Jon Lewis - The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Union activist Karen Silkwood was murdered to prevent her whistle-blowing on the Kerr—McGee nuclear company: ALERT LEVEL 8

Win some, win some. When Democrat John Kerry took on Republican George W. Bush for the US presidency in 2004, one group of Americans was assured of victory whichever way the result went. For Kerry and Bush were both members of the secretive Yale University society known as Skull & Bones.

Skull & Bones was founded in 1832 by Yale University student William H. Russell. He had spent some time in Germany, and based Skull & Bones on the secret societies then popular in that country; some even hold that Russell was introduced in Germany to the Illuminati,and that Skull & Bones was set up as that organization’s US branch. (The skull-and-bones emblem is the official crest of the Illuminati.) What is certain is that Skull & Bones flourished; by 1856 it built its own headquarters, a windowless campus building known to “Bonesmen” as “The Tomb”. Membership was, and remains, highly exclusive. Total living membership stands at around 600; each year just 15 Yale students are “tapped” (literally) and invited to join Skull & Bones. A majority of those so tapped come from private school, the establishments of preference being the Anglophile Phillips Academies and Groton. It helps of course to come from one of America’s blue-blood dynasties; aside from George W. Bush, his father, George H. W. Bush, and his grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush, all featured on the membership roll. Alphonso Taft, a founder member, was the father of Bonesman and US president Howard Taft. Other prominent members of the Skull & Bones—which is also known as “Chapter 322”, “The Brotherhood of Death” and “The Order”—have included Howard Stanley (founder of Morgan Stanley), political pundit William F. Buckley, magazine baron Henry Luce and War Secretary Henry Stimson.

According to the numerous conspiracy websites devoted to detailing the shenanigans of the Skull & Bones fraternity, initiation takes place in the Tomb’s inner sanctum, entered through a door which bears the 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, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull & Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, 2003

Ron Rosenbaum, “The Last Secrets of Skull & Bones”, Esquire, September, 1977

Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood, Trilaterals Over Washington, 1979

Kris Mulligan (ed.), Fleshing Out Skull & Bones, 2003

www.freemasonrywatch.org/bones.html

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 Templarseems 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 Holy Blood, Holy Grail spotlight the Catholic anti-Communist Knights of Malta as “one of the primary channels of communication between the Vatican and the CIA”. Evidence of the connection comes primarily from the alleged membership in the Order of CIA chiefs William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Allen Dulles, John McCone and William Casey. James Angleton was awarded the Croci Al Merito Seconda Classe from the Knights, while George H. W. Bush was reputed to be an honorary initiate. Equally, the Order is closely connected to the Vatican; one of its leading members in the 20th century was the American Cardinal Francis Spellman. Among those awarded the Order’s Grand Cross of Merit has been Reinhard Gehlen, the former Nazi chief of intelligence on the Soviet front. Gehlen was subsequently installed by the CIA as the first chief of West Germany’s equivalent of the CIA, the BND.

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.