The Bilderbergers: Puppet Masters of Power? by Gerhard Wisnewski (Clairview Books, £12.99)

The Bilderberg Club is one of the world’s most powerful and influential organisations of which few will have heard. Founded in 1954, it is an annual conference bringing together up to 150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media. 

Drawn from politics, government and “other fields,” around two-thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from the US. 

Convened by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the so-called independent policy institute based in London, it’s a highly secretive organisation which purports only to be an innocuous discussion group. 

Its meetings conform with the Chatham House Rule, which stipulates that participants are free to use the information received “but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” 

This book’s author Gerhard Wisnewski, in his attempts as an investigative journalist to penetrate the organisation, hits continuous brick walls and obfuscation, but he does manage to prise the closed door open a crack. 

Founded by a former Jesuit spy, the Bilderberg Club still has strong links with powerful Jesuit-Catholic as well as Israeli forces. Wisnewski argues that it is a conspiratorial organisation, set up with the aim of creating a supranational worldwide power base to impact significantly on world events. 

He gives thumbnail portraits of some of its regular attendees, who range from one of its chief orchestrators Henry Kissinger to neocon figures Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, right-wing historian Niall Ferguson and shady figures like Peter Mandelson or Richard Dearlove — officially billed as “Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge” but in fact also the former head of British secret services. 

Many of its inner circle are also members of the US Council on Foreign Relations, one of the most powerful US think tanks and policy-forming organisations. 

The club was instrumental in setting up and promoting the EU and its aim has been to transform it into a great association of states and to unite this with the US to form a so-called Atlantic community, bypassing the UN and other genuinely international structures.

Bilderberg strategies demonstrate a cynical disregard for nations and the group views the setting up of a global corporation to counteract nation states as perfectly justified. It is a sort of clandestine supergovernment, although it strenuously denies this. 

Even though the book smacks of being just another conspiracy theory rant, the author provides enough hard evidence to justify his premise and you may be persuaded that not all conspiracy theories are off-the-wall fantasies.