royal Bank of Scotland. Lord Cameron Cobbold: Hudson's Bay Company, BP, Chemical Bank. Sir Patrick Cooper: Hudson's Bay Company. Sir Andrew Rae Duncan: Imperial Chemical Industries. Edward C. Grenfell: Morgan Grenfell. Baron Brian Griffiths: Goldman Sachs. Sir Charles Hambro: Hambros Bank. Sir William Keswick: Jardine Matheson and Hudson's Bay Company. Sir John Keswick: Jardine Matheson and Hudson's Bay Company. Lord Robert Kindersley: Lazard. Lord Hugh Kindersley: Lazard, Rolls Royce. Sir Maurice Henry Parsons: IMF. Lord R. Leigh-Pemberton: National Westminster Bank. Sir James Pitman: - Lord Roll (the Court): Warburg, Kissinger Associates. Sir David Walker: Lloyds Bank, Morgan Stanley, Reuters.

Even though ISGP's membership list only contains about 350 British members as of this writing, it's already obvious that not only the Bank of England, but also institutes as the Foreign Office and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) are strongly represented. This might have been expected, because they are the British counterparts of the Federal Reserve, the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations.

As for the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA or Chatham House), at this point it is impossible to do as thorough an analysis as has been done with its U.S. counterpart, the CFR, simply because there's not that much information on membership. However, the following Pilgrims have played a significant role in the Royal Institute of International Affairs:

3rd Marquess of Salisbury Member of a prominent Pilgrims Society family. Co-founder and first chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1920 Waldorf Astor 1950 list. Chairman of the Royal Institute for International Affairs from 1935 to 1949 and had helped to establish it in 1920. Sir Henry Philip Price Co-founder of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett Information Secretary RIIA 1927-1931 and council member 1930-1938 and 1959-1967. Sir Roderick Jones Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs around the 1940s and 1950s. Christopher Woodhouse Both his father and older brother were Pilgrims. Director general of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1952 to 1955. Primary British organiser 1953 coup in Iran. Sir Duncan Oppenheim Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1966 to 1970. Lord Humphrey Trevelyan Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1970 to 1977. Sir David Ormsby-Gore Chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1978 to 1984. Lord Greenhill Chaired some of the meetings of the Royal Institute of International Affairs back in the 1970s. Lord Shackleton Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1980 to 1986. Lord Gordon Richardson In early 1984 The Times named Lord Richardson as the soon-to-be-appointed chairman of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Can't tell if he was actually appointed. Lord Carrington Long-time president of the Pilgrims Society. Member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Sir Frank Roberts Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs somewhere in the 1970s. Sir John Birch Council member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs from 1997 to 2003. Lord Paddy Ashdown One of today's three presidents of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Lord George Robertson Another one of today's three presidents of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Previously he was on RIIA governing council for seven years.

Like their American colleagues the British Pilgrims also tend to support the United Nations, NATO, liberal globalist institutions as the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD and a host of transatlantic foundations and think tanks. In that sense the Pilgrims Society is the complete opposite of groups as the American Security Council, Le Cercle and Council for National Policy.

State Department

For American Pilgrims the most important government department has always been the Department of State. No less than 17 of the 28 secretaries of state of the 20th century appear in Pilgrims lists compiled by ISGP. In case of the British Pilgrims, the link with the Foreign Office is less strong. While there are a good amount of foreign service officers to be found, not exactly a lot of foreign affairs ministers have appeared on Pilgrims Society lists it appears. However, ISGP only has analyzed one-fifth of the British names compared to the American ones, so it's hard to make any sweeping conclusions here. There are tons of ambassadors, leading bankers, industrialists, aristocrats and people with ties to business groups and the royal family, but top cabinet officials? Not a whole lot relative speaking.

The link between the Pilgrims and the State Department is additionally confirmed through the close ties between the CFR, whose leadership mostly consists of Pilgrims, and the State Department. Hillary Clinton perfectly demonstrated this in recent years when she quipped:

"It's good to have an outpost of the council right here down in the street of the State Department. We get a lot of advise from the council, so this will mean I don't have as far to go to be told what we should be doing and how we should think about the future." [31]

Early Pentagon ties

In the early days the Defense Department, founded in 1947 as part of the national security state, was regularly headed by a Pilgrim or someone very close to the Pilgrims elite. The first secretary of defense, James Forrestal (1947-1949), came out of Dillon, Read & Co. He committed suicide while still in office, but all his friends from big banking, including the Dillons, William Draper Jr., Averell Harriman and Ferdinand Eberstadt, were Pilgrims. So was his son, Michael Forrestal.

The next defense secretary, General George Marshall (1950-1951), was a former secretary of state. Whilenever a member of the Pilgrims, he was well-respected by the Eastern Establishment. Pilgrim David Rockefeller, for example, invited him to the board of trustees of International House. The German Marshall Fund, named after him and his Marshall Plan, has also been stacked with liberal elites ever since its inception in 1972. These include Pilgrims as David Rockefeller, John McCloy and C. Douglas Dillon.

Robert Lovett, the son of a prominent railroad tycoon and himself a well-known member of Skull & Bones, was secretary of defense from 1951 to 1953. He is not known to have been a Pilgrim himself, but his son Edward definitely was. Lovett certainly mingled in elite circles through the Alibi Club, Links Club and the Century Association, all of them stacked with Pilgrims. The bank he worked for in the pre-World War II era, Brown Brothers Harriman, was another major bastion of Pilgrims Society influence. And thus, like Marshall, it is hard to imagine that Lovett never attended any meetings of the Pilgrims.

Charles E. Wilson was the first secretary of defense (1953-1957) who was not part of the Anglo-American establishment. It must be said, however, that the General Electric Company he came from has been dominated by Pilgrims Society members and that the president he served under, Eisenhower, used to be a Pilgrims Society executive himself. Eisenhower's CIA director and secretary of state, the Dulles brothers, were Pilgrims too. Eisenhower maintained a very pro-Saudi oil stance from which Wilson did not deviate. Certainly it is clear that the geopolitical convictions of an early secretary of defense as Charles Wilson was much more in line with the Anglo-American establishment than some of his neoconservative successors, most notably Donald Rumsfeld (1975-1977; 2001-2006) and also Cheney (1989-1993), although neither went full anti-Arab, pro-Israel neocon until the Bush 43 administration.

F.l.t.r.: Kennedy's secretary of state, Dean Rusk (left), a Pilgrim and important Rockefeller man; Kennedy himself, whose more hard-right father belonged to the Pilgrims just before WWII; and Kennedy's secretary of defense Robert McNamara: Pilgrims, 1001 Club, Ford Motors president, Ford Foundation trustee and involved in the Rockefeller's so-called "Green Revolution". LBJ kept both men on throughout the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Secretaries of defense Thomas Gates (1959-1961), Robert McNamara (1961-1968) and Elliot Richardson (January-May 1973) were, in fact, Pilgrims. Gates, a Pilgrims executive, represented the old Drexel and Morgan banking interests and was close to Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and the Bechtels. [32] McNamara represented the Ford Motor and Rockefeller interests before and after his rather long tenure as secretary of defense. Pilgrims vice president Elliot Richardson, a former attorney general and more of a career politician, became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations and a founding executive of the Trilateral Commission.

A 1990 membership list also reveals name of Donald Rumsefeld, secretary of defense from 1975 to 1977 under Gerald Ford and then under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006. Despite his neocon affiliations, Rumsfeld also has endless ties to the Eastern Establishment and its NGO network. He swings both ways.

Equally surprising, Reagan's secretary of defense from 1981 to 1987, Caspar Weinberger, was a Pilgrims Society executive. Despite not having a traditional Eastern Establishment background, Weinberger was very much devoted to the Anglo-American cause. He also came from Bechtel, where he served under Reagan's secretary of state and fellow-Pilgrim, George Shultz, another individual who is both a Rockefeller liberal elitist as a neocon.

The Reagan administration is an interesting one in that sense. Supposedly a Barry Goldwater (ultra)conservative, Reagan was definitely surrounded by "New World Order" type individuals: vice president George H. W. Bush (his older brother became a Pilgrim), Bush's vice presidential national security advisor Donald Gregg (Pilgrims), chief of staff James Baker (not a Pilgrim), early secretary of state Alexander Haig (Pilgrims executive and vice president), secretary of state George Shultz (Pilgrim), Shultz' deputy John Whitehead (Pilgrims vice president) and Caspar Weinberger (Pilgrims executive) as secretary of defense. It certainly makes sense that the John Birch Society and Council for National Policy were crying wolf. While it's arguably less worrisome than having a fully conservative or neoconservative establishment running the show, it definitely seems mighty hard for any elected president to shake off Eastern Establishment influences, especially when it comes to the State Department - a subject actually already discussed in ISGP's intro article. Individuals as General John Poindexter, General John Singlaub, Colonel Oliver North and CIA director William Casey actually tried to implement their own little foreign policy scheme by primarily isolating Reagan from Shultz, Whitehead and Weinberger [33] and look where it got them: a nice expose of Iran Contra in all the major Eastern Establishment newspapers, part of it generated by Rockefeller and Shultz friend Daniel Sheehan and his Christic Institute. [34] It could be a coincidence, but the ties are there and definitely a correction in foreign policy was made.

ISGP investigates the neocon ties of the supposedly liberal Eastern Establishment in a little more detail in Part III.

National security advisors and elite grooming

Together with the secretary of state and secretary of defense, the position of national security advisor, which has existed since 1953, is another crucial one within the U.S. administration. With daily access to the president and as head of his National Security Council and - at least historically - as chairman of the 40 committee and predecessor groups, which sanctioned and monitored CIA covert operations, the national security advisor has been a very influential force in U.S. politics. It can be debated how influential the position actually is, but ultimately it largely comes down to which top official the president prefers to put the most faith in. This dynamic differs per administration.

National security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski with President Jimmy Carter, both his boss and protege. Brzezinski co-founded the Trilateral Commission with fellow-Pilgrims David Rockefeller and George Franklin, Jr. and proceeded to groom presidential candidate Jimmy Carter to the White House.

Despite being among the most humanitarian-oriented U.S. presidents ever (in stark contrast to Brzezinski), Carter always kept a lot of questionable superclass ties over the decades.

Trying to tie the position of national security advisor to the Pilgrims Society doesn't work very well, at least with the present known membership. Only national security advisors Henry Kissinger from 1969 to 1975 and Zbigniew Brzezinski from 1977 to 1981 are known to have become members of the Pilgrims Society. That's it. Of course, both men are deeply tied to the globalist Rockefeller interests, more so than any other historical national security advisor. Kissinger has ran the Bilderberg meetings with David Rockefeller for many decades, among many other endeavors; and Brzezinski founded the Trilateral Commission with David Rockefeller. So when it comes to the Pilgrims, the Rockefellers might be a more important direction to look into than an official government position.

This does not exactly mean that other national security advisors were nobodies. Far from it. From the beginning the position has been limited to Harvard, Yale and Princeton graduates and over time the road to the office of the national security advisor more and more lay through a variety of think tanks, most of them ran by Pilgrims Society members. Like secretaries of state, defense secretaries and CIA directors, national security advisors are solidly part of the establishment and generally grow to be ranking members of the superclass network after their retirement from official government service. All this indicates they keep some of the nation's biggest secrets.

We can't say much about national security advisors from the 1980s on, simply because we don't have the Pilgrims Society membership lists available for cross-referencing. One assumes that Henry Kissinger protege Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell and George Shultz-protege Condoleezza Rice are past national security advisors with the biggest chance of receiving an invitation to the Pilgrims Society, but nothing is certain, especially not with most national security advisors building their careers in Washington, D.C.'s national security structure.

Readers should never forget though that it's impossible to become national security advisor without affiliation to (Pilgrims-linked) think tanks and other related establishment groups. Let's illustrate this by looking at the latest national security advisor as of this writing: Susan Rice.

Susan Rice's father, Emmett Rice, was the second black governor of the Federal Reserve System and from 1992 until this day her mother, Lois Dickson Rice, has been a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Rice herself received a BA from Stanford on a Truman fellowship, followed by a doctorate in philosophy on an Oxford Rhodes scholarship in 1990. Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright was a close family friend and a virtual godmother to Rice. This clearly paid off for Rice. She was invited to Clinton's national security council in 1993 and from 1997 to 2001, at the recommendation of Albright, she served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

When Bush came into office, Rice sought refuge in the private enterprise and think tank world. In 2001 and 2002 she was a managing director of IntelliBridge, a firm founded by David Rothkopf, the former Kissinger Associates managing director who introduced the term "superclass" to the world. In the same period she joined the CFR, the Aspen Strategy Group, and the boards of the Atlantic Council and Madeleine Albright's National Democratic Institute for Internation