The most influential policy-planning group in foreign affairs is the Council on Foreign Relations [CFR]...The CFR by-laws limit membership to 1,900 individuals who are proposed by existing members...The CFR's list of former members includes every person of influence in foreign affairs...CFR meetings are secret...A discussion of the CFR would be incomplete without some reference to its multinational arm, the Trilateral Commission...The Trilateral Commission was established by CFR Board Chairman David Rockefeller in 1972, with the backing of the Council and the Rockefeller Foundation.

It was no accident that former Clandestine Services Chief Richard Bissell...was talking to a Council on Foreign Relations discussion group in 1968 when he made his 'confidential' speech on covert action. For the influential but private Council, composed of several hundred of the country's top political, military, business and academic leaders, has long been the CIA's principal 'constituency' in the American public. When the agency has needed prominent citizens to front for its proprietary companies or for other special assistance, it has often turned to Council members.

If the agency is to be effective, it will have to make use of private institutions on an expanding scale, though those relations which have been 'blown' cannot be resurrected. We need to operate under deeper cover, with increased attention to the use of 'cut-outs' (i.e., intermediaries). CIA's interface with the rest of the world needs to be better protected. If various groups hadn't been aware of the source of their funding, the damage subsequent to disclosure might have been far less than occurred. The CIA interface with various private groups, including business and student groups, must be remedied. (quote contained in THE PIED PIPER: ALLARD K. LOWENSTEIN AND THE LIBERAL DREAM by Richard Cummings)

[In 1949,] Mac took on a project with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York to study Marshall Plan aid to Europe...The council's study group on aid to Europe included some of the foreign policy establishment's leading figures. Working with young Bundy on the project were Allen Dulles, David Lilienthal, Dwight Eisenhower, Will Clayton, George Kennan, Richard M. Bissell and Franklin A. Lindsay. Dulles, Bissell and Lindsay...would shortly become high-ranking officials of the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency...Their meetings were considered so sensitive that the usual off-the-record transcript was not distributed to council members. There was good reason for the secrecy. These were probably the only private citizens privy to the highly classified fact that there was a covert side to the Marshall Plan. Specifically, the CIA was tapping into the $200 million a year in local currency counterpart funds contributed by the recipients of Marshall Plan aid. These unvouchered monies were being used by the CIA to finance anti-communist electoral activities in France and Italy and to support sympathetic journalists, labor union leaders and politicians.

Both Bundy brothers were also good friends of Frank Wisner, the legendary intelligence officer who ran these covert programs in Western Europe. They socialized with Wisner and his...wife Polly, often at dinner parties hosted by Joe Alsop...Phil and Kay Graham of the WASHINGTON POST were also part of the same social scenery. In short, the council's study group placed Mac Bundy among a small group of like-minded men who fully understood and endorsed the necessity for waging psychological warfare against the Soviet Union.

The policy paper Mac wrote that summer, "Working Paper on the Problem of Political Equilibrium," assumed that such covert activities in Western Europe were worthy endeavors.

Bundy...thought it only natural that the historian William L. Langer...had taken a leave from Harvard to organize the CIA's Office of National Estimates [ONE]...Langer had gone to Washington at the call of the CIA and promptly hired Mac's brother Bill as one of his top aides. They were old friends and political allies...Mac had published a review in THE REPORTER of a massive two volume study of America's entry into World War II written by Langer and S. Everett Gleason. Langer had finished the project while at the CIA and Gleason was a high-ranking official in the National Security Council. Bundy called it a "magnificent achievement...so thorough that it will never be done again"...Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations to the tune of $139,000--an extraordinary sum in those years--and written with privileged acces to classified documents, the Langer-Gleason volumes were official history parading as independent scholarship...

...Political scientist Lester Milbrath notes that "The council on Foreign Relations, while not financed by government, works so closely with it that it is difficult to distinguish Council actions stimulated by government from autonomous actions"...Aside from membership dues, dividends from invested gifts and bequests, and profits from the sale of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, the most important sources of income are leading corporations and major foundations. In 1957-58, for example, Chase Manhattan, Continental Can, Ford Motor, Bankers Trust, Cities Service, Gulf, Otis Elevator, General Motors Overseas Operations, Brown Brothers, Harriman, and International General Electric were paying from $1,000 to $10,000 per year for the corporation service, depending upon the size of the company and its interest in international affairs...More generally, in 1960-61, eighty-four large corporations and financial institutions contributed 12% ($112,200) of CFR's total income. As to the foundations, the major contributors over the years have been the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, with the Ford Foundation joining in with a large grant in the 1950's. According to [newspaper columnist Joseph] Kraft, a $2.5 million grant in the early 1950's from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations made the Council "the most important single private agency conducting research in foreign affairs." In 1960-61, foundation money accounted for 25% of CFR income.

All foundations which support the CFR are in turn directred by men from Bechtel Construction, Chase Manhattan, Cummins Engine, Corning Glass, Kimberly-Clark, Monsanto Chemical, and dozens of other corporations. Further, to complete the circle, most foundation directors are members of CFR. In the early 1960's, Dan Smoot found that twelve of twenty Rockefeller Foundation trustees, ten of fifteen Ford Foundation trustees, and ten of fourteen Carnegie Corporation trustees were members of CFR. Nor is this interlock of recent origin. In 1922, for example, former Secretary of State Elihu Root, a corporation lawyer, was honorary CFR president as well as president of the Carnegie Corporation, while John W. Davis, the corporation lawyer who ran for President on the Democratic ticket in 1924, was a trustee of both the Carnegie Corporation and CFR...

Turning to the all-important question of government involvement, the presence of CFR members in government has been attested to by Kraft, Cater, Smoot, CFR histories and THE NEW YORK TIMES, but the point is made most authoritatively by John J. McCloy, Wall Street lawyer, former chairman of Chase Manhattan, trustee of the Ford Foundation, director of CFR and a government appointee in a variety of roles since the early 1940's: "Whenever we needed a man," said McCloy in explaining the presence of CFR members in the modern defense establishment that fought World War II, "we thumbed through the roll of council members and put through a call to New York."...

Despite the importance of speeches and publications, I think the most important aspects of the CFR program are its special discussion groups and study groups. These small groups of about twenty-five bring together businessmen, government officials, military men an d scholars for detailed discussions of specific topics in the area of foreign affairs. Discussion groups explore problems in a general way, trying to define issues and alternatives. Such groups often lead to a study group as the next stage. Study groups revolve around the work of a Council research fellow (financed by Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller) or a staff member...In 1957-58...the Council published six books which grew out of study groups. Perhaps the most famous of these was written by Henry Kissinger, a bright young McGeorge Bundy protege at Harvard who was asked by the CFR to head a study group. His NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND FOREIGN POLICY was "a best seller which has been closely read in the highest Administration circles and foreign offices abroad"...

It is within these discussion groups and study groups, where privacy is the rule to encourage members to speak freely, that members of the power elite study and plan as to how best to attain American objectives in world affairs...It was supposedly a special CFR briefing session in early 1947 that convinced Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett of Brown Brothers, Harriman that "it would be our principal task at State to awaken the nation to the dangers of Communist aggression."

Despite the fact that the CFR is an organization most Americans have never heard of, I think we have clearly established by a variety of means that it is a key connection between the federal government and the owners and managers of the country's largest financial institutions and corporations. It is an organization of the power elite...In my view, what knowledge we have of CFR suggests that through it the power elite formulate general guidelines for American foreign policy and provide the personnel to carry out this policy...