The Committee of 300 – Anatomy of a Conspiracy Document

Every so often a PDF arrives with the weight of a revelation. This one comes with a CIA web address, an author who describes himself as a former British intelligence officer, and a promise to identify “the mysterious ‘they’” who secretly run the world. It is Dr John Coleman’s Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300, and on the strength of its address alone a great many people have taken it for a leaked intelligence document.

It is not. But the true history of this file is stranger than the one it tells about itself. It runs from the Christmas issue of a Viennese newspaper in 1909, through the assassination of Germany’s foreign minister and the pages of Joseph Goebbels’s newspaper, to a self-published American paperback in 1992 — and finally to a computer seized in Abbottabad, Pakistan. This post follows that chain one link at a time, examines the file forensically, tests the book’s claims against the record, lists where the original sources and the pirated copies can be found, and closes by naming the people who built and sold the myth.

1 — What exactly is this file?

Before asking whether a document is true, ask what it is. A PDF carries its own paper trail: a cryptographic fingerprint, the software that made it, and the dates it was created and last saved. Here is what this one says about itself.

The fingerprint matches the CIA’s copy

The 32-character string at the front of the filename is not decoration. Run this copy through md5sum and the answer is 4a92fd2fb4dae3f773db0b7742cf0f65 — exactly the string under which the CIA published the book in its Abbottabad collection.^[1] An MD5 hash changes if a single byte of a file changes, so this is not merely “another copy of the same book.” It is the same file.

What the metadata says

The internal metadata tells a humbler story than the CIA address suggests. The PDF was made from a Microsoft Word 2000 document in April 2000 — eleven years before the raid — and last saved in May 2003 on a computer whose clock was set seven hours behind UTC, consistent with North America’s Mountain or Pacific time zones in May. The “author” field reads b. gates. That tells us nothing about Bill Gates and a good deal about whoever’s copy of Word was registered under that name; it is a default or a joke, not a byline.

It was scanned, not typeset

The text is peppered with the tell-tale errors of optical character recognition run over a printed page: “Committee of 3OO” with capital letter O’s, “November lOth” with a lower-case L, and years such as l987 and l957. The foreword is dated November 1991, and the text speaks of conditions “at the close of 1991,” which identifies it as the first-edition text published by America West Publishers in 1992.^[2]

2 — From Abbottabad to Langley

US special forces raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in May 2011 and carried away computers and storage media. Two releases matter here.

20 May 2015 — “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence published a list of material recovered in the raid, with 39 items in its English-language books section.^[3] Coleman’s title is on it, in company with Fritz Springmeier’s Bloodlines of the Illuminati, Eustace Mullins’s Secrets of the Federal Reserve, Michael Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon and David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor. Quartz’s Tim Fernholz summed up that corner of the shelf as “conspiracist fodder in books on the supposed Committee of 300 and MKUltra.”^[4]

1 November 2017 — the CIA release. On the authority of then-Director Mike Pompeo, the CIA published nearly 470,000 further files from the compound. The agency said it had withheld “materials protected by copyright; pornography; malware; and blank, corrupted and duplicate files.”^[5] Coleman’s book — still in copyright, and still in print — was nonetheless published, and at the time of writing it remains downloadable from cia.gov under its hash-prefixed filename.^[1]

3 — The sentence that started it: 1909–1928

The phrase “Committee of 300” is not Coleman’s invention. Its ancestor is a single sentence by Walther Rathenau (1867–1922) — industrialist, director and later head of the electrical giant AEG, essayist, and in 1922 Germany’s foreign minister — written for the Christmas issue of Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse on 25 December 1909, in an essay titled Geschäftlicher Nachwuchs (roughly, “Business Successors”).^[6]

Read in context, this is a complaint about oligarchy: a small, self-perpetuating circle of business leaders recruiting its own heirs. Rathenau knew the circle from the inside — his biographer Harry Graf Kessler notes that he counted himself among the three hundred.^[7] The essay was reprinted in his 1922 collection Zur Kritik der Zeit.^[9] Nothing in it says the three hundred were Jewish, secret, or political.

1912 — Theodor Fritsch turns a criticism into a “confession”

Rathenau was Jewish, and that was enough for Theodor Fritsch (1852–1933), one of Germany’s most prolific antisemitic publishers. By 1912 Fritsch was presenting the sentence as an “open confession of indubitable Jewish hegemony” and calling Rathenau the “secret Kaiser of Germany.”^[10] Fritsch’s Leipzig firm, the Hammer-Verlag, went on to publish German editions of the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew.^[11] After the First World War the “three hundred” and the Protocols travelled together.

1921 — Rathenau answers

Rathenau saw where this was going. In a 1921 letter he explained that his “three hundred” were business leaders, not Jews.^[10] It made no difference.

24 June 1922 — murder in the Grunewald

On his way from his home in Berlin-Grunewald to the Foreign Office, Rathenau was shot by Erwin Kern with a submachine gun while Hermann Fischer threw a hand grenade; Ernst Werner Techow drove the assassins’ vehicle. All three belonged to the ultra-nationalist Organisation Consul, and the historian Martin Sabrow identifies its leader, Hermann Ehrhardt, as having ordered the killing. According to Techow’s evidence, Kern justified the murder with the claim that Rathenau “had confessed to being one of the three hundred ‘Elders of Zion’” — testimony the historian Norman Cohn accepted as sound.^[12] Twelve and a half years after it was written, a sentence about boardrooms had become a pretext for assassination.

1926 and 1928 — exported, then weaponised

In New York in 1926, the Russian monarchist Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich published The Secret World Government, or “The Hidden Hand”, claiming the world was ruled by 300 people of “Judeo-Mongol” ancestry.^[13] Two years later, on 19 March 1928, Joseph Goebbels opened his Der Angriff article “Der Weltfeind” (“The World Enemy”) with Rathenau’s sentence, dated to the Neue Freie Presse of 25 December 1909, and used it as the foundation for a Jewish world conspiracy.^[8]

4 — Enter Dr John Coleman

The author, as he describes himself

John Coleman was British-born — biographical entries give 1935^[14][15] — and by his own account came to the United States in 1969. In the foreword to this book he describes “my career as a professional intelligence officer” and says that while serving “as a political science officer in the field in Angola, West Africa,” he saw top-secret documents that set him on his life’s course (PDF p. 2). The book names no service, unit or date.

Every biographical entry we could find for Coleman repeats the MI6 claim as his claim; none corroborates it, and none names a university or a year for the doctorate behind the “Dr.” SourceWatch reports it as his own description;^[16] the French Wikipedia’s only source for it is another conspiracy author, James Perloff.^[17] We found no record of service and no named colleague, posting or document supporting it. On the evidence we could find, the credential that gives the book its authority is unverified.

The publisher, the newsletter and the editions

Coleman says he began issuing “monographs and cassette tapes” in 1969–70 (PDF p. 2). He later published a newsletter, World in Review, from Carson City, Nevada.^[16] Conspirators’ Hierarchy appeared in 1992 from America West Publishers, ISBN 0-922356-57-2,^[2] and was later reissued in a “completely revised and updated Fourth Edition.” Further titles followed through Bridger House, and the book has been translated into Japanese (by Ōta Ryū) and, in 2022, French (Omnia Veritas).^[17][14] It has been quoted by David Icke and the late Jim Marrs.^[15] The blurb accompanying Internet Archive uploads of the Fourth Edition calls it “undoubtedly the ‘Bible’ of conspiracy books.”

Rebranding an old myth

Coleman relocates the “three hundred” from Jewish bankers to the British aristocracy — a council he also calls the “Olympians,” grown out of the British East India Company’s “Council of 300” (PDF p. 62), and headed by the Queen. But the old lineage shows through. His foreword lists “the Zionists” among the secret societies he had studied (PDF p. 2), and his roll of “Past and Present Institutions/Organizations” under the Committee’s influence includes the Anti-Defamation League, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the Baron de Hirsch Fund, the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Federation of American Zionists (PDF pp. 143–144).

The banking dynasties of classic antisemitic lore are here too. The Rothschild family is named 17 times and the Warburgs 10 times — the Rothschilds having long served as the centrepiece of the myth that “global banking is dominated by” a Jewish family.^[18] Coleman has Kissinger’s Harvard mentor “drafted by the Rothschild-Warburg banking network” (PDF p. 99), and says the LSD of the 1960s was “financed by the great Warburg banking dynasty” (PDF p. 63). No source is given for either claim.

What the book leaves out: Rathenau

Across about 82,000 words, Conspirators’ Hierarchy never once mentions Walther Rathenau. The phrase on its cover, and its central number, come from a 1909 newspaper essay whose author was murdered partly because of how that number had been abused — and the reader is never told. A book that promises to reveal hidden origins conceals its own.

A membership list no one can test

The “Past and Present Members” list (PDF p. 158 onward) mixes the living with the long dead: Giuseppe Mazzini (died 1872), Edward Bulwer-Lytton (died 1873), Lord Kitchener (died 1916), the racial theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and “Aurangzeb, Descendants of” — alongside Warren Buffett, George Bush, Willy Brandt and Queen Elizabeth II. Many entries end in “Family Designate” or “or alternate,” which allows any relative to be counted in. A list spanning three centuries with open-ended substitutes cannot be wrong, which is precisely why it cannot be evidence.

Critics as conspirators

The foreword closes the loop. Coleman says the attacks on his work are “a carefully-crafted and orchestrated program to discredit me, run by government agents and informers,” and that these “agent-informers are led and controlled by a group of homosexuals” (PDF p. 2). In effect, disagreement becomes proof of the conspiracy, and the book is sealed against correction.

5 — Borrowed furniture: the LaRouche overlap

Many of the book’s signature motifs also run through the publications of Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) and his Executive Intelligence Review — and the earliest of them, from 1974 and 1978, predate what Coleman himself calls his first “Committee of 300” monograph, of 30 April 1981 (PDF p. 3):

• Britain as drug lord. LaRouche’s circle published Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War Against the World in 1978, and EIR went on to claim “that Queen Elizabeth II is the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel.”^[19] Coleman: the Committee grew from the East India Company’s opium trade, and the Queen is its head.
• The Beatles as psychological warfare. LaRouche wrote that the Beatles were “a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications.”^[20] Coleman: the Beatles were “put together by the Tavistock Institute” (PDF p. 58).
• Fusion versus the Club of Rome. LaRouche co-founded the Fusion Energy Foundation in 1974 to promote nuclear power and fusion research.^[21] Coleman calls fusion energy “the DEADLY enemy of the Committee of 300” and claims a “fusion torch could produce from one square mile of ordinary rock enough aluminum… to fill our needs for 4 years” (PDF p. 14) — a concept originally proposed by Atomic Energy Commission physicists Bernard Eastlund and William Gough.^[22]

6 — Real anchors, invented joins

The book is persuasive to many readers because it is studded with real documents and real events. The method is to anchor a chapter on something that can be verified, then attach to it a connection that cannot.

• The SRI report. Changing Images of Man is a real 1974 policy study from SRI’s Center for the Study of Social Policy under Willis Harman, later published as a book in 1982.^[23] Coleman adds that Tavistock commissioned it to destroy the family through rock music and drugs, and that it “later became known as ‘The Aquarian Conspiracy’” (PDF p. 16). The Aquarian Conspiracy is in fact a 1980 book by Marilyn Ferguson; the claim that SRI commissioned it is, in Wikipedia’s words, “inaccurately alleged.”^[24]
• Kissinger and Aldo Moro. That Henry Kissinger pressured Italy’s Aldo Moro is genuinely on the record: Moro’s spokesman Corrado Guerzoni gave sworn testimony about it, Moro’s widow testified to it at the 1983 Red Brigades trial, and Kissinger denied it.^[25][26] Coleman reports the Guerzoni testimony accurately enough — then asserts that Kissinger was “acting according to instructions received from the Club of Rome, the foreign-policy arm of the Committee of 300” (PDF p. 5). Neither testimony says any such thing.
• The Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth. Real organisation, real report, real controversy.^[27] Coleman’s contribution is to call it “a complete fraud” commissioned by the Committee (PDF p. 14).
• The Global 2000 Report. A real 1980 report to President Carter.^[28] Coleman says it was a genocide plan written by Cyrus Vance under which “the population of the United States is to be reduced by 100 million by the year 2050” (PDF p. 16).

Each anchor checks out. None of the joins does — and the joins are the book’s entire argument.

7 — The book contradicts itself

Before testing the book against the outside world, it is worth testing it against itself. A full-text reading turns up two contradictions on exactly the dates that underpin Coleman’s claim to be a pioneer.

When was the Club of Rome founded?

Coleman gets this right — twice. Italian governments have fallen “since the Club of Rome was established in 1968” (PDF p. 6); the Club “was put together in 1968 from hard-core members of the original Morgenthau group” (PDF p. 11). Yet near the end of the book the Association for Humanistic Psychology is said to have been founded “in 1957 as a Club of Rome project” (PDF p. 168) — eleven years before the Club existed by Coleman’s own account.

When did Coleman first reveal the Club of Rome and the Committee?

On his own account his monograph of 30 April 1981 “was the first mention of both of these organizations in the United States” (PDF p. 3). But the foreword says that when he arrived in 1969, names including the Club of Rome “were at best totally unknown here,” and that “in 1969-1970 I set about remedying the situation in a series of monographs and cassette tapes” (PDF p. 2). Elsewhere he refers to the Committee of 300’s goals “which I first enumerated in 1969” (PDF p. 18), and says “I first introduced the names of Reese and Tavistock into the United States in 1970” (PDF p. 33). Either the 1981 monograph was not the first mention, or the 1969–70 work did not mention the organisations it is said to have exposed. Both cannot be true.

8 — Fact check: sixteen claims against the record

A book that claims to name the secret rulers of the world should at least get its checkable facts right. These are taken directly from the text, with page numbers in the 169-page PDF, and set against the public record.

Propaganda, intelligence and opium: five more claims

9 — Where to read it: originals and copies

For readers who want to check the chain for themselves, here are the primary documents, followed by the unauthorised copies of Coleman’s book that circulate online, followed by a warning list.

Primary documents and original sources

• Rathenau’s 1909 essay — Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 25 December 1909 (Christmas issue), Austrian National Library ANNO archive: anno.onb.ac.at
• Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit (S. Fischer, 1922), reprint at p. 207 — public-domain scan: archive.org
• Kessler’s biography of Rathenau (1928), chapter VII — Projekt Gutenberg-DE
• Goebbels, “Der Weltfeind” (1928), translated and annotated by Randall Bytwerk — German Propaganda Archive, Calvin University
• Cherep-Spiridovich, The Secret World Government (1926) — read as a historical artefact of antisemitic propaganda: archive.org
• The Limits to Growth (1972) — Environment & Society Portal
• Coleman, Conspirators’ Hierarchy, first edition (America West, 1992), ISBN 0-922356-57-2 — library holdings via WorldCat
• ODNI, “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf” (2015) — archive.dni.gov
• CIA, Abbottabad release announcement (2017) — cia.gov

Unauthorised copies of Coleman’s book

Coleman’s book remains in copyright, and as far as we can tell none of the copies below was published by its rights holder; they are listed here because they are how almost everyone online encounters the text, and because provenance is the subject of this post.

10 — Summary: naming the bad actors

Stripped to essentials, the story of this document is a relay race. A real man made a fair criticism of oligarchy. Each runner after him took the baton, changed the message, and passed it on to a larger audience — until a scanned paperback ended up in the files of the world’s most wanted man and, from there, on a government website that lends it an authority it never earned. These are the runners, and the case against each rests on the public record and on their own published words.

Notes and References

1. The CIA-hosted file in the Abbottabad compound collection, published under the name 4A92FD2FB4DAE3F773DB0B7742CF0F65_Coleman.-.CONSPIRATORS.HIERARCHY.-.THE.STORY.OF.THE.COMMITTEE.OF.300.R.pdf. The copy examined for this post was hashed with md5sum and returned 4a92fd2fb4dae3f773db0b7742cf0f65. Wikipedia’s “Committee of 300” article cites the same URL. cia.gov (PDF) ↩
2. First edition: America West Publishers, 1992, ISBN 0-922356-57-2 (978-0-922356-57-7). Library holdings: WorldCat. ↩
3. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “Bin Laden’s Bookshelf,” first released 20 May 2015 under the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act review; the English Language Books section lists 39 items. Now hosted on the ODNI archive site. archive.dni.gov ↩
4. Tim Fernholz (Quartz), “Osama bin Laden’s Eclectic Collection of Books,” republished by Government Executive and Defense One, 20 May 2015. Lists “Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Committee of 300 by John Coleman” and describes “conspiracist fodder in books on the supposed Committee of 300 and MKUltra.” govexec.com · defenseone.com ↩
5. Central Intelligence Agency, “CIA Releases Nearly 470,000 Additional Files Recovered in May 2011 Raid on Usama Bin Ladin’s Compound,” press release, Langley, VA, 1 November 2017. The list of withheld categories is quoted from this release. cia.gov ↩
6. Neue Freie Presse (Vienna), 25 December 1909, the Christmas issue — digitised by the Austrian National Library’s ANNO newspaper service. The date is the one Goebbels gives in “Der Weltfeind” and is consistent with Kessler’s “Christmas issue.” anno.onb.ac.at ↩
7. Harry Graf Kessler, Walther Rathenau: Sein Leben und sein Werk (1928), ch. VII, “Der Weg zum Abgrund” — gives the German text, places the essay in the Christmas issue of the Neue Freie Presse of 1909, and notes that Rathenau counted himself among the three hundred. Projekt Gutenberg-DE ↩
8. Joseph Goebbels, “Der Weltfeind” (“The World Enemy”), Der Angriff, 19 March 1928; reprinted in Der Angriff. Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1935), pp. 333–336. English translation and annotation © Randall Bytwerk, German Propaganda Archive, Calvin University. research.calvin.edu ↩
9. Walther Rathenau, Zur Kritik der Zeit (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1922), p. 207 — the reprint cited by both Wikipedia and Randall Bytwerk. Public-domain scan from the University of Toronto, hosted by the Internet Archive. archive.org ↩
10. Mark Swartzburg, “The ‘Three Hundred’,” in Richard S. Levy (ed.), Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (ABC-CLIO, 2005), pp. 705–706 — source for Fritsch’s 1912 “confession” reading and for Rathenau’s 1921 letter; summarised in Wikipedia, “Committee of 300.” en.wikipedia.org ↩
11. Wikipedia, “Theodor Fritsch” — the Hammer-Verlag (founded 1902) and its German editions of the Protocols and Ford’s The International Jew; prison terms in 1910 and 1911; the 1935 Zehlendorf memorial; his standing as “doyen” of the Nazi movement. en.wikipedia.org ↩
12. Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 145–146; Martin Sabrow, Der Rathenaumord (Oldenbourg, 1994) — the assassins, Organisation Consul, Ehrhardt’s role and Techow’s testimony; summarised in Wikipedia, “Walther Rathenau.” en.wikipedia.org ↩
13. Wikipedia, “Arthur Cherep-Spiridovich” — The Secret World Government, or “The Hidden Hand” (New York: Anti-Bolshevist Publishing Association, 1926), alleging rule by 300 people of “Judeo-Mongol” ancestry. en.wikipedia.org · scan: archive.org ↩
14. Wikipedia (Japanese), “ジョン・コールマン” — born 1935; all Japanese translations by ŏta Ryū. ja.wikipedia.org ↩
15. “John Coleman (author),” en-academic mirror of a former English Wikipedia article — born 1935; quoted by David Icke and Jim Marrs; publisher of World in Review. The article flags the MI6 claim as his own. en-academic.com ↩
16. SourceWatch, “Committee of 300” — describes Coleman as “a former intelligence agent of British MI6” on his own account, and gives World in Review’s Carson City, Nevada address. sourcewatch.org ↩
17. Wikipédia (French), “John Coleman” — bibliography including Conspirators’ Hierarchy (America West Publishers, 1992), Diplomacy by Deception (Bridger House, 1993), One World Order (Bridger House, 1998) and the 2022 French translations by Omnia Veritas. Its only cited source for the MI6 claim is James Perloff’s Truth is a Lonely Warrior. fr.wikipedia.org ↩
18. Wikipedia, “Antisemitic tropes” — records the Anti-Defamation League’s documentation of the claim that “global banking is dominated by” the Rothschild family, and traces the trope to the medieval association of Jews with moneylending. en.wikipedia.org ↩
19. Wikipedia, “Executive Intelligence Review” — Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War Against the World (1978), and EIR’s claim “that Queen Elizabeth II is the head of an international drug-smuggling cartel,” citing John David Rausch in Peter Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Theories in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2003), p. 245. en.wikipedia.org ↩
20. Wikipedia, “Lyndon LaRouche” — conviction on 16 December 1988 for conspiracy to commit mail fraud, mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the IRS; 15-year sentence; parole on 26 January 1994; his description of the Beatles as “a product shaped according to British Psychological Warfare Division specifications.” en.wikipedia.org ↩
21. Wikipedia, “Fusion Energy Foundation” — co-founded by LaRouche in New York in 1974; promoted nuclear power and fusion research. en.wikipedia.org ↩
22. Wikipedia, “Bernard Eastlund” — the “fusion torch,” co-developed with William C. Gough and recognised by the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1970. en.wikipedia.org ↩
23. Wikipedia, “Willis Harman” — SRI appointments 1967–1984; Changing Images of Man (with Joseph Campbell and O. W. Markley, 1982). Coleman (PDF p. 57) gives the 1974 SRI report reference and misspells Harman as “Harmon.” en.wikipedia.org ↩
24. Wikipedia, “The Aquarian Conspiracy” — Marilyn Ferguson (J. P. Tarcher, 1980); notes that it was “inaccurately alleged” that SRI commissioned the book. en.wikipedia.org ↩
25. Wikipedia, “Conspiracy theories about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro” — testimony of Moro’s widow, Eleonora Chiavarelli, at the 1983 Red Brigades trial, and Kissinger’s denial. en.wikipedia.org ↩
26. Open, “Accusa infondata: Aldo Moro ucciso dagli Stati Uniti” (18 March 2025) — refers to sworn court testimony by Moro’s spokesman, Corrado Guerzoni, about Kissinger’s alleged warning to Moro, while calling the wider claim that the US killed Moro unfounded. open.online ↩
27. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972). Profile and link to the full text at the Environment & Society Portal (Rachel Carson Center). environmentandsociety.org ↩
28. Wikipedia, “The Global 2000 Report to the President” — commissioned by President Carter; study director Gerald O. Barney; 1980. The Secretary of State at its release was Edmund (not “Edwin”) Muskie. Global 2000 · Edmund Muskie ↩
29. Reference dates: French Revolution from 1789; Burning of Washington, 24 August 1814; David Hume 1711–1776; Jeremy Bentham 1748–1832; Club of Rome founded 1968. Burning of Washington · David Hume · Jeremy Bentham · Club of Rome ↩
30. Theodor W. Adorno with George Simpson, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941) — Adorno’s best-known attack on the “standardisation” of popular song. Adorno died on 6 August 1969. en.wikipedia.org ↩
31. Merriam-Webster, “teenager”: “The first known use of teenager was in 1913.” merriam-webster.com ↩
32. Wikipedia, “Highway of Death” — Project on Defense Alternatives (2003): “at least 800 or 1,000” killed across both highways; Michael Kelly (Washington Post): 200–300 on the main highway. Wikipedia, “Gulf War” (infobox): 20,000–50,000 Iraqi military killed in the entire war. Highway of Death · Gulf War ↩
33. Wikipedia, “Federal Emergency Management Agency” — formed 1 April 1979 under Presidential Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1978, activated by Executive Order 12127. en.wikipedia.org ↩
34. Wikipedia, “Ditchley Park”: “a country house near Charlbury in Oxfordshire, England.” en.wikipedia.org ↩
35. Wikipedia, “John Rawlings Rees” (1890–1969) — psychiatrist; co-founded with Hugh Crichton-Miller the clinic that opened in 1920; medical director from 1933; consulting psychiatrist to the British Army in the Second World War with the rank of brigadier. en.wikipedia.org ↩
36. Wikipedia, “Tavistock Institute”: the institute “was formally established in September 1947,” growing out of the wartime work of Tavistock Clinic staff when the Clinic joined the NHS. en.wikipedia.org ↩
37. Wikipedia, “University of Sussex” — established as a company in 1959; Royal Charter granted on 16 August 1961; 52 students in 1961–62. en.wikipedia.org ↩
38. Wikipedia, “Winston Churchill” — out of government through the 1930s; First Lord of the Admiralty from 3 September 1939; Prime Minister from 10 May 1940. en.wikipedia.org ↩
39. Wikipedia, “UKUSA Agreement” — the 1943 BRUSA agreement, and UKUSA, signed on 5 March 1946. en.wikipedia.org ↩
40. Wikipedia, “OMF International” (formerly the China Inland Mission) — founded by James Hudson Taylor on 25 June 1865. en.wikipedia.org ↩
41. Wikipedia, “East India Company” — its China trade monopoly “was ended by the Saint Helena Act 1833”; formally dissolved on 1 June 1874. en.wikipedia.org ↩
42. Wikipedia, “War Propaganda Bureau” — approved by Cabinet on 5 September 1914 with Charles Masterman as director; housed at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate, whose name it took as cover; Northcliffe’s 1918 role was at the Department of Propaganda in Enemy Countries (Crewe House). en.wikipedia.org ↩
43. Wikipedia, “Edward Bernays” — Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928); during the First World War he worked for the US Committee on Public Information. en.wikipedia.org ↩

Primary text examined

John Coleman, Conspirators’ Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300, first-edition text (foreword dated November 1991), 169-page PDF, MD5 4a92fd2fb4dae3f773db0b7742cf0f65. All page references in this post are to that PDF. Quotations are reproduced for the purposes of criticism and review.

How the quotations were checked. The complete text of the book was processed paragraph by paragraph, and every quotation from Coleman in this post was machine-checked word for word against it and matched to its page in the PDF. Scanning errors in the source are silently corrected in quotations — “3OO” becomes “300” and “l957” becomes “1957” — but Coleman’s own spellings are left as printed, including “Maselov,” “Harmon,” “Reese,” “Wellesly” and “Rothmere.”