The Factory of Initiative

A History of the Bilderberg Group: Book I · Foundation and the Atlantic Rationale (1954–1966)

In May 1954, seventy-five men shut themselves away for three days in a hotel at the edge of a Dutch forest. Out of that meeting came the most influential private conversation of the Cold War.

They signed nothing. They voted on nothing. They dismissed the press, switched off the recorders, and agreed that nothing said could be attributed to anyone. When they left, they did not even have a name for what they had created. The world would come to know it as Bilderberg.

This first volume reconstructs, year by year, the thirteen founding meetings of the most discreet group in Western politics: from the inn at Oosterbeek in 1954 to the hotel in Wiesbaden where, in 1966, the Atlantic Alliance faced its first great fracture. Through those rooms passed princes and bankers, prime ministers and trade unionists, spies and newspaper editors —and the first woman to break that circle of men— all of them bent on an idea that then seemed impossible: to think of Europe and America as a single thing.

Drawing on the leaked reports of each conference, the real participant lists and the archives of the period, the book tells what actually happened: who was there, what they discussed, and why it mattered. The Cold War, decolonisation, the building of Europe, the atomic bomb and the birth of the Atlantic Alliance —all seen from the room where the elites of the West debated in private what they could not yet say in public.

This is not a history of conspiracies. It is something more interesting: the rigorous, documented account of how consensus is really built among those who govern.

The first volume of The Factory of Initiative, a seven-book history of the Bilderberg Group, from 1954 to the present day.

A work by the research team at bilderberg.club.