David Rockefeller, heir to the world's most storied fortune, clearly isn't used to answering this kind of question.
No, he assures a guest, he does not secretly run the world. For that matter, he doesn't secretly run anything, especially the Trilateral Commission - now entering its 23rd year on the foreign policy map, not to mention the maps of conspiracy theorists from shore to shore.Depending on how you think the world works, the commission is either an international seminar on trade and diplomacy with a revolving membership, or a dank venue of international conspiracy, homeport to many a black helicopter.
"Is this an international conspiracy?" he asks as a cadre of 140 suited businessmen, academics and government types from Tokyo, New York and Europe parade in name tags down the halls of The Waterfront Centre Hotel at the commission's annual meeting, held last weekend in this shining city on Canada's west coast.
If so, it is the only conspiracy to post its agenda on the hotel events calendar or to assign a press officer to arrange three days of interviews with members for a visiting reporter. At a table outside the commission's temporary office, women stop by at the "spouses program" table to arrange a day of sightseeing and shopping, all, presumably, while hubby seizes control of the universe.
"If I'm running the global conspiracy, I need more staff," said Nick Swales, a bespectacled young Canadian who works for the commission.
These have been tough years for The Trilateral Commission. Presidential candidates from the right have railed against it. One of its most prominent members, George Bush, fled its roster, fearful he would have to answer to voters demanding to know why he belonged.
As Rockefeller greets his fellow Trilateralists, two men who think this group is one of the secret string-pullers for the dreadful New World Order sit in a jail cell on charges they blew up a federal building in Oklahoma one year ago. As the likes of Zbigniew Brzezinski break bread with former Irish Prime Minister Garret Fitzgerald, an extremist group called the Freemen are holed up in a cabin in Montana surrounded by FBI agents they think are the vanguard of a world government led, in part, by the Trilateralists.
As the seminars on energy supplies and the Mexican economy kick off, a Phoenix dentist named Emmett Warren has just been freed on bail. He is charged with passing Freemen-style bogus documents. Among those he blames for his woes: "The International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, the Trilateral Commission and the New World Order."
"It's so absurd I can't help but, to some extent, find it amusing," Rockefeller said. "In another sense, it's put the Trilateral Commission on the map. It's well-known, but little understood."
Apparently.
The map of the world, Trilateral style, stretches from the industrial democracies of Europe, across North America and into Japan. These are the three spots that put the tri- into Trilateral Commission. Its stated intention is to get the Japanese, North Americans and Europeans together to talk about ways to increase international cooperation.
In this year's session, Sens. Charles Robb, D-Va., and John McCain, R-Ariz., show up as visitors to a Saturday lunch and let loose on, among others, Pat Buchanan, a frequent Trilateral critic. McCain assures the internationally minded members that Buchanan is a passing fad, hardly representative of the Republican Party whose presidents opened doors with China and led an international alliance in the Persian Gulf war.
Members range from the well-known - Henry Kissinger, former House Speaker Tom Foley - to the obscure. Who has heard of Sirkka Hamalainen? Its members shape opinions in places large and small. Conrad Black is publisher of both the London Telegraph and the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. If they go into government service, their membership becomes inactive. Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher can attest to that.
Showing up at its meetings, conspiracy theorists note, is often followed by rapid advancement in personal achievement: Jimmy Carter joined in 1973 and slept in the White House three years later. Likewise with Bill Clinton. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was invited to speak one year and nearly became president of Peru the next.
Despite the ponderous and purposeful sound of "Commission," Swales said, the Trilateral is "more like a university seminar than a forum of policies one could expect to see implemented."
Not everyone's as certain. Since the mid-1970s, when the commission came to public attention, hard-liners on the political left, and then the far right, latched onto it as a near satanic cabal determined to blanket the globe with a single currency of ambition.
"If the world's most popular film stars or football players gathered for a closed-door meeting over the weekend, the press would go crazy, demanding to know what was discussed," writes Jim Tucker, a reporter for The Spotlight, a weekly newspaper of the far-right Liberty Lobby. He occasionally slips into town ahead of the meetings and works up contacts with hotel staffers who smuggle out copies of commission documents from the meetings. "But when the world's most powerful private citizens gather in the company of key political leaders, there's not the slightest cry of outrage."
Paula Stern, a newly named member and trade expert from Washington, has no illusions that guys like this are running the world.
"In their dreams," she chuckled. "I don't think this group has the kind of consensus to settle on a single issue."
From Stern's view, the businessmen who populate the commission's ranks are there because business is now international.
"For me, it's a networking and trying to kind of animate people about ideas I think would be good for the United States," she said.
In the early 1970s, David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, then a high-profile professor at Columbia University, attended the annual Bilderberg meeting of international leaders - a high-powered gathering of string-pullers, itself the focus of right-wing theorists - and argued that the meeting ought to let in the Japanese.
Tadashi Yamamoto, a courtly Marquette University grad who runs the Japan Center for International Exchange, was summoned to a meeting in 1972 at Pocantico, the Rockefeller estate in New York.
"The creation of the Trilateral Commission coincided with the timing of recognition of Japan's growing influence in world affairs," Yamamoto said. "Not many Japanese were conscious of the place of Japan in the rest of the world at that time."
Brzezinski became the first director of the commission and, along with Rockefeller and others brought in from Japan and Europe, began assembling a membership list.
It included the usual suspects from the foreign policy and business world. Additionally, someone thought it was a good idea to sign on the respective chairmen of the Republican and Democratic governors associations. Thus was the world of international statecraft introduced to a Georgia peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter.
It would assure the commission its place in the lexicon of conspiracy.
Peter Dobell, a Canadian who was one of the original Tri-lat-er-al-ists, says the commission has become an emblem of international cooperation. And, yes, members will tell you, there are a few ideas that have burrowed their way through bureaucracies in Washington and Tokyo.
As the commission met in Vancouver, President Clinton was in Moscow as part of a summit of the Group of seven nations to discuss nuclear proliferation with Russian President Boris Yeltsen.
"The G-7 was our idea," Brzezinski said.
"If you have someone who is the publisher of Time magazine, someone who is publisher of The Washington Post, the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, these are people who are going to influence things," said Stephen Gill, a British-born academic whose 1990 book "American Hegemony and The Trilateral Commission" explored the group's role in world affairs.
Among the failures he cites was the commission's inability throughout the 1970s and '80s to work out some unified game plan on nuclear proliferation. America, which had plentiful other sources of energy, wanted a cutback on nuclear power expansion. Europeans, harder pressed, balked.
But the commission's biggest moment, and biggest problem, happened when Carter turned up in the White House.
Carl Jensen was a middle-of-the-road academic in Sonoma, Calif., when he decided to start a project to highlight news stories that seemed important but, for some reason, never caught on in the mainstream press.
Project Censored began as a student project. And in 1977, his students at Sonoma State University began poring over articles from two obscure papers: Seven Days and Review of the News.
The gist of it was that newly installed President Jimmy Carter had appointed his top Cabinet officials, including Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, from the ranks of a murky, little-known and secretive group called the Trilateral Commission. Carter's national security adviser and foreign policy tutor was Zbigniew Brzezinski, whom he had met on the Trilateral Commission. In all, Carter had named 17 Trilateralists to his administration.
The students sent the accounts on to the project's judges, who voted "Jimmy Carter's little-known relationship with David Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission" the Best Censored Story of 1976.
"I started getting all these calls from right-wing kooks from all over the United States," Jensen recalled. "I discovered I was almost their poster boy."
One of the Trilateral Commission's task force reports did little to help. Samuel Huntington, a conservative Harvard professor, was joined by French researcher Michel Crozier and Japanese academic Joji Watanuki for a report on the future of Democracy.
In breathtakingly sterile prose, the researchers reported back that democratic impulses had so fragmented society that expectations had to be lowered and democracy reined in before nations became ungovernable.
Filled with troubling language about "an excess of democracy" and "a democratic distemper" that had to be placed under control, the report laid out a menu of potential solutions that included a few that astonished outsiders - cut back higher education, muzzle the press. Huntington later told Gill the report was intended to kick off discussion, not usher in totalitarianism.
"It made people think, `Well, do these guys really have this blueprint?' " Gill said.
At the 1975 meeting in Tokyo, Trilateralists rose to denounce the report. Some urged that it not be published.
"I thought it was very perceptive and raised some very important problems that should be thought about," he said. "It wasn't a rejection of democracy. It was an attempt to diagnose a problem and find some remedies."
It also became a staple in far-right publications as an example of Trilateralism's ulterior motives.
For serious Trilateral watchers, the question of the 1990s is not whether the commission is a power clique. They are wondering if it is still relevant. In its current form, the commission speaks for Western-style industrial democracies. Third World nations have always been skeptical of its motives, and South America and Africa are emerging slowly as potential players on the world stage, as are far eastern countries like Korea.
Some members, such as Berthoin, have pressed for a debate on whether the commission, lest it make the mistake of the Bilderbergers 23 years ago, should open its doors to new members.
This time, it's David Rockefeller who is balking.
On the second morning of this year's conference, the commission's executive committee met to discuss what to do about Asia.
"If we tried to cover the whole world, it becomes a private United Nations and would be rather unproductive," Rockefeller protested.