I believe in elite conspiracy theory -- because I was part of one ...

[HamdenRice]

As the administration takes the country and the world into a catastrophic downward spiral, one of the issues that comes up again and again is whether certain "conspiracy theories" about the administration are plausible. Was there government complicity in 9/11? Did elements within the DOD purposely hype intelligence? Have electronic voting machines been hacked to deliver the 2004 election to Bush? Each of these allegations require us to believe there was a conspiracy.

One rote answer to every allegation of conspiracy is that conspiracies are impossible to keep secret, especially those that would involve as many people as 9/11, voting fraud or faked intelligence.

The reason I increasingly believe in the conspiracy theories is that -- I confess -- I was part of an elite institution/corporate/government conspiracy. I participated at a very low level. And unlike the conspiracies we worry about today, I would characterize the conspiracy I participated in as a conspiracy for good.

Here's the odd part. Even though our cover was blown nearly two decades ago (in 1986, I think) and what we did is public record, I am still reluctant to discuss it or write about it on a public bulletin board.

The conspiracy I am talking about was called the Study Group on South Africa. I was basically a graduate student hired as a "consultant" -- but I was basically a ghost writer, note taker and overall gofer. The Study Group was run out of two big foundations -- first one, then the other. The public image was that we were ad hoc do-gooders, who gathered information for US decision-makers and made policy recommendations. Secretly, however, we hosted discrete contacts between the South African government and the African National Congress at conferences in the US. This was when it was illegal for South Africans to meet ANC representatives, and politically impossible for ANC to talk to the SA government, because Mandela and other leaders werew still in prison.


Representatives of corporations that did business in South Africa participated, as did some high ranking staff members of certain liberal Senators. (One thing that struck me and changed my view of some corporations, was that some corporate representatives were truly agonized over their dilemma, and took significant risks to their profits by illegally desegregating their South African facilities.)

One memorable meeting concerned a currency crisis in South Africa. For reasons that were not initially clear to me, it was held in the basement conference room of the foundation -- a room that I had not known existed. A representative of the ANC and a representative of the South African reserve bank each gave conflicting half hour presentations on what the west's banks should do. Then a representative of Chase Manhattan Bank (it was whispered he was directly representing David Rockefeller) made something like a cryptic two sentence response to the effect that the "presentation by the representative of the ANC was more convincing". The next day, western banks refused to roll over South Africa's external debt. The representative from the ANC who gave the winning presentation was then a high level, but relatively unknown ANC bureaucrat (I think head economist of the political-military committee), named Thabo Mbeki, today South Africa's president.

The reason I am relating this is not just to tell war stories (although that's part of it), but because I remember how terribly important we all thought discretion was. I don't remember anyone ever telling me directly that it was secret, but it was understood. I have rarely talked about it since, even though the existence and work of the Study Group became public in 1986. A NY Times article in (I think 1986) reported these secret discussions, and that meant that neither the SA government, nor ANC representatives could easily participate. But before that time, another young consultant was kind of marginalized from the work of the Group because it was whispered he lacked discretion.

So I can certainly understand how the espirit de corp of a secret group works, and from my experience it is plausible that any of the alleged conspiracies of evil we worry about could be taking place.