Rule by Secrecy:The Hidden History that Connects the Trilateral Commission,The Freemasons,and the Great Pyramid

Disturbing, provocative, and utterly compelling, Rule by Secrecy offers a singular worldview that may explain who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

In this unconvincing potboiler, Marrs, who charged that conspiracies were behind the JFK assassination (Crossfire) and government cover-ups of the UFO phenomenon (Alien Agenda), now offers a sweeping view of world history through the warped prism of conspiracy theory. The world’s richest and most powerful individuals, he opines, wield excessive influence over governments and news media through their control of multinational corporations and organizations he refers to as “secret societies,” such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the international Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg group (which holds annual closed-door conferences around the globe).

 The aim of these “secret societies,” suggests Marrs, is one-world government and centralized social control, and in this respect, he adds, all these groups and their offshoots carry the imprint of older secret brotherhoods, including Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Conspiracy buffs will have a field day wading through this morass, but other readers will remain unpersuaded by a tract that proceeds by way of innuendo, quotation of other conspiracy researchers’ extremist opinions and unsubstantiated statement.

 Marrs squeezes into his procrustean framework the origins of WWI and WWII, Nazis’ occult dabblings, the Russian Revolution, the Morgan and Rothschild banking dynasties and the Knights Templar, and he uncritically entertains a host of maverick theories. His conspiracy trail winds up back in Mesopotamia, as he plies territory mined by Zecharia Sitchin, who believes that extraterrestrials founded the earth’s earliest civilizations. Ultimately, this mishmash lacks the semblance of plausibility that helped make Alien Agenda a bestseller.

Drawing on historical evidence and his own impeccable research, Mars carefully traces the mysteries that connect these modern-day conspiracies to humankind’s prehistory. The eye-opening result is an extraordinary synthesis of historical information -; much of it long hidden from the public -; that sheds light on the people and organizations that rule our lives.

Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids

Family of Secrets:The Bush Dynasty,America's Invisible Government,and the Hidden History of the last 50 years

From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jamie Malanowski Halfway through the concluding chapter of Family of Secrets, Russ Baker mentions, not entirely modestly, that when a colleague heard some of the things he would be disclosing in his almost 600-page book about the Bush family and its connections to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Watergate and many other pivotal events, the colleague “suggested, only half in jest, that the book be called ‘Everything You Thought You Knew Is Wrong.’ ” Well, any investigative journalist whose credo isn’t “Everything You Thought Is Wrong” should probably pack it in. No quality, not even doggedness, is more important than the ability to embrace the belief that, despite what everyone else thinks, only the reporter really knows the truth. But with this big challenge comes a big burden of proof. As history’s tide rolls out, we may eventually discover that everything we think we know about the George Bushes, père et fils, is wrong and that everything Baker alleges about them in his book — their secrets, their labors on behalf of powerful, self-serving interests — is right on the money.

Despite strenuous efforts, however, Baker doesn’t prove it here. A softer sell would have served him better. A capable investigator who has written for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Baker is skillful at taking bits of information and placing them in contexts that make the Bush family’s behavior and decisions look unusual and, frequently, nefarious. Had he been satisfied to raise suspicions, he would have been provocative and, on some counts, persuasive. But by trying to explain everything, to create a unified field theory of American tragedy that has the Bushes as the key actors and beneficiaries, Baker exceeds his grasp. Take, for example, the many details Baker has collected about George H.W. Bush and his activities in Texas in the 1950s and early ’60s. Baker’s cornerstone is a memo, reported by the Nation magazine in 1988, in which J. Edgar Hoover says the FBI spoke to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. To that Baker adds suggestive pieces of information about the Bush family-Yale-Skull & Bones-CIA-oil industry nexus. All this, taken together, advances the possibility that the elder Bush was at least a minor asset to the CIA, and maybe more, when he was doing business in Latin America and the Caribbean early in the Cold War.

As everyone knows, Bush became the CIA’s director in 1976. But Family of Secrets posits that his connections to the agency go back much earlier. Baker then scrutinizes the elder Bush’s movements on Nov. 22, 1963. On the morning of the assassination, he was in Dallas, then flew to Tyler, Tex., to speak at a luncheon (the speech was cancelled when the shooting was reported; Baker notes that Bush remained “supremely well composed”), then flew back to Dallas and on to Houston, but not before phoning the FBI from Tyler to report his suspicions that a Republican Party activist might have been involved in the killing. Add in a handful of Bush associates who had interesting (and in one case downright bizarre) connections to the event, the author’s general distrust of right-wing oilmen, an argument that the CIA had its own reasons for hating Kennedy, and suddenly you have a scenario that starts to sound like a conspiracy. Baker never explains how Bush might have been involved in the assassination; he only suggests that having apparently developed ties to the CIA and having had these weird friends and having done this odd informer thing — possibly to establish an alibi — well, he must be up to his neck in something. And who knows? But the Nation asked George H.W. Bush in 1988 if he were the person Hoover was referring to, and a spokesman for the then-vice president said no. The CIA produced another George Bush who had been on its staff at the time of the assassination, although that guy also denied having dealt with the FBI. Baker suggests that this was some kind of cover story to protect Bush 41, but what kind of cover story is it when the coverer doesn’t stick to the story? The point is, Baker is not content merely to raise uncomfortable questions; he has latched onto the Grand Theory of Bushativity, and he insists on pressing his case with evidence that will not bear the weight. Every time he reaches a gap in someone’s means or motivation, he hops, skips and jumps across it as nimbly as a mountain goat. Such words as “appears,” “apparently,” “likely,” “seems,” “seemingly” and “in all likelihood” appear at many crucial junctures; there are more crutches in these pages than in the grotto at Lourdes.

Baker also hurts himself by consistently thinking the worst of his subjects, even on matters only tangentially related to his central argument. He makes a big deal, for example, out of inconsistencies in the elder Bush’s accounts of being shot down during World War II. Smith suggests that Bush changed his story to seem more courageous and to diminish his responsibility for the lives of his crew. Never mind studies that point to the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, and set aside all we know about how the passing of time messes with memory. Just think: Bush was flying an airplane and trying to bomb a target while people were trying to kill him, and they very nearly succeeded. I’ve never been in that position, so I can’t say how well I would have recollected events. I can say I have gone into a supermarket with two small children and come out having forgotten to buy the very item I went to the store to get. Baker’s Javert-like pursuit makes him seem unreasonable. This is just one of many places where the author overplays his hand. In a particularly weak section, he argues that Bush was complicit in a plot to undermine Richard Nixon. Here Baker relies on revisionist accounts of Watergate that point to John Dean as the one who ordered the break-in, or to the CIA as conspiring to oust Nixon. Bush is linked to these fuzzy schemes primarily by having, like the Watergate burglars, a CIA connection. In addition, Baker finds it suspicious that Bush advised Nixon to come clean about the break-in. But such advice was highly conventional and could be considered anti-Nixon only if you buy the idea that Bush prodded an innocent president to admit to something that didn’t involve him. Baker doesn’t convincingly cast Bush as anything beyond a sycophantic, Zelig-like presence in the Nixon years.

The later chapters of the book, about George W. Bush, are more plausible, if only because Baker breaks less ground in his coverage of the family’s connections to Saudi Arabia and the younger Bush’s record in the National Guard. But having seen Baker stretch his evidence in the early chapters, a reader cannot be entirely sure that he isn’t doing the same thing again. The next time this intrepid investigator takes aim at a subject, he might remember that it is wiser to underpromise and overdeliver than vice versa.(washington post)

Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

Ghost Wars:The Secret History of the CIA,Afghanistan,and Bin Laden,from the Soviet Invasion to September 10,2001

Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 offers revealing details of the CIA’s involvement in the evolution of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the years before the September 11 attacks. From the beginning, Coll shows how the CIA’s on-again, off-again engagement with Afghanistan after the end of the Soviet war left officials at Langley with inadequate resources and intelligence to appreciate the emerging power of the Taliban. He also demonstrates how Afghanistan became a deadly playing field for international politics where Soviet, Pakistani, and U.S. agents armed and trained a succession of warring factions. At the same time, the book, though opinionated, is not solely a critique of the agency. Coll balances accounts of CIA failures with the success stories, like the capture of Mir Amal Kasi. Coll, managing editor for the Washington Post, covered Afghanistan from 1989 to 1992. He demonstrates unprecedented access to records of White House meetings and to formerly classified material, and his command of Saudi, Pakistani, and Afghani politics is impressive. He also provides a seeming insider’s perspective on personalities like George Tenet, William Casey, and anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke (”who seemed to wield enormous power precisely because hardly anyone knew who he was or what exactly he did for a living”). Coll manages to weave his research into a narrative that sometimes has the feel of a Tom Clancy novel yet never crosses into excess. While comprehensive, Coll’s book may be hard going for those looking for a direct account of the events leading to the 9-11 attacks. The CIA’s 1998 engagement with bin Laden as a target for capture begins a full two-thirds of the way into Ghost Wars, only after a lengthy march through developments during the Carter, Reagan, and early Clinton Presidencies. But this is not a critique of Coll’s efforts; just a warning that some stamina is required to keep up. Ghost Wars is a complex study of intelligence operations and an invaluable resource for those seeking a nuanced understanding of how a small band of extremists rose to inflict incalculable damage on American soil. –Patrick O’Kelley –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001