legend (in German): “Who was the fool, who was the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all’s the same in death.” Initiation involves bizarre quasi-Masonic rituals, said to include nude confessions of sexual histories, and masturbation while lying in a coffin. A skull stolen from the grave of Geronimo by Prescott Bush is a frequent prop in ceremonies. (In fact, a DNA test undertaken at the behest of the Apache nation revealed that the skull did not actually belong to the old warrior.) Presumably, the rituals are designed to bind by shame: no Bonesman can denounce the society or another member, because he/she would then be open to blackmail. Or ridicule.
Certainly, Skull & Bones has proved one of the most impenetrable of secret organizations. Ron Rosenbaum, chief Skull & Bones expert, once noted, “I think Skull & Bones has had slightly more success than the Mafia in the sense that the leaders of the five Mafia families are all doing 100 years in jail, while the leaders of the Skull & Bones families are doing four and eight years in the White House.”
According to conspiracy author Anthony C. Sutton, the influence of Skull & Bones is by no means limited to the Oval Office, and the fraternity “more or less controls the CFR” (Council on Foreign Relations) and has “either set up or penetrated just about every significant research policy and opinion-making organization in the United States”. The Order’s relationship with the CIA is particularly close, and George H. W. Bush, William Bundy, Hugh Cunningham and Archibald MacLeish are just a few of the Bonesmen to take prominent office in the CIA.
While Skull & Bones is indisputably the foremost secret student club, it is by no means the only one. Yale also has the Scroll & Key and the Wolf’s Head, while Harvard boasts the Porcelain Club and Princeton has the Ivy & Cottage Club. As Rosenbaum states, anyone who is anyone in the Eastern establishment attended one of those clubs if not Skull & Bones itself. Such clubs have played a long game of nepotism and matchmaking for Eastern families, but in truth they are in decline. Accusations of homophobia and racism have required Skull & Bones and its WASP fellows to admit the sorts it was founded to protect society from: gays, Asians, Chinese, Hispanics and blacks. In consequence, says Rosenbaum, Skull & Bones has become “a more lackadaisical, hedonistic, comfortable, even, said some, decadent group”.
Alexandra Robbins,
Ron Rosenbaum, “The Last Secrets of Skull & Bones”,
Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood,
Kris Mulligan (ed.),
Sovereign Military Order of Malta
Originally known as the Knights Hospitaller, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta was founded in the 11th century in Jerusalem, where it protected Christian pilgrims visiting the Holy Sepulchre. When the Holy Land was lost to the Saracens in 1291, the Hospitallers moved to Cyprus and then Rhodes. Much of the property of the banned Knights Templar seems to have accrued to the Hospitallers in the meantime. In 1523 the Turkish siege of Cyprus put the Knights Hospitaller on the move again, and they found refuge in Malta, given to them by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, where they became known as the Knights of Malta or the Sovereign Military Order of Malta.
Napoleon’s invasion of Malta in 1798 forced the Sovereign Military Order into a diaspora, and today it exists as scattered branches throughout the world. There is a headquarters in Rome. In line with its founding principle, the Order continues its charitable work of defending the sick and the poor.
But is that all it does? For a charity, the Sovereign Military Order wields unusual power. It has Permanent Observer Status at the UN General Assembly and diplomatic relations with 40 countries. The authors of
Gehlen is not the only fascist to have been welcomed into the arms of the Order. So was Franco. According to conspiracy reporter Francoise Hervet, Count Umberto Ortolani, the Order’s Ambassador to Uruguay, was the “brains behind” the crypto-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge.
Somehow, the Sovereign Order finds the time, according to some paranoid conspiracy theorists, to also hold Satanic rituals and help run the New World Order.
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln,
Francoise Hervet, “The Sovereign Military Order of Malta”,
Star Gate
Star Gate was one of a number of psi-ops “remote viewing programs” conducted by the CIA from 1972 onwards. Developed in response to reported Soviet investigations of psychic phenomena (funded, the CIA estimated, to the tune of 60 million roubles a year), Star Gate was based at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA. Many of the first remote viewers, among them New York artist Ingo Swann, were from the Church of Scientology. By 1983 Swann and Star Gate’s director Harold Puthoff were developing instructions which theoretically allowed anyone to be trained to produce accurate visualizations of targets. Allegedly. A 1995 analysis of the Star Gate project by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) found that even “gifted” subjects only scored 5–15 per cent above chance and advised that Star Gate be closed down. In not one single case, the CIA concluded, had ESP remote viewing provided data able to guide intelligence operations. For decades whispers of a CIA psychic viewing programme had bounced around conspiracy circles. The AIR report confirmed its existence, even if it was at the very end of the project’s life.
Over $20 million was spent on Star Gate—ill-advisedly, according to the Agency. However, according to Star Gate psychic Joe McMoneagle (who left Star Gate in 1984, reportedly with a Legion of Merit Award for his services) the project had a string of “eight martini” results, so-called because the remote viewing data was so accurate that programme workers needed eight martinis to recover. These included:
Locating kidnapped Brigadier General James L. Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy in 1981
Disclosing that chemicals (for a weapons programme) would be transported from Tripoli to a port in the east of Libya aboard a ship named either
The Star Gate project is not to be confused with
