Attending the elusive Bohemian Grove retreat should be a priority for former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, News Corp executive Andrew Knight allegedly writes in an email to US Gen. Colin Powell obtained by RT.
The mysterious computer hacker known only as Guccifer has once again supplied RT with a trove of presumed personal emails in which the private correspondence between some of the world’s most influential men is put under the looking glass. The hacker’s target is once again former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and this time the discourse dives into a topic rarely discussed: the annual summer retreat at California’s Bohemian Grove.
Guccifer has previously taken credit for hacking Gen. Powell’s Facebook, compromising what are believed to be sensitive emails sent to former-President George W. Bush and even uncovering emails about last year’s Benghazi, Libya terrorist attack allegedly sent to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the latest leaked emails sent to RT, Guccifer showcases a number of emails reportedly sent to Colin Powell’s AOL account during the last few years.
The few dozen emails forwarded to RT offer what appears on the surface to be little insight into Gen. Powell’s personal habits, but one email in particular referenced enough other well-known individuals that it couldn’t help but raise a red flag: in correspondence dated March 21, 2012, Knight asks Gen. Powell to have a few words with Mr. Blair about preparing for that year’s Bohemian Grove retreat, an annual gathering of the rich and powerful that has stayed so elusive for decades that countless documentaries and books have been written about the event — and journalists like Vanity Fair’s Alex Shoumatoff has even been arrested trying to infiltrate it.
According to the Sonoma County Free Press, the membership list of Bohemian Grove has included every Republican US president since 1923, as well as titans of the defense sector, banking tycoons and the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the world. Spy Magazine linked the guest list with millionaires and billionaires from the likes of IBM and Bank of America, as well as leading politicians from Washington and abroad. And when Spy’s Philip Weiss snuck into the grove in 1989, he confirmed that attendees congregate at a shrine to an owl described as “40-foot-tall, moss-covered statue of stone and steel.”
Weiss adds that during the event’s middle weekend — the busiest session of the two-week gathering — he saw roughly 2,200 guests, all male, on the camp ground. Just last year, though, Powell was asked to ensure that Blair made it for that portion of the festivities.
“Might you be able gently/firmly to point out to Tony that you rank the Bohemia Middle Weekend in your diary before allowing any other duties to get in the way?!” writes Knight, a journalist who currently serves as a director of billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s multinational News Corp, in the latest leaked emails. “Lack of exposure suggests that Tony has not yet got his priorities straight.”
Also included in the email is a PDF attachment — unavailable to RT’s reporters — said to include a response of sorts from Mr. Blair to George Shultz, a longtime member of Washington’s elite that worked as secretary of state underneath US Pres. Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s while Gen. Powell held the position of national security advisor. In his own right, Shultz has been associated with the secretive Bohemian Grove group for decades.
In the leaked emails, Knight says to Powell, “I’m going to suggest the same to Henry,” likely implying that the journalist was determined to make sure Mr. Kissinger — who served as secretary of state under Pres. Nixon and Ford, and before that was national security advisor himself — was preparing to attend last year’s event.
Several sources online tie Powell, Shultz, Knight and Kissinger to Bohemian Grove, but Blair has only been long rumored to be an attendee at the annual soiree. In 2006, Blair did visit San Francisco, California — less than 100 miles away from the Grove’s gated campsite—where he dined with Shultz.
“There was speculation that Mr. Blair might even have been a guest at the male-only event, following in the footsteps of John Major and Prince Philip,” the UK’s Daily Mail reported at the time. “As it is, the Shultz party was said to have been littered with guests who had left the Grove in order to meet Mr. Blair.”
The San Francisco Chronicle also reported that summer that Prime Minister Blair was rumored to be attending the festivities, which have long become a topic of debate and discussion of conspiracy theorists, largely due to the sheer elusiveness of an event that attracts high-profile men of power with a strict embargo on admitting the media.
“Less than a mile from us there are millionaires, billionaires, people who control the world, control the central banks, build nuclear weapons. This is their summer playground,” Sonoma State University sociology professor Peter Phillips told RT in 2011. “We know for sure that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan sat down and had conversation about who was going to run for president when and they made a deal.” The Washington Post has even reported that a planning meeting for the Manhattan Project occurred at the grove in 1942, leading eventually to the creation of the atom bomb.
Since the list of attendees is kept under lock and key, only a confirmation from Powell or Blair themselves could verify whether or not the four star general did in fact convince the prime minister to attend last year’s event. In his email to RT, Guccifer signed with the signature, “illuminati free world.”