Network Institutions

Royal Institute of International Affairs and Council on Foreign Relations

Quigley opens his chapter on the RIIA by stating that the Institute was “nothing but the Milner Group ‘writ large.’ It was founded by the Group, has been consistently controlled by the Group, and to this day is the Milner Group in its widest aspect.” He identifies Lionel Curtis as the “real founder,” adding that this fact “was concealed for many years,” records the founding meeting at the Hotel Majestic on 30 May 1919, and notes that the Institute was formed jointly by the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group “acting together,” but the “real decisions” were being made by the Milner Group.^[1]

The minutes of the May 30, 1919 meeting at the Hotel Majestic survive in the British Foreign Office files at the National Archives (FO 608/152). Andrea Bosco works from those minutes and from the Chatham House and Round Table papers to trace the Round Table Movement’s influence on both the RIIA and the CFR.^[2] Inderjeet Parmar’s comparative study of the two bodies opens with the same fact: both grew out of the same unofficial gatherings at Paris in 1919, and both sit inside an elite network that ties together big money, the universities, the major foundations, and the people making policy.^[3] Both Bosco and Parmar independently confirm Quigley’s account of the RIIA and CFR origins.

Quigley notes that the RIIA agreed to regard the CFR as its “American branch.”^[4] In Tragedy and Hope, Quigley describes the relationship bluntly, stating that the Network’s organization “had to be greatly extended” following the end of WWI. To accomplish this, Lionel Curtis set up front organizations for the existing Round Table groups. In England and the dominions, the front group was called the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In New York it was called the Council on Foreign Relations. Quigley states that the original plans for the RIIA and CFR “were drawn up at Paris.”^[5]

Additionally, he states: “We have already indicated that the experts of the British delegation at the Peace Conference were almost exclusively from the Milner Group and Cecil Bloc. The American group of experts, ‘the Inquiry,’ was manned almost as completely by persons from institutions (including universities) dominated by J.P. Morgan and Company. This was not an accident.”^[6] Quigley notes that Morgan "never made any real effort to conceal" that the CFR’s published officer lists were loaded with his partners and associates.^[7]

Another name deserves attention. Whitney H. Shepardson went to Paris in 1919 as Colonel House's aide, and served there as secretary to the commission that drafted the League Covenant. That was his official work. Additionally, he was secretary to the group organizing the American institute, and Quigley lists him as a member of the American Round Table group. He co-wrote with Curtis the memorandum on the American branch that sits in the Chatham House archives, travelled to London to tell the British the New York branch would be Americans only, and sat on the CFR board from 1921 until his death in 1966. During the Second World War he headed the Secret Intelligence branch of the OSS, and from 1953 to 1956 he was president of the Free Europe Committee, which ran Radio Free Europe. He was also a Rhodes Scholar and wrote for Curtis's Round Table from 1920.^[8]

During the Second World War, both branches did what they had been built to do. In September 1939, CFR officers went to the State Department and proposed a confidential program of postwar planning known as the War and Peace Studies. The Rockefeller Foundation funded it with nearly $350,000 ($8 million in today’s dollars). Isaiah Bowman wrote that the collaboration had to remain secret because "the whole plan would be 'ditched' if it became generally known that the State Department [was] working in collaboration with any outside group." The CFR’s own historian states that the work went on in “rigid secrecy,” unknown to most of the Council’s 663 members.^[9]

Chatham House, by Quigley’s account, became “for all practical purposes, the research section of the Foreign Office” in 1939. The work was done by a special unit inside the RIIA — run by Toynbee, with Curtis alongside him (standing in for Lord Astor, the Institute's chairman). Essentially, the Network was doing in Britain what it was doing with the CFR and State Department in the U.S., though in Britain the arrangement was public knowledge. In 1943 the special RIIA unit was absorbed outright as the Foreign Office Research Department.^[10]

Parmar’s study covers these years and treats the two bodies (RIIA and CFR) as sibling instruments of the same elite, central to America’s shift from isolationism and to building public support for the postwar order.^[11]

After 1925 the Round Table system drew substantial support from foundations and firms tied to the “international banking fraternity.” Quigley names the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, organizations associated with J.P. Morgan, the Rockefeller and Whitney families, and the associates of Lazard Brothers and Morgan, Grenfell.^[12] The CFR’s history confirms the American side with grants totaling tens of millions of dollars (inflation adjusted) coming from Carnegie Corporation, the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation. The CFR's four-story New York headquarters was also a gift. In 1944 the widow of CFR member and Standard Oil director Harold Irving Pratt donated the family mansion, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. led the funding of its conversion. Its original construction cost alone would exceed $15 million in today’s dollars.^[13] On the British side, Quigley describes Rockefeller Foundation grants to Chatham House totaling over $10 million more in today’s dollars.^[14]

Quigley theorizes that the Milner Group’s close relationships with J.P. Morgan and associates were probably based on “the financial holdings controlled by the Milner Group through the Rhodes Trust. The term ‘international financier’ can be applied with full justice to several members of the Milner Group inner circle, such as Brand, Hichens, and above all, Milner himself.”^[15]

The CFR’s history, published by CFR Press, is titled Continuing the Inquiry. It explicitly describes the CFR as the “direct heir” of the Inquiry.^[16] The Council’s founders adopted Curtis’s view that “right public opinion was mainly produced by a small number of people in real contact with the facts...” Foreign Affairs was launched in 1922 with the stated purpose of “guiding” American public opinion.^[17]

At the end of World War II, the CFR continued shaping public opinion, except now it focused on post-war policy. CFR director Allen Dulles was so passionate about one topic, the Marshall Plan, that he wrote a book arguing for its adoption. (More than forty years passed before the book was published.) Grose explains: “The Council on Foreign Relations functioned at the core of the public institution-building of the early Cold War, but only behind the scenes.” Well-placed members conveyed ideas to the public, “but without portraying the Council as the font from which the ideas rose.”^[18]

The CFR also developed programs linking its work directly to government personnel. In 1962 it began bringing selected Air Force officers to its headquarters for a year of research with CFR foreign-policy experts. Eventually, the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps gained similar access. In 1967 the Council created its International Affairs Fellowship Program, which enabled young scholars to gain practical government experience. When discussing the Council’s “1980s Project,” Grose notes that by the 1990s “many 1980s Project authors were by then installed in government policymaking positions.” Grose added: “Council members continued the ‘in-and-out’ progression, established by the previous generations, through changing American administrations.” The overlap was substantial. Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter studied 502 senior government officials who held high positions during 1945–72 and found that more than half were CFR members. Grose also quotes Council member and frequent critic Richard Barnet describing membership as “a rite of passage for an aspiring national security manager.”^[19]

Summary

The RIIA was created by the Milner Group as a permanent propaganda and policy instrument. The CFR was created as its American counterpart, planned at Paris, staffed from Morgan-dominated institutions, and acknowledged by both Quigley and the CFR itself as the direct descendant of the Inquiry. Independent scholarship confirms the Round Table origin of both the RIIA and CFR. The CFR’s own historian confirms the Paris plan and the secrecy. Both branches served as private research arms of their governments in the Second World War. The Morgan connection extended the Network’s reach into the financial system, and the Network’s inner circle included its own international financiers. Grose also documents public lobbying without Council attribution and an exchange of CFR personnel with government across generations.

Sources

1. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pages 182–184.

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2. Andrea Bosco, “From empire to Atlantic ‘system’: the Round Table, Chatham House and the emergence of a new paradigm in Anglo-American relations,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 16, no. 3 (2018): 222–246, https://doi.org/10.1080/14794012.2018.1482710. The Majestic minutes are cited there (nn. 58–59, 61) as “Minutes of Meeting at Hotel Majestic, 30 May 1919,” Foreign Office Papers, FO 608/152, National Archives, Kew. Bosco also draws on John Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 260–263, and Michael L. Dockrill, “The Foreign Office and the ‘Proposed Institute of International Affairs’ 1919,” International Affairs 56, no. 4 (1980): 665–672.

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3. Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Introduction, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000780.

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4. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 191. His source is Stephen King-Hall, Chatham House: A Brief Account of the Origins, Purposes and Methods of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London: Oxford University Press, 1937.

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5. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pages 951–953.

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6. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pages 182–183.

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7. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 191.

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8. Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1996; reprinted 2006), pages 4–9; Council on Foreign Relations, “The Whitney H. Shepardson Fellowship,” https://www.cfr.org/whitney-h-shepardson-fellowship (board 1921–1966, OSS Secret Intelligence, Free Europe Committee); Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, page 951 (Shepardson listed in the American Round Table group); Bosco, “From empire to Atlantic ‘system’,” n. 76 (memorandum by Lionel Curtis and Whitney H. Shepardson, Chatham House Papers 2/1/2). Rhodes Scholarship: John W. Shepardson, “Colgate’s First Rhodes Scholar,” The Colgate Scene, March 1999; Round Table authorship from 1920: Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), page 160.

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9. Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, pages 23–26.

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10. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pages 196–197.

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11. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy, Introduction and ch. 8, “CFR–RIIA Interconnections: A Transnational Ruling Class, Liberal Atlantic Community or Anglo-American Establishment?,” pages 189–214.

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12. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, page 951.

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13. Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, pages 15, 23, 27, 29. The Pratt mansion is reported to have cost over $1 million when built in 1920 (Council on Foreign Relations, “Harold Pratt House,” pratthouse.com). That is roughly $16 million in today’s money.

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14. Quigley describes Rockefeller grants of £8,000 a year from 1932 to 1942. The Anglo-American Establishment, page 189. That equals roughly $10 million total in today's money. Also, Rockefeller Foundation reports add a $32,400 grant in 1942 and a $64,800 two-year grant in 1943. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1942, pages 172–174; Annual Report 1943, page 183. That’s about $2 million more in today’s money.

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15. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 183.

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16. Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, https://www.cfr.org/book/continuing-inquiry

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17. Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, pages 11–12, 55.

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18. Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, page 38.

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19. Grose, Continuing the Inquiry, pages 46, 48–49, 62 and 64.

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1

MI6

Lord Esher was not merely a member of the Network; he was one of only four members of the secret society’s original inner circle. At the top sat Cecil Rhodes, followed by the “Junta of Three:” Lord Esher (Reginald Baliol Brett at the time of founding), William Stead, and Alfred Milner. Quigley described Lord Esher as a “friend and confidant of Queen Victoria,” and said he went on to become “the most influential adviser of King Edward VII and King George V.”^[1]

That same Esher chaired the special committee appointed in 1903 to reform the British War Office. Quigley writes that both the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) and its secretarial staff were “creations of Lord Esher,” and that, “as a result of his influence, the secretariat of this committee became a branch of the Milner Group.”^[2] Esher became a permanent member of the CID, and Quigley notes that he remained “the most important factor on the Committee of Imperial Defence.”^[3]

In 1909, the CID formed a subcommittee on foreign espionage chaired by Richard Haldane, Secretary of State for War (later Lord Haldane), whom Quigley identified as a member of the Milner Group.^[4] Esher himself sat on this subcommittee, which recommended the creation of the Secret Service Bureau. His role therefore extended into the specific body responsible for MI6’s founding recommendation.^[5]

But the planning went beyond a general call for better intelligence. A smaller working committee defined how the new Bureau should operate. Its April 1909 recommendations called for a body separate from, but in close contact with, the Admiralty, War Office, and Home Office. It would investigate foreign espionage inside Britain and serve as an intermediary through which the military departments could obtain intelligence from agents abroad.^[6]

The Secret Service Bureau began operations in October 1909. Its domestic and foreign intelligence work developed into the two services now known as MI5 and MI6. Vernon Kell led the domestic side and Mansfield Cumming the foreign side.^[7]

Summary

A founding Network member with direct, unrivaled access to the Crown helped create the Committee of Imperial Defence, then made its secretariat a branch of the Milner Group. He then sat on the subcommittee, chaired by another Milner Group member, that recommended the Secret Service Bureau. The Bureau's foreign branch became MI6, drawing a straight line from the secret society's inner circle to the founding of Britain's permanent secret intelligence service.

Sources

1. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 3.

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2. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 153.

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3. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 264.

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4. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 58.

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5. Nicholas P. Hiley, “The Failure of British Espionage against Germany, 1907–1914,” The Historical Journal 26, no. 4 (December 1983): 867–889, note 27, citing the subcommittee’s report and proceedings, July 24, 1909, The National Archives, CAB 16/8. Hiley lists both Haldane as chairman and Esher as a member. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00012735

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6. Adam Gordon, “Vox clamantis in deserto?” The Evolution of Britain’s Foreign Intelligence and Security Structures, 1870–1914 (PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2022), pages 282–283, citing “Conclusions of the Sub-Committee requested to consider how a secret service bureau could be established in Great Britain,” April 28, 1909, The National Archives, WO 106/6292; see also CAB 16/232. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/82755/

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7. Security Service (MI5), “The Establishment of the Secret Service Bureau”; Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), “Our History.” https://www.mi5.gov.uk/history/mi5s-early-years/the-establishment-of-the-secret-service-bureau ; https://www.sis.gov.uk/about-us/our-history/

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

The CIA was officially established in 1947, but that’s not where it began. The Network’s British and American branches were involved at different stages as the agency was brought to life.

On the British side, the connection began with MI6. As documented in the expanded MI6 reference, Network co-founder Lord Esher helped create the Committee of Imperial Defence, whose secretariat became a branch of the Milner Group. A subcommittee chaired by another Group member, Lord Haldane, recommended creation of the Secret Service Bureau, from which MI5 and MI6 emerged.^[1]

That British intelligence machinery then helped build America’s wartime intelligence service. The path to the OSS (the CIA’s predecessor) began with William Donovan’s trip to London in July 1940. Before Donovan arrived, Lord Lothian and William Stephenson urged London to give him full cooperation. Lothian was not a peripheral Network figure: Quigley identifies him as its leader from 1925 until his death in 1940.^[2] During the visit, MI6 chief Stewart Menzies personally briefed Donovan on the service’s overseas organization.^[3]

Stephenson headed British Security Coordination (BSC), which represented MI6 and other British secret services in the Americas. Stephenson urged the Roosevelt administration to establish an intelligence coordinator. Roosevelt did so in July 1941, creating the Coordinator of Information (COI) with Donovan in charge. In June 1942, COI’s intelligence and special-operations functions were reorganized into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), with Donovan remaining in charge.^[4]

Donovan formally acknowledged in 1944 that Stephenson helped plan COI’s organization. Stephenson’s deputy, MI6 officer Charles “Dick” Ellis, supplied practical guidance on recruiting and managing secret agents. David Bruce, who headed COI’s secret-intelligence work, later told CIA historian Thomas Troy that without Ellis’s assistance, “American intelligence could not have gotten off the ground in World War II.”^[5]

Meanwhile, the Network’s American branch, the CFR, had been secretly collaborating with the U.S. State Department since 1939 through its War and Peace Studies.^[6] The CFR’s own official history quotes Isaiah Bowman saying the collaboration had to remain strictly confidential because the whole plan would be “ditched” if the public learned that the State Department was working with an outside group.^[7]

When the war ended, another CFR member helped preserve the OSS machinery that eventually passed into the CIA. In September 1945, as the OSS was being dissolved, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy ensured its secret-intelligence and counterespionage capabilities were preserved in the Strategic Services Unit (SSU).^[8] McCloy had joined the CFR in 1939 and would later serve as its chairman.^[9] The SSU’s intelligence capabilities subsequently passed into the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which was replaced by the CIA in 1947.^[10]

Allen Dulles was instrumental in the final process that created the CIA.

Dulles joined the Network’s CFR as a member in 1926 and within a year he was added to its Board of Directors. By 1933, he’d climbed to the role of Secretary which he held until 1944. From there, he briefly served as vice president of the CFR prior to becoming president in 1946.

Dulles remained a senior officer of the CFR while simultaneously serving in the OSS and shaping the postwar intelligence system. During the War and Peace Studies, the Security and Armaments Group that he led produced memo A-B49, “The Coordination of Intelligence Service Activities.” This was years before the CIA existed,^[11] leaving no doubt that CFR planning included matters of intelligence. (And the connection went beyond planning: Donovan drew personnel directly from the CFR’s War and Peace Studies when staffing the COI.^[12]) However, Dulles didn’t just play the role of “planner.”

When it came time to actually create the CIA, Dulles shifted from planner to legislative architect. In February 1947, he submitted detailed edits to the proposed Central Intelligence Group Enabling Act.^[13] Two months later, he submitted a memo to the Senate arguing that the new agency must be under civilian leadership, a condition he repeated in live testimony before Congress.^[14] In 1949, he led a major official review of the new agency. His report was called “one of the most influential outside evaluations in the history of the Intelligence Community,” and the accepted recommendations ultimately moved more power into the hands of the Director.^[15] Dulles then became CIA Director in 1953,^[16] which is no surprise since his name was suggested before the agency even existed.^[17]

Summary

The CIA came into existence as a direct result of the Network’s efforts. On the British side, Esher and Haldane helped bring MI6 into existence, and Lothian helped open British doors to Donovan. From there, British intelligence supplied organizational assistance and expertise to America’s wartime intelligence service. On the American side, the Network’s CFR conducted secret intelligence planning with the State Department, Donovan drew personnel directly from the CFR’s War and Peace Studies when staffing COI, McCloy helped preserve the OSS machinery for its postwar successor, and Dulles helped shape the CIA’s legislation, restructuring, and leadership. These were acts of institutional creation, not simply connections acquired after the agency already existed. The CIA was not captured by the Network; it was created by it.

Sources

1. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (New York: Books in Focus, 1981), pages 3, 58, 153, 264; Keith Jeffery, The Secret History of MI6, ch. 2; Secret Intelligence Service, “Our History,” https://www.sis.gov.uk/about-us/our-history/.

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2. Thomas F. Troy, Donovan and the CIA: A History of the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 1981), page 32; Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 3.

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3. Troy, Donovan and the CIA, page 32; Greg Bradsher, “William J. Donovan and the Establishment of the Office of the Coordinator of Information, July 1940–July 1941,” National Archives, July 8, 2021.

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4. Central Intelligence Agency, “The Intrepid Life of Sir William Stephenson”; National Archives, “Records of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Record Group 263, sec. 263.1.

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5. Troy, Donovan and the CIA, pages 82–83, 106. Troy reproduces Donovan’s acknowledgment of Stephenson’s organizational role and David Bruce’s assessment of Ellis’s assistance.

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6. Council on Foreign Relations, The War and Peace Studies of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1939–1945 (New York: The Harold Pratt House, 1946). Full text available at archive.org.

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7. Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press), page 23.

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8. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, doc. 95, “Directive Regarding the Transfer of Activities of the Office of Strategic Services,” September 26, 1945.

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9. Council on Foreign Relations, “John J. McCloy Program.” The CFR states that McCloy joined in 1939 and served as chairman from 1953 to 1970.

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10. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, “The Strategic Services Unit, 1945–1946” (Introduction); National Archives, “Records of the Central Intelligence Agency,” Record Group 263, sec. 263.1.

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11. Council on Foreign Relations, The War and Peace Studies (1946), Appendix B, memorandum A-B49, “The Coordination of Intelligence Service Activities” (March 5, 1942). Search “A-B49” in the full text; if the OCR fails, search “Coordination of Intelligence.”

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12. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), page 112 and note 156. Wertheim identifies William Langer and Walter Sharp as CFR planners brought into Donovan’s organization and records Donovan’s unsuccessful attempt to recruit War and Peace Studies vice chairman Hamilton Fish Armstrong as his second-in-command.

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13. Foreign Relations of the United States, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, doc. 208, “Comments by Mr. Allen Dulles on Proposed CIG Enabling Act.”

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14. Foreign Relations of the United States, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, doc. 229, “Memorandum for Director of Central Intelligence Hillenkoetter.” The document summarizes Dulles’s April 25, 1947 memorandum to the Senate Armed Services Committee and states that his oral testimony before the House Committee was substantially the same.

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15. Michael Warner and J. Kenneth McDonald, US Intelligence Community Reform Studies Since 1947 (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, April 2005), pages 11–12.

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16. Central Intelligence Agency, “Directors Portrait Gallery,” Allen W. Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, February 26, 1953–November 29, 1961.

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17. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945–1950, Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment, doc. 45, “Minutes of Meeting,” November 14, 1945. During a meeting of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy concerning creation of a central intelligence agency, Secretary of War Patterson asked whether anyone knew a good candidate to head it. Robert Lovett replied that the only name he had heard mentioned was Allen Dulles, who was generally regarded as highly competent.

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1

Federal Reserve and Bank for International Settlements

The essential structure of the Federal Reserve Act was secretly drafted by Network Bankers in 1910 on Jekyll Island. The meeting included America’s primary “Money Trust” titans: Senator Nelson Aldrich (Morgan business associate, father-in-law to John D. Rockefeller Jr.), Frank Vanderlip (Rockefeller’s National City Bank), and Morgan partner Henry Davison. It also included Paul Warburg of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (a member of the dominant European banking interests historically led by the Rothschild banking network).^[1]

President Wilson acknowledged that he lacked the expertise necessary to evaluate the proposed Federal Reserve bill, so he relied on his closest advisor, Colonel House, to guide him. And while House was guiding the president, Paul Warburg was guiding House to ensure the bill maintained an acceptable structure.^[2]

Benjamin Strong became the first governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1914 as “the joint nominee of Morgan and of Kuhn, Loeb, and Company.” Carroll Quigley described men like Strong as merely “technicians and agents of the dominant investment bankers […] who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks.”^[3]

When describing the goal of these bankers, Quigley did not mince words: “The powers of financial capitalism [sought] 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 […] by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements […] The apex of this system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank […] sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”^[4]

As implied in Quigley’s quote above, the Network created the Bank for International Settlements as well. The BIS was established under the Young Plan, named for Owen D. Young, who chaired the committee that produced it. Quigley identifies Young as a Morgan agent and lists him on the governing council of the CFR in 1928, which is the year before he led the committee.^[5]

Summary

The Network’s private banking interests secretly drafted the Federal Reserve plan, placed their nominee at the head of its most powerful branch, and designed the BIS to serve as the supranational apex of a global central-bank cartel operating above democratic control.

Sources

1. Federal Reserve History, “Jekyll Island Conference.”

   https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/jekyll-island-conference
   Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pages 48–52. Quigley describes the Rothschilds as the greatest international banking dynasty and includes the Warburg family among the principal international banking families, “above all Rothschild and Morgan.”

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2. Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House. Search “greatest embarrassment” and “Warburg.”

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3. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pages 326–327.

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4. Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, page 324.

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5. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, pages 309, 951–52. Quigley calls Owen D. Young “a Morgan agent,” identifies him as chairman of the committee that drew up the Young Plan, and lists him among the CFR’s governing council in 1928.

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League of Nations and United Nations

Quigley names four members of the Network^[1] who "formed the British ideas on the League [of Nations] and the British drafts of [its] Covenant." They were Lord Robert Cecil, General Smuts, Lord Phillimore, and Alfred Zimmern.^[2] Phillimore drew up one draft of the Covenant, and the other (attributed to Cecil) was largely Zimmern's work.^[3] It was from these British drafts that the final Covenant emerged. Then, two of the same men helped build the League's successor: The United Nations.

At the 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco, Jan Smuts brought a draft preamble before the delegates. A subcommittee of the Conference adopted Smuts’s proposal as the basis, tasking other nations with framing their drafts around it.^[4] Historian Saul Dubow explains that the British Foreign Office, under Charles Webster’s direction, merged its own draft with the one Smuts created. The combined text arrived in San Francisco under Smuts’s name.^[5]

Meanwhile, the U.S. delegation included multiple CFR members. Key among them was Leo Pasvolsky.

Pasvolsky joined the CFR in 1938 and became one of its main liaisons to the State Department during the War and Peace Studies. He headed the State Department's Division of Special Research, which supplied research for the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy. In 1942, CFR research secretaries became consultants to the State Department’s corresponding subcommittees while continuing their CFR work.^[6] Those research secretaries acted as middlemen, providing a direct conduit for CFR policy recommendations to flow into government planning.

In early 1943, six men took charge of the State Department’s postwar political planning, including the plans for the United Nations: Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Under Secretary Sumner Welles, Norman Davis, former U.S. Steel chairman Myron Taylor, Isaiah Bowman and Pasvolsky. All but Hull were CFR members, and Davis was the CFR’s president. Roosevelt called them “my postwar advisers.” Months earlier, in September 1942, Harley Notter, who later wrote the State Department’s official history of this planning, had drafted a resignation letter complaining that “control by the Council” had reached the point where “the outcome is clear.” He never sent it, and his official history leaves the complaint out.^[7]

At San Francisco, Pasvolsky chaired the Coordination Committee, which prepared the Charter’s final drafts.^[8] Sir Brian Urquhart, former UN Under-Secretary-General, called him "the mastermind of this work" who "remained the central figure in the development and drafting of the UN Charter until its final approval at San Francisco."^[9]

Also worth noting: CFR member John Foster Dulles, the brother of Allen Dulles and later Secretary of State, served as an adviser to the U.S. delegation at the conference.^[10] Also, CFR member Isaiah Bowman, who led the Territorial Group of the War and Peace Studies, was present and involved in shaping the UN preamble.^[11]

On the British side, Alfred Zimmern served as the bridge between the League of Nations and the United Nations.

Prior to the United Nations, Zimmern was deputy director of the League's International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation and was described by Quigley as its "guiding spirit."^[12] In 1945, Zimmern served as secretary-general of the 1945 London Conference that created the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and subsequently became the first Executive Secretary of its Preparatory Commission.^[13] The institutional continuity from the League of Nations to UNESCO ran directly through Zimmern.

Summary

Network members drafted the British proposals from which the League of Nations Covenant emerged, shaped its conceptual framework, and guided its institutions. When the United Nations was formed, the Network's British branch supplied the draft that became the basis of the UN preamble, while the Network's American branch led the American planning and drafting of the Charter, so completely that the State Department’s own historian privately complained the Council was in control. The United Nations replaced the League of Nations. It was built by the same Network.

Sources

1. Quigley's Appendix in the Anglo-American Establishment lists Smuts in the Inner Circle; Zimmern and Cecil in the Outer Circle. However, Quigley notes that both Zimmern and Cecil were involved with inner-circle meetings prior to 1920. Phillimore is not listed in the Appendix but is identified by Quigley as a member on page 99.

   ↩

2. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, page 250.

   ↩

3. Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, page 26.

   ↩

4. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers, 1945, General: The United Nations, vol. I, doc. 258, “Minutes of the Fifty-Seventh Meeting of the United States Delegation,” May 29, 1945, pages 958–959. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v01/d258. Note 60 identifies the South African draft as UNCIO Documents, vol. 3, page 476 (Doc. 2, G/14(d)(1), May 3, 1945).

   ↩

5. Saul Dubow, “Smuts, the United Nations and the Rhetoric of Race and Rights,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 1 (2008): 43–72, page 53 and n. 40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022009407084557. Dubow describes the merger of the Foreign Office and Smuts drafts under Charles Webster’s direction; note 40 cites Attlee’s confirmation of the collaboration in the House of Commons on August 22, 1945.

   ↩

6. G. William Domhoff, “Why and How the Corporate Rich and the CFR Reshaped the Global Economy after World War II,” section “The Council on Foreign Relations and the postwar world,” https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/postwar_foreign_policy.html (CFR membership from 1938); Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), page 124 (Pasvolsky and Davis as liaisons), pages 150, 155 (Division of Special Research), and pages 154–157 (research secretaries’ dual service).

   ↩

7. G. William Domhoff, “Why and How the Corporate Rich and the CFR Reshaped the Global Economy after World War II,” section “The Council on Foreign Relations and the postwar world,” https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/postwar_foreign_policy.html. Domhoff names the six members of the Informal Political Agenda Group and states that all but Hull were CFR members. He reports that Roosevelt called them “my postwar advisers.” He also quotes Notter’s unsent resignation letter, held in the Notter File at the National Archives. His source for both is Laurence H. Shoup’s 1974 Northwestern University dissertation, pages 203 and 250. Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, pages 159–160, also quote the letter and note that it was never sent.

   ↩

8. FRUS, 1945, vol. I, doc. 304, “Minutes of the Seventy-Sixth Meeting of the United States Delegation,” June 19, 1945, pages 1360, 1366. Pasvolsky reports that the Coordination Committee has prepared thirteen chapter drafts; the minutes expressly identify him as its chairman. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v01/d304.

   ↩

9. Brian Urquhart, “A Great Day in History,” The New York Review of Books, January 15, 2004, section 1. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/01/15/a-great-day-in-history/.

   ↩

10. Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, page 235 (John Foster Dulles’s CFR membership); FRUS, 1945, vol. I, “List of Persons,” entry for John Foster Dulles (adviser to the U.S. delegation), https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v01/persons; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “John Foster Dulles (1888–1959),” https://history.state.gov/departmenthistory/people/dulles-john-foster.

    ↩

11. FRUS, 1945, vol. I, doc. 258, May 29, 1945, pages 958–959, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v01/d258 (Bowman’s interventions in the preamble discussion); Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, pages 150–151, 155–156 (Bowman’s CFR leadership and territorial planning).

    ↩

12. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment page 193.

    ↩

13. FRUS, 1945, vol. I, doc. 374, memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State William Benton to the Secretary of State, December 5, 1945, enclosing “Summary Report on UNESCO Conference,” December 3, 1945, pages 1525, 1528. The report identifies Zimmern as secretary-general of the London conference and executive secretary of the newly established Preparatory Commission. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945v01/d374.

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1

IMF and World Bank

The framework for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) was agreed upon in 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.^[1]

The Network was deeply involved on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the British side, the RIIA (also known as Chatham House) acknowledges that its research group, led by prominent economist Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, made major contributions to the founding of the World Bank. The RIIA also acknowledges that Rosenstein-Rodan’s wartime Economic Group developed ideas that led to the establishment of both the IMF and World Bank.^[2] But the RIIA’s work extended beyond Rosenstein-Rodan’s group.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the RIIA’s economic study groups brought together economists, financiers and policymakers to develop ideas concerning international money, investment and trade. Participants included John Maynard Keynes, Lionel Robbins and Dennis Robertson. Many of the ideas developed in those discussions influenced the Bretton Woods negotiations,^[3] and in 1944, Keynes led Britain’s official delegation to Bretton Woods, with Robbins and Robertson serving alongside him.^[4]

Beyond Keynes, Robbins, Robertson and Rosenstein-Rodan, there was Robert Henry Brand.

Quigley placed Brand near the very top of the Milner Group, and referred to him as the probable leader of the secret society after 1940. Quigley also identified Brand as the Round Table Group’s economist and a powerful banker in his own right (serving as a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers and a director of Lloyds Bank).^[5] Lazard’s own history describes Brand as one of the men who transformed its London operation into a major international banking house and leading underwriter of foreign-government debt.^[6]

At Bretton Woods, Brand was His Majesty’s Treasury Representative in Washington. The British government’s official announcement of its delegation named him as associated with the delegation and authorized to attend its meetings “as a Member.”^[7]

In other words, the man Quigley identified as the probable leader of the Network after 1940, and one of the most central figures in its core, was a member of Britain’s delegation to the conference that created the IMF and World Bank.

The same pattern appears on the American side.

The CFR’s War and Peace Studies project operated in confidential collaboration with the U.S. State Department. The CFR’s own official history quotes Isaiah Bowman explaining that the arrangement had to remain strictly confidential because the plan would be “ditched” if the public learned that the State Department was working with an outside group. Over the following five years, the project produced 682 memoranda for the State Department, which circulated them among appropriate government departments.^[8]

Its Economic and Financial Group, led by Alvin Hansen and Jacob Viner, developed the postwar monetary and development architecture while the official American plans were taking shape. On November 28, 1941, the group produced memorandum E-B44, “International Collaboration to Secure the Coordination of Stabilization Policies and to Stimulate Investment.” It subsequently produced E-C9, “Suggestions Regarding an International Monetary System,” on November 17, 1942, and E-B66, “International Development and Investment Bank,” on January 8, 1944. The archival inventory identifies Hansen himself as the author of E-B66.^[9]

These were more than simply outside proposals that happened to resemble what government officials later created. Viner was simultaneously participating in Treasury discussions with Harry Dexter White. A January 15, 1942 Treasury memorandum states that White’s proposed international stabilization fund “grew out of several discussions within the Treasury” that included Viner.^[10] By April 1942, White had developed a proposal explicitly containing both a United Nations Stabilization Fund and a “Bank for Reconstruction and Development.” Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau subsequently sent the proposal to President Roosevelt, explaining that the two agencies were intended to address postwar monetary, credit, reconstruction and economic-development problems.^[11]

In 1941, Hansen traveled to Britain on a State Department-sponsored mission to discuss postwar arrangements with British economists and officials. An official IMF history states that Hansen and Luther Gulick proposed an International Development Corporation, capitalized by governments, to finance development abroad.^[12] Archival research into Hansen’s correspondence shows that after returning from Britain he told Viner there was interest in an international reconstruction-finance institution “along the lines of the discussion at our own Council on Foreign Relations.” He subsequently proposed continuing the work through the CFR because of its “confidential relations with the State Department.”^[13]

During this period, the British and American branches of the Network were also interacting directly. CFR records examined by G. William Domhoff show that its Economic and Financial Group initiated a series of off-the-record meetings with British economists in September 1941 to discuss economic collaboration; the secretary of the RIIA was among those present. Hansen traveled to Britain shortly afterward and reported his discussions with Keynes back to Viner.^[14]

G. John Ikenberry writes that “most of the important ideas” incorporated into White’s proposal were also being discussed by the CFR Economic and Financial Group. He notes that most experts involved in American postwar monetary planning were associated with that group in one way or another, that Viner played a key role in developing the rationale for White’s plan, and that Hansen helped revise it.^[15]

Summary

The United States and Britain dominated the negotiations at Bretton Woods, and the Network’s American and British branches were deeply embedded in both. Their research groups developed the institutional architecture, their personnel moved between private planning and official government positions, their planners coordinated across the Atlantic, and individuals connected to both branches participated directly in the process that produced the IMF and World Bank.^[16]

Sources

1. International Monetary Fund, Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund; World Bank Group Archives, “Bretton Woods and the Birth of the World Bank.” IMF Articles of Agreement | World Bank: Bretton Woods and the Birth of the World Bank

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2. Chatham House, “Our History,” 1944 entry, states that the IBRD was founded after “major contributions” from a Chatham House research group led by Paul Rosenstein-Rodan. See also Vassilis Ntousas, “Listen to Cassandra,” Chatham House (2020), on the group’s ideas feeding into the debates leading to Bretton Woods, the IMF and IBRD. Chatham House: Our History | Listen to Cassandra

   ↩

3. Massimo Beber and Brigitte Granville, “International Finance: Rules of Engagement,” Chatham House, The World Today (March 1, 2001), drawing on RIIA archival records. Chatham House: International Finance: Rules of Engagement

   ↩

4. Hansard, House of Commons, “International Monetary Conference (British Delegation),” June 8, 1944. The official list names Lord Keynes as leader and Lionel Robbins and D. H. Robertson as delegates. Hansard: British Bretton Woods delegation

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5. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. Quigley states that from 1925 to 1940 Kerr was leader and that “since his death in 1940 this role has probably been played by Robert Henry Brand.” Elsewhere he describes Brand as the economist of the Round Table Group, a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers, a director of Lloyds Bank, and “one of the most central figures in the core of the Milner Group.” Quigley, ch. 1 (leadership succession) | Quigley facsimile, pages. 60–61 (Brand)

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6. Hansard, November 12, 1940, identifies Brand as managing director of “Lazard Brothers and Company, merchant bankers,” and a director of Lloyds Bank. Lazard’s institutional history describes Brand and Robert Kindersley as transforming its London operation and notes the firm’s role underwriting foreign-government bonds. Hansard: Robert Brand qualifications | Lazard: Building a British Banking Empire

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7. Hansard, House of Commons, June 8, 1944, identifies R. H. Brand as Treasury Representative in Washington and states that he was associated with the delegation to attend its meetings “as a Member.” The World Bank’s archival research guide independently lists Robert Henry Brand as a delegate of the United Kingdom delegation. Hansard: British Bretton Woods delegation | World Bank Archives research guide: delegates

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8. Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (Council on Foreign Relations Press), War and Peace Studies section, page 23. CFR’s official history quotes Isaiah Bowman calling the arrangement “strictly confidential” and records the project’s production of 682 memoranda for the State Department. CFR: Continuing the Inquiry (PDF)

   ↩

9. The Economic and Financial Group’s principal economists were Jacob Viner and Alvin H. Hansen. The archival finding aid, Records of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1921–1951, confirms E-B44, “International Collaboration to Secure the Coordination of Stabilization Policies and to Stimulate Investment” (Nov. 28, 1941); E-C9, “Suggestions Regarding an International Monetary System” (Nov. 17, 1942); and E-B66, “International Development and Investment Bank,” authored by Alvin H. Hansen (Jan. 8, 1944). CFR archival inventory (PDF), War and Peace Studies index

   ↩

10. Henry Morgenthau Jr. Diaries, vol. 486, January 15, 1942, digitized by FRASER, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The Treasury memorandum states that White’s proposed stabilization-fund draft “grew out of several discussions within the Treasury” that included Jacob Viner. FRASER: Morgenthau Diaries, vol. 486

    ↩

11. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942, vol. I, doc. 148. Morgenthau’s May 15 submission to Roosevelt contains Harry Dexter White’s April 1942 “Preliminary Draft Proposal for United Nations Stabilization Fund and a Bank for Reconstruction and Development of the United and Associated Nations.” U.S. State Department: White Fund and Bank proposal

    ↩

12. J. Keith Horsefield, The International Monetary Fund 1945–1965, vol. I, ch. 1, “The Keynes and White Plans (1941–42),” IMF. The official history records Hansen and Luther Gulick’s State Department-sponsored British mission and their proposal for a government-financed International Development Corporation. IMF history: The Keynes and White Plans

    ↩

13. G. William Domhoff, “Why and How the Corporate Rich Created an International Economy,” drawing on the Viner Papers and Hansen Papers. Domhoff reproduces Hansen’s October 1941 references to reconstruction finance discussed “at our own Council on Foreign Relations” and to the CFR’s “confidential relations with the State Department.” Domhoff: CFR and postwar economic planning

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14. Domhoff, citing CFR Memorandum E-A20 (Sept. 20, 1941), reports that the CFR Economic and Financial Group initiated a series of off-the-record meetings with British economists to discuss collaboration and that the secretary of the Royal Institute of International Affairs was present. Domhoff: CFR/RIIA September 1941 meetings

    ↩

15. G. John Ikenberry, “The Political Origins of Bretton Woods: A Study in American Foreign Economic Policy,” in A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System (University of Chicago Press/NBER, 1993), especially pages 165–166. NBER: The Political Origins of Bretton Woods (PDF)

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16. Margaret Garritsen de Vries, The International Monetary Fund, 1972–1978: Cooperation on Trial, vol. I, ch. 14, “Final Outline of Reform” (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 1985). The IMF history states: “At Bretton Woods, the United States and the United Kingdom had dominated the negotiations,” with the United States playing the leading role. https://www.elibrary.imf.org/display/book/9781451922684/ch014.xml

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1

World Health Organization (WHO)

The World Health Organization's Constitution was agreed upon in 1946 and came into force in 1948. However, the WHO did not begin with a blank sheet of paper. A central part of its history began with the League of Nations Health Organization and continued through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) that followed. Melville Mackenzie's papers show that League Health Organization policy documents drafted from 1943 to 1945 provided the basis of the WHO Constitution itself, including its definition of health.^[1]

The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, or Chatham House) had been planning postwar health machinery years before the WHO was established. As documented in the expanded citation for RIIA/CFR, Quigley described the RIIA as the Milner Group "writ large.” Chatham House's own history states that in 1939 its Committee on Reconstruction began studying postwar welfare, medical relief in Europe and future international organizations.^[2]

Quigley places Rockefeller-linked organizations among the financial backers of the Round Table system. The relationship also involved shared personnel during the wartime planning period. CFR director Lewis Douglas was a Rockefeller Foundation trustee, and CFR member John Foster Dulles served on the Foundation’s executive committee.^[3]

Rockefeller support for the RIIA's planning was already in place by 1932. That’s when the Rockefeller Foundation awarded the RIIA a five-year grant of £8,000 per year (roughly $1 million per year in today’s money). The funds were given to advance its study-group method of research, and the grant was extended for another five years in 1937.^[4]

When the grant extension ended in 1942, support continued. A Rockefeller Foundation report in 1942 records a new $32,400 appropriation toward RIIA research. The report also notes that RIIA experts were using its study groups to meet informally with officials working in government departments.^[5] The following year, Rockefeller gave another $64,800 for the RIIA research program, covering a two-year period.^[6]

Meanwhile, Rockefeller was also funding the Network's American branch. The same 1942 annual report that records support for RIIA postwar research describes the CFR's War and Peace Studies as an unofficial operation whose contribution to government was becoming "increasingly important and helpful." Nearly 400 CFR memoranda had already been transmitted to U.S. policymaking officials, and Rockefeller appropriated $70,700 in 1942 ($1.4 million in today’s dollars) to support the project through 1944.^[7]

Also in 1942, as part of its postwar planning program, the RIIA published Melville Mackenzie’s Medical Relief in Europe. Mackenzie joined the League of Nations Health Organization in 1928 and spent much of the interwar period on League health missions.^[8] In Medical Relief in Europe, Mackenzie recommended that a "central co-ordinating administrative machine" be organized before World War II ended. He specifically proposed incorporating the still-functioning League Health Organization into that machinery.^[9]

In 1946, Mackenzie also participated in the work of the Technical Preparatory Committee^[10] and, at the International Health Conference in New York, he was appointed Chairman of the General Drafting Committee. He presented the WHO Constitution for approval and, with authority from the British government, signed it on behalf of Britain.^[11]

But the League Health Organization that Mackenzie proposed to preserve, and whose wartime documents became the basis of the Constitution he signed, was not a matter of simple inheritance. It had been shaped from the start by the same foundation that was paying for the RIIA's planning.

Beginning in the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board (renamed the International Health Division, or IHD, in 1927) became a major force. The League of Nations Health Organization partially modeled itself on IHD efforts, drawing from Rockefeller personnel, practices and agenda. The Foundation became what historian Anne-Emanuelle Birn describes as the League health body's "lifeline," eventually financing nearly half of its personnel.^[12]

During World War II, the League Health Organization's functions were largely absorbed and expanded by UNRRA. Birn records that UNRRA itself was devised and planned by IHD veteran and Rockefeller Foundation vice-president Selskar Gunn. Former IHD Director Wilbur Sawyer then became head of UNRRA's health operations. Birn identifies the League Health Organization and UNRRA as the WHO's immediate precursors and describes them as a pipeline for the WHO's first generation of personnel.^[13]

Then there was Thomas Parran. His role in the WHO's creation also began long before the founding conference.

When the WHO was being founded in 1946, Parran was Surgeon General of the United States. At the same time, he was also a Rockefeller Foundation trustee and a prominent member (and former chairman) of its International Health Division's Scientific Directors. That board governed the IHD's program: its Director answered directly to the Scientific Directors, who exercised “immediate supervision” over the IHD’s work and held substantial authority over its projects, budget and personnel.^[14] The government's own biography of Parran dates his leadership role in international health to the 1930s, with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pan American Health Organization.^[15]

Henry van Zile Hyde worked with Parran during the State Department's preparatory work, developing the agenda and documentation, including material that became the WHO Constitution. Parran then sat as the United States member of the Technical Preparatory Committee in Paris, where the constitutional proposals were drawn up.^[16]

The Technical Preparatory Committee was not ceremonial. The WHO's official historical record states that its meetings produced draft constitutional proposals based on preliminary drafts submitted by France, Britain, the United States and Yugoslavia. After Paris, Parran became President of the International Health Conference in New York, where the Constitution was finalized, adopted and signed.^[17]

Rockefeller spent decades building the professional ecosystem from which international-health officials were drawn. Birn records that the IHD helped establish twenty-five schools and institutes of public health around the world and sponsored roughly 2,500 nurses, doctors and engineers for graduate public-health training. Rockefeller's own archival notes on the July 1946 conference recorded that a "large number" of the national representatives present were IHD public-health fellows.^[18]

Rockefeller's involvement continued as the WHO moved from ideas on paper to an institution. During the Interim Commission, senior Rockefeller officer John Grant began supplying material and "feeding ideas" to Executive Secretary Brock Chisholm, who sought Grant's input.^[19]

Rockefeller officials were also involved behind the scenes in the question of the WHO's leadership. Parran was regarded as a possible Director-General. Rolf Struthers, Associate Director of Rockefeller's Medical Sciences Division, investigated the political situation in May and June 1947 and reported that if the United States insisted on Parran, Russia would not join and "it will not be a World Health Organization." In January 1948, IHD Director George Strode suggested backing Brock Chisholm instead. Chisholm subsequently became the WHO's first Director-General.^[20]

This demonstrates how Rockefeller officials privately assessed viable candidates and decided whom to support inside a system the Foundation had spent decades financing and cultivating.

The WHO's second Director-General, Marcolino Candau, was a former Rockefeller fellow and held the post for twenty years (1953–1973). He was not an exception. Every elected Director-General in the WHO's history had already served within the WHO or held a leadership role in another instrument the Network built: six had previously served within the WHO or its Interim Commission, and the other two, Brundtland and Tedros, had already held leadership roles within the UN system. Brundtland also sat on the CFR's International Advisory Board while she held the post.^[21]

Rockefeller's own International Health Division was remarkably candid about its role in creating the WHO. At an internal meeting in October 1948, its Scientific Directors concluded that the WHO "could not have come into existence" without the IHD, which "had the original concept and blazed the trail."^[22] Birn, working from the archives of both institutions, reaches essentially the same conclusion in her own voice: Rockefeller had "enormous bearing" on the WHO, whose "very configuration was unthinkable without the [Rockefeller Foundation]."^[23]

Summary

The WHO was formally established through a multinational United Nations process, but the institutional machinery that produced it depended on the Network. The WHO’s constitutional lineage ran through the Rockefeller-shaped and funded League Health Organization. On the British side, the RIIA developed postwar health plans, and published Mackenzie's proposal for a centralized international-health mechanism built around the League Health Organization. Mackenzie subsequently participated in the Paris constitutional process, chaired the final drafting committee in New York and signed the WHO Constitution for Britain. Rockefeller's IHD spent decades financing, staffing and shaping the League Health Organization. Then, senior IHD figures helped build its wartime successor, UNRRA. Rockefeller trustee and IHD Scientific Director Thomas Parran participated in the American constitutional planning, sat on the Paris Technical Preparatory Committee and presided over the founding conference.

Rockefeller officials operated behind the scenes in the WHO's early leadership politics, and Rockefeller veterans entered the WHO's regional structure and senior leadership. Rockefeller money directly financed the Network’s principal British and American branches during the same postwar-planning period. Rockefeller’s 1942 report documents grants to the RIIA while it was developing postwar plans, including medical relief, and to the CFR's War and Peace Studies while that project was supplying policy memoranda to the U.S. government.^[24]

None of this requires dozens of governments to secretly take their orders from the Rockefeller Foundation, the CFR, or the RIIA. That’s not how centralized institutional power works. A network that can finance the institutions, develop the plans, train and promote personnel, place them in leadership roles, and reward cooperation or punish resistance is the dominant creative force behind the structure that emerges. That is the mechanism described in Chapter One. It is also the mechanism described here.

Sources

1. David Macfadyen, The genealogy of WHO and UNICEF and the intersecting careers of Melville Mackenzie (1889-1972) and Ludwik Rajchman (1881-1965) (University of Glasgow, 2014), abstract. Macfadyen states that League of Nations Health Organisation policy documents drafted between 1943 and 1945 'provided the basis of the Constitution of WHO,' including its definition of health. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/5625

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2. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 182, describes the RIIA as the Milner Group 'writ large,' founded and consistently controlled by the Group. See the separate RIIA/CFR expanded note for more. Chatham House, 'Our History,' 1939 entry, states that its Committee on Reconstruction began work on postwar welfare, medical relief in Europe, air transport and future international organizations. https://www.heritech.com/yamaguchy/library/quigley/anglo_10.html ; https://www.chathamhouse.org/about-us/our-history

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3. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, page 951, identifies organizations associated with the Rockefeller family among the financial supporters of the Round Table system. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1942, page viii, lists Lewis W. Douglas as a trustee and John Foster Dulles as a member of the Foundation's executive committee. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1942-1.pdf Peter Grose, Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 (Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1996; reprinted 2006), pages 9 and 69, documents Dulles's CFR membership and Douglas's service as a CFR director from 1940 to 1964. https://cdn.cfr.org/sites/default/files/book_pdf/Continuing_The_Inquiry.pdf

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4. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, page 189, states that in 1932 the Rockefeller Foundation gave the RIIA £8,000 a year for five years 'to advance the study-group method of research' and that the grant was extended for five more years in 1937. Using UK historical CPI, £8,000 in 1932 is equivalent to approximately £725,000 in 2026 purchasing power, roughly $1 million at contemporary exchange rates. https://www.officialdata.org/uk/inflation/1932, https://www.heritech.com/yamaguchy/library/quigley/anglo_10.html

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5. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1942, Social Sciences, Royal Institute of International Affairs section, printed pages 172-174. The report says RIIA research was 'largely devoted to post-war planning and reconstruction,' specifically mentions the Institute's pamphlet on medical relief in Europe, notes informal study-group contact with government officials, and states that the Foundation's 1942 contribution to RIIA research was $32,400. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1942-1.pdf

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6. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1943, Social Sciences, Royal Institute of International Affairs section, page 183. The report states: “For the research program of the Royal Institute the Foundation voted in 1943 a grant of $64,800 for a two-year period.” https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1943-1.pdf

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7. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1942, Social Sciences, Council on Foreign Relations section, printed pages 170-171. The report describes the contribution of CFR's unofficial War and Peace Studies to government as becoming 'increasingly important and helpful,' states that nearly 400 memoranda had been transmitted to policymaking officials, and records a $70,700 appropriation in 1942 for use in 1943-44. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1942-1.pdf

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8. Wellcome Collection, 'Mackenzie, Melville Douglas' archival catalogue. The collection biography states that Mackenzie joined the Health Organisation of the League of Nations in 1928 and undertook international missions for it throughout the interwar period. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/p2kykmxc

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9. 'Post-war Medical Relief,' Nature 150 (September 5, 1942), page 288, reviewing Melville D. Mackenzie, Medical Relief in Europe (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1942). The review records Mackenzie's proposal for a 'central co-ordinating administrative machine' organized before the end of the war and his recommendation that the League Health Organization be incorporated into it. https://www.nature.com/articles/150288a0

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10. United Nations Economic and Social Council, Second Session, Summary Records, Annex 1, pages 161–163. The volume reproduces ECOSOC’s resolution of February 15, 1946, establishing the Technical Preparatory Committee. Sir Wilson Jameson is listed as the United Kingdom member, with Dr. Melville Mackenzie as his alternate; Surgeon-General Thomas Parran is listed as the United States member.

    https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/862889/files/E_2nd_sess._SR.1-15-EN.pdf. See also Macfadyen, The genealogy of WHO and UNICEF, pages 241–243, on Mackenzie's participation in the Paris committee. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/5625/2/2014macfadyenmd.pdf

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11. United Nations, International Health Conference, General Committee record E/H/G/W.6: on Dr. Sze's nomination, the Committee appointed Dr. Melville Mackenzie (United Kingdom) Chairman of the General Drafting Committee. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1487044/files/E_H_G_W-6-EN.pdf. Macfadyen, pages 244–246, records that Mackenzie presented the WHO Constitution for approval and signed it on behalf of the United Kingdom with plenipotentiary authority. https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/5625

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12. Anne-Emanuelle Birn, 'Backstage: the relationship between the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Health Organization, Part I: 1940s-1960s,' Public Health 128 (2014): 129-140, pages 129-130. Birn states that the League of Nations Health Organization partially modelled itself on IHD efforts, drawing from IHD personnel, practices and agenda, and that the Rockefeller Foundation eventually funded almost half its personnel. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010 ; accessible full text: https://www.economicsvoodoo.com/wp-content/uploads/Backstage-Relationship-betw-Rockefeller-Foundation-and-WHO-Part-I-1940s-1960s_Public-Health-2014.pdf

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13. Birn, 'Backstage,' pages 130–131. Birn states that UNRRA 'was devised and planned by IHD veteran Selskar Gunn'; that former IHD Director Wilbur Sawyer became head of UNRRA health operations after retiring from Rockefeller Foundation in 1944; and that the League Health Organization and UNRRA were the WHO's immediate precursors and a pipeline for its first generation of personnel. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010 Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1944, page x, identifies Gunn as Foundation vice-president since 1927. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1944-1.pdf

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14. Rockefeller Foundation, Organization of the International Health Division and By-Laws, Article IV (1928–29). The Scientific Directors were placed in charge of the “immediate supervision” of the IHD's work; the Division's Director was immediately responsible to them, and they were authorized to designate expenditures, approve or alter projects within established policies and budgets, make certain commitments on the Foundation's behalf, and exercise substantial appointment authority. National Library of Medicine: https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/ocr/nlm%3Anlmuid-2934149RX223-leaf

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15. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1941, Trustees, Committees and Officers and Secretary's Report, pages viii and 60. Parran is listed as a trustee and as Chairman of the IHD Scientific Directors. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1941-1.pdf . Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1946, page viii, again lists Parran both among the Trustees and among the IHD Scientific Directors. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1946-1.pdf . Office of the Surgeon General, biography of Thomas Parran (reproduced at Social Networks and Archival Context): Parran's 'leadership role in international health affairs dated back to the 1930s with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Pan American Health Organization.' https://snaccooperative.org/view/30206728

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16. World Health Organization, Milton Siegel oral-history tapes, page 4. Siegel states that Henry van Zile Hyde worked with Surgeon-General Thomas Parran during State Department preparatory work, helping develop the agenda and documentation 'including what became the Constitution of the World Health Organization.' https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/documents/about-us/milton_siegel_tapes.pdf . The committee’s report lists Parran as the United States member and credits him, Jameson, and others with “basic preliminary work in preparing documents” that substantially assisted its deliberations. United Nations Economic and Social Council, Second Session, Summary Records, Annex 1, pages 158, 161–163.

    https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/862889/files/E_2nd_sess._SR.1-15-EN.pdf

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17. World Health Organization, Official Records, historical introduction. The Technical Preparatory Committee met from March 18 to April 5, 1946 and developed draft constitutional proposals from preliminary drafts submitted by France, Britain, the United States and Yugoslavia. https://iris.who.int/bitstream/10665/85588/1/Official_record9_eng.pdf . A contemporary U.S. Senate report records that the International Health Conference met in New York from June 19 to July 22, 1946 under the chairmanship of Dr. Thomas Parran. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/SERIALSET-11116_00_00-052-0421-0000/pdf/SERIALSET-11116_00_00-052-0421-0000.pdf

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18. Birn, 'Backstage,' pages 130–131. Birn records that the IHD helped establish twenty-five schools and institutes of public health worldwide and sponsored about 2,500 nurses, doctors and engineers for graduate public-health training. She also quotes Rockefeller Foundation archival notes stating that at the July 1946 conference 'a large number of the representatives of the countries present were IHD fellows in public health' (RF Archives, RG 3.1, Series 908, Box 7I, Folder 86.128). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010

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19. Birn, 'Backstage,' page 131. During the WHO's Interim Commission, senior Rockefeller officer John Grant supplied material to Executive Secretary Brock Chisholm; Birn states that Chisholm sought Grant's input officially or privately and that Grant began 'feeding ideas' to Chisholm, including support for creating a Bureau of Health Care. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010

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20. Birn, 'Backstage,' pages 130-131 and refs. 39-40. Birn describes Rockefeller Foundation staff as 'mobilizing backstage' over WHO leadership. In May-June 1947 Rolf Struthers, Associate Director of the Foundation's Medical Sciences Division, reported that if the United States insisted on Parran, Russia would not join and 'it will not be a World Health Organization.' Birn also notes that Parran was thought not to enjoy broad support. On January 15, 1948, IHD Director George Strode suggested backing Chisholm. Chisholm was elected the WHO's first Director-General in 1948. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010

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21. WHO, “Former Directors-General”; Birn, 'Backstage,' page 134; Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO-hosted CV; CFR, Annual Report 1999, page 102. These document the six prior WHO/Interim Commission posts, Candau's Rockefeller fellowship, Brundtland's UN/CFR roles, and Tedros's UNAIDS chairmanship.
    WHO: https://www.who.int/director-general/former-directors-general
    Birn: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010
    Tedros: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/who-leadership-team/cv-tedros-dg-candidate-2017849824aef6404a91984c6b9ad91ab73a.pdf
    CFR: https://static.cfr.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/CFR_annual_report_1999.pdf

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22. Birn, 'Backstage,' page 132, citing Rockefeller Foundation Archives, 'World Health Organization and the IHD,' October 25, 1948 (RG 2, Series 1948/100, Box 401, Folder 2708). At the IHD Scientific Directors meeting, the directors stressed that the WHO 'could not have come into existence' without the IHD, which 'had the original concept and blazed the trail.' https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010

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23. Birn, 'Backstage,' page 136. After reviewing the archival relationship, Birn concludes that the Rockefeller Foundation had 'enormous bearing on WHO' and that the WHO's 'very configuration was unthinkable without the RF.' https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2013.11.010

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24. Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report 1942, pages 170-174; see notes 5 and 7 above.
    Report: https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Annual-Report-1942-1.pdf

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1

European Union (EU)

The European Union was built on a chain of treaties: the Treaty of Paris (1951) created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC); the Treaties of Rome (1957) created the European Economic Community and Euratom; and the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) established the European Union and laid the foundations for the euro. Each successive treaty transferred additional sovereign powers from national governments to institutions above them. Step by step, European “federalism” concentrated more authority over the member nations into fewer hands.^[1]

Quigley described the Network’s original program as federating the English-speaking peoples and bringing “all the habitable portions of the world” under their control.^[2] That objective (global control) requires “instruments” that operate above the nation-state level. Therefore, European federation is a logical step: it takes dispersed power among separate national governments and moves it into institutions that are positioned above them. For a Network seeking global control, that structure is much easier to control.

Since we already know the Network desired federation, the question to answer is: What evidence do we have that its institutions and personnel worked to bring that structure into existence?

The trail begins prior to World War II. Quigley identifies Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) and Lionel Curtis as “probably the most important members” of the Network during Milner’s leadership, and names Kerr as its leader from 1925 until his death in 1940. Both men were lifelong federalists. When the British Federal Union movement was founded, it quickly gained the active support of Lothian and Curtis.^[3]

Three of Chatham House’s leading figures - its founder Curtis, its Director of Studies Arnold Toynbee, and Kerr - were among the senior intellectuals of Federal Union. Federal Union was founded in 1938 with a focus on creating a European federation. Chatham House established a study group to examine both the need for a European federal union and how it should be formed. Jamie Perry, the historian of postwar Chatham House, notes that the Institute’s senior staff transferred their hopes from an imperial federation to a European one. However, their federal ambitions were not limited to Europe. In early 1939, Toynbee urged the formation of a joint RIIA-CFR study group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of federation more broadly. That March, Curtis explicitly described Federal Union as the route to world government: plant the idea broadly enough in the public mind that politicians would be “overridden.”^[4] Aldrich records that Federal Union’s ideas, backed by prominent figures such as Lord Lothian, influenced an entire generation of Europeans.^[5]

By 1940, the work had moved from advocacy and study into constitutional design. In March, the Foreign Office examined an “Act of Perpetual Association between the United Kingdom and France” drafted by Arnold Toynbee and Alfred Zimmern at Chatham House, and created a committee to translate the proposal into a constitution. The plan envisioned pooling defense, foreign policy and economic resources, along with common citizenship. Three months later, Jean Monnet was among the small group behind Churchill’s proposed “indissoluble union” with France. That bilateral plan failed when the French government chose an armistice with Germany.^[6]

The failure of the Anglo-French plan did not end the broader push for European unity. Retinger later recalled that in 1946 he “made a start” on a renewed Europe-wide effort by giving an address at the RIIA. Within weeks he and former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland formed the Independent League for Economic Co-operation (ILEC, soon renamed the European League for Economic Cooperation, ELEC), a transnational pressure group aimed at a European common market. ILEC became one of the organizations combined into the committee that launched the European Movement, with Retinger serving as Secretary-General.^[7]

The postwar federalist groups were organized under the umbrella of the European Movement, and the conduit for American financing was the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE). Allen Dulles organized ACUE in 1948 together with William Donovan, the former head of the OSS. At the time, Dulles was president of the Network’s CFR and was also heading the National Security Council’s review of the newly created CIA, which he would go on to lead (see the expanded CIA citation).^[8]

Donovan served as ACUE’s chairman and Dulles as its vice-chairman. Day-to-day administration was handled by Thomas Braden, a former OSS officer who joined the CIA as Dulles’s special assistant in late 1950. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, who became Director of Central Intelligence that same year.^[9] The European Movement’s records show that there were no fewer than four CIA members among ACUE’s officers and directors, that the vast majority of American funds for the European unity campaign came from State Department secret funds, and that ACUE served as a “legal covering organisation” for that money.^[10]

ACUE’s secret funding kept the Movement alive and was directed toward concrete federal outcomes. In 1949 and 1950, ACUE funds prevented the European Movement from financial collapse.^[11] Over the whole period 1949-60, ACUE channeled between three and four million dollars (over $35 million in today’s money), mostly from U.S. government sources. That covert contribution never amounted to less than half of the European Movement’s budget, and after 1952, as much as two-thirds of it. Its stated purpose was to build mass support for the Schuman Plan (for the European Coal and Steel Community), the European Defence Community, and a European Assembly with sovereign powers.^[12]

By 1951, the objective was explicit: the Mutual Security Act authorized aid in part “to further encourage the economic unification and the political federation of Europe.” The 1952 amendment went further, directing that the Act be administered to support concrete measures for political federation in Europe and authorizing aid to be furnished directly to the European Coal and Steel Community.^[13]

Funding also gave ACUE leverage over the Movement’s direction and leadership. When Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law, resisted the faster federation favored by mainland European federalists, ACUE cut off funding. Paul-Henri Spaak, a leading Belgian federalist, agreed to take over the Movement after ACUE promised additional funding. By July, Sandys was out and, as Aldrich puts it, “Spaak’s federalist element now took control.” With ACUE funding, the secretariat then moved to Brussels.^[14] Beginning in 1952, the secrecy surrounding ACUE funding was increased. To further obscure its source and avoid accusations that the Movement was an American creation, funds were routed through “special budgets.”^[15]

The Schuman Plan (which led to the Treaty of Paris and creation of the European Coal and Steel Community) was drafted by Jean Monnet. Monnet’s crucial American ally was the U.S. High Commissioner for West Germany, John McCloy.

McCloy joined the CFR in 1939 and became chairman of its board in 1953, a post he held until 1970.^[16] The State Department’s records acknowledge that McCloy pressured German Chancellor Adenauer on the coal and steel provisions.^[17] A study in The Historical Journal concludes that, in its origins, the ECSC was the product of “a bargain struck between [West Germany] and America,” not between France and West Germany.^[18] Meanwhile ACUE assisted by organizing public support. In June 1950, Allen Dulles released an open letter to Schuman signed by 118 prominent Americans endorsing his plan.^[19] In October 1952, after the treaty had entered into force and the ECSC was operating, Monnet told Donovan that ACUE’s continued support was “now more crucial than ever” for “the full realisation of our plans.”^[20]

Aldrich notes that the same small band of senior officials, many from the intelligence community, supported the three most important transnational groups of the 1950s: the European Movement, the Bilderberg Group, and Jean Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe.^[21]

Bilderberg was founded in 1952 by Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Retinger secured backing from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller, and Bedell Smith; the American wing was organized by Eisenhower’s psychological-warfare coordinator, C.D. Jackson. The first meeting, in 1954, was paid for by the CIA and much of its funding thereafter came from the Ford Foundation. Aldrich states that the Rome Treaty was “nurtured” by discussions at Bilderberg the preceding year.^[22] Monnet’s Action Committee, formed in 1955 after his resignation from the ECSC High Authority, is credited by the EU’s historical archive with helping drive and coordinate the Treaties of Rome.^[23] Its secretariat was funded by the Ford Foundation, and ACUE’s own reports list Monnet’s activities among its supported programs.^[24]

The Ford Foundation was already operating within the same support network. As early as 1949, at Dulles’s request, it was cooperating with the CIA on European programs; by 1950 it was coordinating with ACUE; and by 1959 McCloy was chairman of the Ford Foundation while simultaneously chairman of the CFR.^[25] In May 1960, ACUE voted to wind itself down. It did not dissolve. At the request of Monnet and Schuman, it deactivated instead, so that it could come back into the picture if and when necessary.^[26]

Summary

The Network engaged in a sustained effort to build a federal structure above Europe’s nation-states.
On the British side, the RIIA studied how European federation should be formed. Lionel Curtis tied Federal Union directly to the objective of world government. RIIA figures drafted the 1940 Anglo-French federal plan, and Retinger restarted his postwar unity campaign at Chatham House before helping build the European Movement.
On the U.S. side, the American Committee on United Europe (ACUE) played a dominant role. ACUE was created by CFR President Allen Dulles (later CIA Director) and former OSS chief William Donovan. ACUE secretly financed the European Movement using hidden State Department funds, and that funding provided ACUE leverage over the European Movement’s leadership. That money built the organizations and the public campaign; the treaties themselves were pushed through at the government level. John J. McCloy (CFR member and U.S. High Commissioner for West Germany) pressured the German Chancellor (Adenauer) to accept the European Coal and Steel Community treaty (the Treaty of Paris). Bilderberg and Monnet’s Action Committee, supported through the same intelligence, foundation and CFR-linked network, carried integration further toward the Treaties of Rome. On both sides of the Atlantic, the ideas, organizations, money and political leverage required for federation repeatedly ran through the same Network.

Sources

1. H. N. Brailsford, The Federal Idea (Federal Union pamphlet, 1940): federations transfer sovereign power to a central authority; Federal Union’s stated aim was federation “as a first step towards democratic world government.” https://federalunion.org.uk/the-federal-idea/

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2. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, page 131: Rhodes sought to federate the English-speaking peoples and bring “all the habitable portions of the world under their control.” https://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/Tragedy_and_Hope.pdf . See also The Anglo-American Establishment, ch. 1: https://www.heritech.com/yamaguchy/library/quigley/anglo_01.html

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3. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, ch. 1: Kerr and Curtis were “probably the most important members”; Kerr led the Group from 1925 to 1940. https://www.heritech.com/yamaguchy/library/quigley/anglo_01.html . John Pinder, “Federalism in Britain and Italy,” on their support for Federal Union: https://www.thefederalist.eu/site/index.php/en/essays/1972-federalism-in-britain-and-italy-radicals-and-the-english-liberal-tradition

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4. Jamie Perry, Chatham House, the United Nations Association and the politics of foreign policy, pages 7-8, 13: the Chatham House Federal Union study group and shift from imperial to European federation. https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/6097/1/Perry15PhD.pdf . Inderjeet Parmar, “Anglo-American Elites in the Interwar Years,” notes 38, 101: Curtis on world government through Federal Union; Toynbee on a joint CFR-RIIA study. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117802016001005

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5. John Pinder, “Federalism in Britain and Italy,” and European Parliament research paper on British federalist influence on Spinelli and the Ventotene Manifesto. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/174892/20090316ATT51977EN.pdf . Richard J. Aldrich, “OSS, CIA and European Unity,” page 191. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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6. Andrea Bosco, “Britain’s forgotten WWII attempt to build a European federation”: the Toynbee-Zimmern Chatham House draft, Foreign Office committee to turn it into a constitution, and June 1940 union declaration. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/02/17/britains-forgotten-wwii-attempt-to-build-a-european-union/

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7. Joseph Retinger, Memoirs of an Eminence Grise: in 1946 he “made a start” toward European unity with a May 7 Chatham House lecture, then formed ILEC with Paul van Zeeland. https://www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2002/4/17/9bfcae37-96f9-4187-83d5-346e9cfda4b1/publishable_en.pdf . CVCE on ILEC/ELEC and the European Movement: https://www.cvce.eu/en/collections/unit-content/-/unit/e50703eb-142f-4770-a6a5-b1a7f0cac450/dd467f09-4583-4df1-8079-97b14e02fdea ; https://www.cvce.eu/en/unit-content/-/unit/04bfa990-86bc-402f-a633-11f39c9247c4/272166ae-84b2-466b-9cfa-4df511389208

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8. Aldrich, pages 185, 188: Dulles and Donovan organized ACUE in 1948; Dulles used his CFR position to enlist U.S. foundations for covert projects. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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9. Aldrich, pages 192-193: ACUE leadership included Donovan, Dulles, Thomas Braden and Walter Bedell Smith; Aldrich links their ACUE work with their CIA reorganization work. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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10. Aldrich, page 212, citing F. X. Rebattet’s study of European Movement records: at least four CIA members served among ACUE officers/directors; most American funding came from State Department secret funds; ACUE was a “legal covering organisation” for the money. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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11. Aldrich, pages 195-196: ACUE funding prevented the European Movement’s financial collapse and financed the Brussels and Westminster conferences. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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12. Aldrich, pages 184-185, 211-214: ACUE sent roughly $3-4 million to Europe in 1949-60, mostly from U.S. government sources; its share was at least half the Movement’s budget and after 1952 probably about two-thirds. It promoted the Schuman Plan, European Defence Community and a European Assembly with sovereign powers. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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13. Mutual Security Act of 1951, sec. 101(a): aid “to further encourage the economic unification and the political federation of Europe.” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951v02/d352 . Mutual Security Act of 1952, sec. 2: support for “concrete measures for political federation” and direct assistance to the ECSC. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-66/pdf/STATUTE-66-Pg141.pdf

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14. Aldrich, pages 196-198: ACUE withheld funds during the dispute over Duncan Sandys; Paul-Henri Spaak then took the lead, and ACUE funding moved the Movement’s secretariat to Brussels. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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15. Aldrich, page 207: from 1952 American money was routed through “Special Budgets” to avoid charges that the European Movement was an American creation. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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16. Council on Foreign Relations, “The John J. McCloy Program”: McCloy joined the CFR in 1939, served as U.S. High Commissioner for Germany (1949-52), and chaired the CFR Board (1953-70). https://www.cfr.org/support-cfr/john-j-mccloy-program . CVCE, “The Monnet Plan,” on McCloy’s support: https://www.cvce.eu/en/recherche/unit-content/-/unit/5cc6b004-33b7-4e44-b6db-f5f9e6c01023/4802c240-1497-4127-9b14-f7b6896d6fd9

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17. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951, vol. IV, pt. 1, docs. 45, 75: McCloy reports U.S. pressure to bring about the Schuman Plan and says the question was “whether we were not doing more than we should.” https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951v04p1/d45 ; https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951v04p1/d75

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18. A. W. Lovett, “The United States and the Schuman Plan,” The Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (1996): the ECSC originated in “a bargain struck between the Federal Republic and America.” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X00020318

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19. Aldrich, pages 193, 204: Dulles organized an open letter to Schuman signed by 118 prominent Americans endorsing the Schuman Plan. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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20. Aldrich, page 208, citing Monnet to Donovan, 3 October 1952: continued ACUE support was “more crucial than ever.” https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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21. Aldrich, page 186: the same small band of senior officials, many from the intelligence community, supported the European Movement, Bilderberg Group and Monnet’s Action Committee. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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22. Aldrich, page 216: Retinger and Prince Bernhard created Bilderberg; Retinger secured Harriman, Rockefeller and Bedell Smith backing; C. D. Jackson organized the American side; the CIA financed the first meeting and Ford later supported it. Aldrich says the Rome Treaty was “nurtured” by Bilderberg discussions. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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23. CVCE, “The role of the Action Committee for the United States of Europe”: Monnet’s Action Committee helped drive and coordinate the genesis of the Treaties of Rome. https://www.cvce.eu/en/recherche/unit-content/-/unit/02bb76df-d066-4c08-a58a-d4686a3e68ff/47a30811-a240-474e-9733-ae595ea9eaa4 . See also Relations internationales no. 136 (2008/4): https://shs.cairn.info/article/E_RI_136_0021?lang=en

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24. Aldrich, page 209: the Ford Foundation funded Monnet’s secretariat; ACUE reports listed Monnet’s activities among supported programs. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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25. Aldrich, page 209: by 1949 the Ford Foundation was cooperating with CIA European programs at Dulles’s request and by 1950 with ACUE. Ford Foundation Annual Report 1965: McCloy was a trustee from 1953 and chairman from 1959 through 1965; he was simultaneously CFR chairman (note 16). https://www.fordfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/1965-annual-report.pdf . Aldrich: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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26. Aldrich, pages 210-211: in 1960 ACUE was deactivated rather than dissolved at Monnet’s and Schuman’s request so it could be revived if needed. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/aldrich/publications/oss_cia_united_europe_eec_eu.pdf

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Back to contents · Return to Chapter 1