World’s most secretive group meets in Washington

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel entrance was cordoned off with high fences for the first ever Washington meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

One of the world’s highest-powered, yet least known, conferences on international affairs wrapped up in Washington DC on Sunday (Monday AEST), without a single Australian among the attendees.

For three days the entrance to the exclusive Mandarin Oriental Hotel was cordoned off with green, opaque fences, perhaps three metres high, suggesting privacy was a high priority for the first ever Bilderberg meeting to be held in Washington.

Police cars and black limousines clogged the cul-de-sac outside the Haussmann-style Mandarin – entirely booked out – as NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, the King of the Netherlands, tech billionaire Peter Theil, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, and chief executives, including of BP, Pfizer and UBS, mulled over the big geopolitical questions of the day.

Hotel staff told The Australian they either didn’t know, or weren’t allowed to say, what was happening inside.

“One of the agenda topics was Indo-Pacific realignment … so it’s fair to say that Australia was mentioned a few times,” one of the organisers told The Australian, on the condition of anonymity.

Around 120 guests, hand-picked by the Bilderberg steering committee, discussed 14 topics, including some directly relevant to Australia – China, Geopolitical Realignments, Disinformation, Energy Security, and Sino-US Tech Competition – in full confidence their remarks would stay off the record.

“Thanks to the private nature of the Meeting, the participants take part as individuals rather than in any official capacity, and hence are not bound by the conventions of their office or by pre-agreed positions,” Bilderberg states on its website.

“There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued,” it adds, stressing guests are bound by the Chatham House Rule to keep individuals’ comments confidential.

Australia, with a voice, at least on occasion, at the world’s top conferences, including the G20, G7, and World Economic Forum, for instance, is excluded from Bilderberg Meetings, set up in the 1950s to encourage free discussion between leaders in Europe and North America, by default.

“About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; approximately a quarter from politics and government and the rest from other fields,” the organisation says.

The first meeting took place at Bilderberg Hotel in the Netherlands in 1954. Henry Kissinger, 99, once again on the guest list, has attended most meetings since the late 1950s.

Russia, Ukraine and the Disruption to the Financial System rounded out an agenda more ominous than that of the previous meeting in Montreux, Switzerland in 2019, which included Space, A Stable Global Order and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence.

The organisers reportedly dropped a press conference at the start of the conference in the 1990s “due to a lack of interest”, which some critics say can’t be the real justification given the elite list of guests.

Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s half-Ukrainian deputy prime minister, and Sanna Marin, prime minister of Finland, which has recently applied to join NATO, were on the guest list, along with William Burns, the CIA director, the director of France’s intelligence services, Bernard Emie, and his opposite number in the UK, Jeremy Fleming.