Jon Lewis - The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

For over 70 years people agreed the Titanic disaster was a concantenation of fate (the iceberg) and folly (she was governed by maritime legislation which required her to carry lifeboats for only 1,178 people), but then Oxford plasterer Robin Gardiner published “Titanic”: The Ship that Never Sank? (1998). Gardiner’s thesis—elucidated also in his books The Riddle of the Titanic (1997) and The Titanic Conspiracy (1998; with Dan Van der Vat)—is that the Titanic disaster was, well, a titanic insurance fraud. According to Gardiner it was not the Titanic which left Southampton on 10 April but her older sister ship, the Olympic. This had been damaged by a Royal Navy ship, rendering her worthless. The cash-strapped White Star Line, owner of both ships, faced bankruptcy… until someone hit on the idea of switching the Olympic for the Titanic, then sinking the “Titanic” in mid-Atlantic and claiming oodles of insurance money. To pass off the Olympic as the Titanic was easy, since they were near-identical. All that was required was a week in a Belfast dry dock for a paint job that included a change of name.

The fraudsters, however, weren’t heartless: they arranged for the SS Californian and other rescue ships to be nearby in the middle of the Atlantic when the sea cocks of the false Titanic were opened… but the plan went awry when the Titanic hit a rescue vessel placed on station by White Star and sank sooner than expected, with the loss of many lives.

Gardiner picks up some oddities in the official Titanic saga, chiefly the suspicious behaviour of the Californian, which lurked 20 miles (32km) from the Titanic ’s death-site on the fatal night. Owned by financier J. P. Morgan, the Californian was carrying an unusual cargo: 3,000 woollen blankets and jumpers. Morgan was a co-owner of White Star. He had been booked to travel on the Titanic but had cried off at the last minute.

In Olympic and Titanic Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge sought to sink Gardiner’s insurance-con theory by referencing the Titanic debris found on the Atlantic seabed by Professor Robert Ballard. A propeller numbered 401 (the Titanic ’s number) and the straight-faced wheelhouse both definitely identify the debris as belonging to the Titanic.

Unless the propeller and wheelhouse were among the cosmetic changes made to the Olympia in dry dock…

Robin Gardiner, “Titanic”: The Ship That Never Sank? 1998

Steve Hall and Bruce Beveridge, Olympic and Titanic: The Truth Behind the Conspiracy, 2004

The Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973 by banking titan David Rockefeller as an invitation-only think-tank. Rockefeller had the bucks, the organizational skills and the contacts, but the Trilateral Commission’s philosophy was provided by Columbia university professor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970). This was a prophetic look at a future “shaped culturally, psychologically, socially, and economically by the impact of technology and electronics—particularly in the area of computers and communication”. Explaining that “National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept”, Brzezinski foresaw “movement toward a larger community by the developing nations” funded by “a global taxation system”. However, since this end-goal of “world government” was some way off, an initial “attainable” step should be closer trilateral co-operation between the nations of America, Europe and Asia, in the latter instance specifically Japan.

Membership of the Trilateral Commission was limited to 300 (later expanded to 450), and early participants included Time, Inc. editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan, British politician Reginald Maudling, FIAT president Giovanni Agnelli, and former French premier Raymond Barre. Among the more recent members are Alan Greenspan of the American Federal Reserve, Dick Cheney, Enron’s Ken Lay, Paul Wolfowitz and George H. W. Bush… in other words, the Trilateral Commission is stuffed full of exactly the same sort of mondo politicians and businessmen who sit on the plush chairs at the Bilderberg Groupand Council for Foreign Relations.Naturally, then, the Trilateral Commission comes in for the same critical fire as those two—that is, it’s attempting to covertly instal a shadow global government run by its members. They must be busy boys and girls, these Trilateralists, because they’ve also been accused by über -conservative Lyndon LaRouche of running the drugs trade, been denounced by black rappers Public Enemy for organizing Zionist plots, fingered as agents of the Illuminatiby fundamentalist-conspiracist Texe Marrs, and marked by evangelist Pat Robertson for promoting Satanism.

For a supposed “secret society”, the Trilateral Commission is disappointingly open: its membership can be viewed at its website, www.trilateral.org/. Meetings are held in camera, but it would be a wonder if globalism weren’t a frequent fixture on the agenda—after all, world order was the raison d’être for the creation of the Commission. Many Trilateralists represent big business—the likes of Exxon, Mobil, Goldman Sachs—which finds the nation state inimical to its interests and consequently seeks to extend the remit of transnational institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

So is the Trilateral Commission, as feared by the American far right, the executive board of the New World Order? The Commission does not have its hands on the surreptitious levers of global power for a simple reason: there aren’t any. International politics and economics are more complex than the instrumentalist philosophy of far-right conspiracists realize.

Indeed, focusing on the Trilateral Commission’s international agenda-setting carries the risk of blindness to its interesting role in the US. One early member of the Commission was a down-home Southern Democrat by the name of Jimmy Carter. According to former Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, the Trilateral Commission eased Carter into the White House in 1973 by mobilizing “the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community… and the media controllers”. With Mr Carter to Washington went fellow Trilateralists Walter Mondale as V.P. and old Zbigniew Brzezinski as National Security Advisor. Anthony C. Sutton and Patrick M. Wood, authors of Trilaterals Over Washington (1979), commented: “If you are trying to calculate the odds of three unknown men [Carter, Mondale and Brzezinski], out of 60 [Trilateral] Commissioners from the US, capturing the three most powerful positions in the land, don’t bother. Your calculations will be meaningless.”

Carter, Mondale and Brzezinski weren’t the only Trilateralists to get their feet in the door of the Carter administration: Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher, Director Paul Warnke of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Undersecretary of the Treasury Anthony Solomon, Undersecretary of Economic Affairs Richard Cooper and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke were among nearly 20 Trilateralists to hold prominent positions in the government. Then Carter selected banker Paul Volcker to head the American Federal Reserve; Volcker was the chair of the North American branch of the Trilateral Commission. So dominating were the Trilateralists that even the normally supine Beltway press took notice, with the Washington Post calling the Trilateralist influence “unsettling”.