Narrator: The annual gathering of about 115 elite leaders is informally known as the Bilderberg, or the Bilderbergers, after the hotel where it first met.

Adler: They take place one weekend a year; they usually take place in some Western European country, every four years I think they take place in the United States. They’re nearly always at resorts.

Narrator: Security for these meetings is extremely tight.

Tucker: With my experience, especially in Europe, quite frequently the military itself is deployed. Then there’s a large number of uniformed, armed cops.

Narrator: Jim Tucker is a self-appointed Bilderberg watchdog. At the 1999 conference in Portugal, Tucker tries to get close to the hotel where the meeting is taking place.

Tucker: … And the cop bragged that “We have snipers up on top of those boulders up there. Anybody going over that fence, day or night, they’re going to stay over that fence.” So apparently they take security rather seriously.

Narrator: The reason for all the security, say the conspiracy advocates, is obvious.

Tucker: I don’t think 120 of the world’s most powerful men get together and play pinochle.

Marrs: This is where the ruling elite within these secret societies go and gather and compare notes and apparently set agendas. One of the members of the Bilderbergers years ago said they talked about opening up China. And within months, President Nixon had gone and opened up China to the West.

Icke: They met in the early 70s at an island off Sweden and they decided that they were going to hike price of oil massively. They then went to the Arab oil countries, which they also interconnect with, and they said, “Look. We’re going to hike the price of oil massively, you’ll make vast amounts of extra income, but we want you to put it in specific bank accounts that we tell you about.” OK. They then needed an excuse to hike the price of oil so what they did was created the Arab-Israeli war.

Narrator: The conspiracist’s view of the world is that control is exerted through the control of money.

Marrs: In this country we operate under the Golden Rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules.

Narrator: Whether or not this type of nefarious global control exists, it is true that the Bilderbergers have been successful in at least controlling media coverage of their meetings. Leading media moguls are always invited to Bilderberg conferences, but only on the strict understanding that they will not report on what they hear.

Icke: So, for instance, Kathryn Graham of the Washington Post has been to many Bilderberg meetings. One of the inner core Bilderberg members is Conrad Black, who owns 68% of the newspapers in Canada, Telegraph newspapers Britain, the Jerusalem Post, and a stream of newspapers worldwide, and not one word has appeared in his newspapers about the Bilderberg group.

Adler: The steering committees and bureaucracies and the meetings themselves had their own concern, rather intense concern, of not being mentioned in the press, and had this brilliant idea of co-opting whatever press they did invite, and then going higher and higher in the press as they invited it. But it’s quite something to have more than a hundred people attend a meeting one weekend a year, all of them at least of some importance, and have nothing in the mainstream press about them. That’s quite remarkable, that, in a way, that might be the most remarkable thing about them.

Icke: If you, and I have done many times, said to journalists, let alone the general population, “Tell me about the Bilderberg Group”. This glassy-eyed look comes across, “The what? The what?” And yet, the major people they are reporting every day are members of an organization together, different political parties,