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BONES OF A CONSPIRACY Skull and Bones - a secret society at Yale University - boasts two former American presidents among it's members, a trophy room that allegedly houses Geronimo's skull, and an intiation rite that requires masturbation in a coffin. Does it also have designs on running the United States? JEB BUSH, son of George, is currently seeking the Republican nomination for governor in Florida. During the campaign there was the following curious exchange between him and one of his constituents: 'You're familiar with the Skull and Crossbones Society?' Jackie Miller, a secretary, asked, referring to the Yale secret society to which both Jeb Bush's father and grandfather belonged. 'Yeah, I've heard about it,'Jeb Bush replied dryly. Well, can you tell the people here what your family membership in that is?' she demanded. 'Isn't your aim to take control of the United States?' JEB is not the first in his family to be confronted in this way: in the I992 election campaign, Pat Buchanan, George Bush's challenger for the Republican nomination, accused the president of running 'a Skull and Bones presidency'. His reference was glancing, intended to needle its recipient with the threat of a conspiracy revealed. But the uninitiated - which is to say, most Americans and the rest of the world - would be forgiven for wanting to know what possible conspiracy' there might be. The society, usually known as 'Skull and Bones', was founded in 1832 as an elite debating society by a General Russell - valedictorian of his Yale class - and several of his classmates. Its principles, rituals and activities have been secret since its inception, as has its membership list. Made up of 15 senior (fourth year) students selected annually in the spring before their final year, the society has met twice a week during term since 1856 in a forbidding, windowless mausoleum near the corner of Crown and High Streets in New Haven, at the centre of the Yale University campus. Aside from a general understanding that members dine and then debate a topic drawn from 'the sacred skull', nobody outside the club knows exactly what takes place within its walls, although it is known that alcohol and drugs are forbidden from the premises and the society assigns a hierarchy of nicknames and roles to its active members, some permanent and others specific to individuals. The permanently renewed roles include the Toby, who runs the show; the jester, whose role is to make mischief among club members; and the Bones Devil, who originates more extensive disruption in the world outside the club. But it is the initiation rite, involving masturbation in an open coffin while recounting adolescent sexual exploits, which has made the club's activities infamous. The building in which Skull and Bones meets, built in 1856, is known as the Tomb, and has been furnished with gifts from successive graduating classes (there is a tradition that each 15 make donation). According to a 1989 New Yorker article, 'one Bonesman ... recalled during the early 70's seeing perhaps 30 skulls, not all of them human, scattered about the tomb.' Raiders have reported other unexplained items, including a bloodied knife in a glass case. Other such societies followed and have flourished at Yale, with names such a Scroll and Key, Wolfs Head, or Book and Snake, but Skull and Bones has remained the central, most enigmatic and best know of the lot. This prestige stems not only from speculation about the group's activities but also from its illustrious list of Patriarchs (the title given to graduate members; the current initiates are known a Knights, their Scroll and Key counterpart as Savages, and the rest of the world as Barbarians). And it is precisely the eminence of its clandestine membership that has led to repeated charges that the society has sought to influence the course of American history. A far from complete list of living members (Bonesies or Bonesmen), published in the New York Times in 1988, named, in addition to George F Buckley, Jr, editor of the National Review, Senator John H Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island; Daniel P Davidson, chief executive officer and chairman of the US Trust Company; William H Draper 3rd, administrator of the United Nations Development Program; Evan G Galbraith, former ambassador to France, now a director of Morgan Stanley; and judge John Steadman, of the Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia.' This list of the living omits the impressiv departed, which would include President William Taft (Bush was not the first to run a Skull and Bones presidency), professor and national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, former ambassador to Britain , Averell Macleish publisher Henry R Luce, poet and Harvard professor Archibald MacLeish and almost all of Yale's own presidents since the turn of the century - in short, a roster of many of recent America's most important men. Andrei -4 Navrozov, a Russian educated at Yale and now living in London, whose recent book The Gingerbread Race addresses the nature and function of America's closed elite systems, including Skull and Bones, sees the danger of the society in its secrecy. 'In Britain,' he maintains, 'the aristocracy does provide some control mechanism, however small. Birth is very democratic, because it is an accident. The Americans, on the other hand, "blue" their blood by procedures which are man-made - which means someone controls them to a certain advantage.' In his eyes, Skull and Bones is not simply a microcosmic subset of a wider American elite, it is 'the top of the pile and in the driver's seat. These people run the country,' Navrozov says. 'They are responsible for what goes on. They should be known so they can be held to account.' This may be taken as the ranting of a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but the claims are not made without evidence that points to Skull and Bones' wider involvement in the mechanisms of American power and the CIA. Intermingled with testaments to the wide-reaching influence of the group, Navrozov (along with others) cites evidence of an astonishing puerility which sits ill on the shoulders of senior statesmen. If, for example, George Bush did lie in a coffin and masturbate while recounting his teenage sex life to his fellow Bonesmen, as the society's initiation rite demands, then it is suddenly difficult to see the former president as a figure of particlilar gravitas. 'This ritual is not just silly,' says Navrozov of the symbolic death and rebirth as a 'Knight' of the order, 'it is like a black mass.' Not unlike some Masonic ceremonies, it involves a compromising of individual dignity and thereby ensures a Bonesman's loyalty to his society. This loyalty is fiercely maintained: not one of the 2,280 initiated members ofthe society has ever spoken ofhis involvement. BUT WHAT IS THE secrecy about? What are the secrets? They range from the simply avowed intention ofthe society - as early as 1883 - to extend its sphere of influence outside the university, to charges of grave-robbing (in particular of the skulls ofthe Indian chief Geronimo and of the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa) for the trophy cabinet of the society's crypt. Furthermore, links between members of the society and the CIA are indisputable but are relevant largely insofar as these powerful individuals would wish to keep such ignominious acts as the stealing of trophies from tarnishing their reputations. Navrozov's information on Skull and Bones came from a former Yale student whom he refers to only as 'Steve', who in the mid-1988s embarked on extensive (even obsessive) research into the society for two books that he had contracts to produce. Steve possessed photographs and documents stolen from the Bones crypt by a raiding party, and he maintained that he was in great danger because of them. Eventually, after his apartment was burglcd, Steve went into hiding. Neither of his books has been published. The distinguished author Peter Matthiessen also met Steve in New Haven in the mid-1980s, and was told the same story as Navrozov. 'I do believe it's true,' he says of the details. 'It's incredibly childish, but if one third of that stuff is true, they would stop at nothing to keep it from coming out.' Of Steve, he says: 'I don't think this guy was faking being scared. They pushed him around, they tore up his apartment. They wanted their manuscripts back.' George Lord, a now-retired Yale professor who introduced Steve to Matthiessen and who recently tried, unsuccessfully, to trace Steve's whereabouts, confirms the authenticity ofthe young man's documents. 'His information came from members,' he says. 'He had photographs. He did an awful lot of research. But then the project seemed too hazardous to him.' One of the documents obtained by Steve, and copied by Navrozov - the 50th anniversary address to the society - certainlv attests to the society's triumphant infiltration of the Yale Utiiversity administration. Delivered in 1883 by the Patriarch Timothy Dwight, later a Yale president, it joviallv acknowledges the piratical principles of a club whose symbol is the Jolly Roger. Dwight reports the 'crooking', or stealing, of significant Yale memorabilia, includ ing the tombstone of Governor Yale, a historic punch bowl and the ceremonial robes of the university president. Today, the Russell Trust Association, the society of graduate Patriarchs, meets annually and reportedly bestows a gift of $15,000 on each of the graduating Bonesmen. Far from squatting on Yale-owned land, the Trust, a prospering corporation, owns much of the land on which the university sits. As for stretching their arm, beyond the university walls, the Bonesmen had occasion to do so when, in 1865, three students broke into the Tomb and stole several relics. Threatened by their professors (themselves Patriarchs), the boys returned their booty; but did not remain at Yale to graduate. According to Dwight: 'One of these misguided young men threatened some years later, it is said - when he had fled to the other side of the continent - to publish what he knew, and, like all the blackmailing tribe, at the same time offered to suppress the publication for a sum of money. But Eulogia looked at Demosthenes and Demosthenes at Eulogia. Nothing was said on either side; only a pleasant smile illumined the face of each. No money was paid, no publication appeared.' Quite what the society did to ensure the youtlhs silence is left open to speculation (Navrozov believes they murdered him, and that this accounts for the bloodied knife among the Tomb's relics). In 1986, in New York City, representatives of Skull and Bones - among them George Bush's brother Jonathan - met Ned Anderson, a former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe of Arizona, who had approached the Russell Trust Association with a document titled 'Continuation of the History of Our Order for the Century Celebration' - sent to him, according to Navrozov's book, by Steve. The Bonesies agreed that the document was authentic, but insisted that the events it described - the prying open ofthe iron doors of Geronimo's tomb, the use of carbolic acid , to clean the skull - were purely apocryphal. Nonetheless, several generations of Bonesmen are familiar with the contents of a glass display case inside the New Haven tomb: a skull that everyone refers to as 'Geronimo'. But the meeting between Anderson and the Bonesies did not resolve the situation, partly because Anderson had no actual proo that the skull had been stolen in the first place. The problem with the Pancho Villa skull is quite the opposite: while there is evidence that Villa's skull was stolen, there is no proof that Skull and Bones was responsible. The efforts of a lobby called the Wednesday Group, from El Paso, Texas, to pin the theft on the Yale men stems from a second-hand account in the memoirs of one Ben Williams. In 1926, Williams met a man named Emil Holmdahl, who claimed to have plundered Vilia's tomb for a fee of25,000. Forty-five years later, Williams was told by an acquaintance named Frank Brophy that Brophy and his fellow Bonesmen had had the skull stolen for their Society, at a Cost Of $25,000, and that the skull could be found in the New Haven tomb. But Brophy, although a Yale graduate, was never a member of Skull and Bones, and Bonesmen categorically deny the presence of Villa's skull among their relics. Then, of course, there is the case of Hitler's silverware. Navrozov asserts that a friend of his (a Scroll and Key man) discovered it in the Skull and Bones building when he raided it in the early 1980s. That this unsavoury trophy should have ended up in the hands of one group of Yale undergraduates or another is not so surprising when one learns, from Brian Freemantle's book CIA, that Richard Helms, eventually a director of the Agency, found himself in Berlin in May I945 and 'took away as souvenirs some dinnerware and stationery embossed with crest'. While it is possible that the dinner service now floating around the Yale campus was filched by someone else in Berlin in I945, it seems more likely that it was 'crooked' from Helms, a Williams College graduate, by one of the many Yale men who worked with him in the CIA. Specific links between Skull and Bones and the CIA, aside from the figurehead of George Bush, are not easy to research, given that both associations are based upon secrecy. But there are analogies to be drawn, as historian Robin Winks points out in Yale And The Secret Service: 'The title of Office of Policy Coordination was a euphemism for Covert Action,' he writes, of the department in the newly-formed CIA just after the Second World War. 'OPC's approach to intelligence work was rather like a "secret society" - serving the country in ways it did not know. Yale's most prestigious social life turned on secret societies, of which Skull and Bones was the most exclusive, and the members of those societies deeply believed in the wisdom of their own selection (and perhaps at times in the wonder of it) and were convinced they served Yale in ways that the beneficiarics of their noblesse oblige might never understand. Of course, it was widely rumoured that the secret societies were recruiting grounds as well.' The very notion for which Navrozov has been labelled a conspiracy theorist (b y William F Buckley's National Review for one) - the idea of a covert elite making secret policy decisions supposedly for the benefit of the ignorant masses - is here spelled out by Winks as simple fact. And although the idea that Skull and Bones per se would be, as Navrozov maintains, 'the top of the pile and in the driver's seat' in government policy or the CIA may seem far-fetched, the supposition that many of its members, individually, are in that position proves to be incontrovertible fact - and fact of which George Bush is only the most prominent example. The habit of secrecy and the concept of noblesse oblige of the Knights towards the Barbarians, born in undergraduate days, must of necessity have spilled over into the organisations and mechanisms that the Bonesmen have gone on to inhabit and to master. When the Organisation mastered has become the entire nation, Navrozov's paranoia ceases to seem quite as extreme. IN THE GINGERBREAD RACE, he tells of reading in the Sunday Times of Bush's appointment of Raymond Seitz, former ambassador to the Court of St James's and, like Bush, a Yale man. Navrozov quotes the paper: 'Bush's offer took Seitz by surprise as he was dining out in Brussels after a day of Nato meetings ... [He was] called to the phone by the barman ... it was James Baker, the Secretary of State, to say that the President would be calling in five minutes to offer him the Court of St james's. Later Seitz made a diary note of what was said - first spelling out to Baker the dialling code for Brussels.' Navrozov muses: 'Baker had just phoned him in Brussels. Why should he spell out the code unless it has some hidden significance, as codes do? What is the Brussels code, anyway? I bet it's 322 [The number on the badge of Skull and Bones, the meaning of which is known only to inifiates.] Ah yes, so it is.' it does make you wonder. Certainly the 'conspiracy', inasmuch as there can be imagined to be one, is not that Bonesmen are everywhere in positions of power but that the outside world cannot recognise them as such. How comfortable Americans should feel knowing that their country's affairs of state have been increasingly managed by men who have participated in absurd rituals and have passively condoned, if not participated in, thefts for the benefit of a trophy collection in a windowless tomb in New Haven - that is another matter entirely. But because of its secrecy, the charting of the Bonesmen's course is only possible in retrospect. Is there a chance that this will change? America today, in the wake of innumerable scandals, seems to be moving slowly away from its obsession with secrecy. President Clinton has opened files on CIA activities and covert medical experiments (most recently on the use of unsuspecting mothers and children in testing the effects of radioactivity) . Such revelations prove to the nation that its conspiracy fears were not all lunacy. The shape of the establishment along with the composition of the student body at universities like Yale, is changing. Several years ago, in a move so controversial that the New Haven Tomb was closed for some months, Skull and Bones decided, at last, to admit women. This move must have forced a change in their long-standing rite (co-ed masturbation is surely beyond the pale?), which might, in turn, after the unbroken faithfulness of the members to their club; but it has not, as yet, relaxed their vows of secrecy. What the men and women now turning from Knights to Patriarchs will become, and how they may differ from their piratical forebears, remains to be seen. Then again, without a more radical divestment of the past, it may not be seen at all. By Claire Messud. 31 July 1994. Observer Life Magazine ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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