Taking on a Conspiracy Theory

By Chester Campbell

Back in the early nineties, I subscribed to a financial newsletter by Larry Abraham, who headed an international investment house based in Panama. One of his pet subjects was the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group. He and Gary Allen wrote a book in 1972 titled None Dare Cal it Conspiracy. It was revised in 1985 with the title Call It Conspiracy. The book detailed his studies of the CFR and his belief that its leadership, including heads of major corporations and financial institutions, used their influence to set the agenda for the government and the economy. The Bilderberg Group, including wealthy bankers and corporate leaders from around the world, acted in concert on an international scale.

When I tackled my third book in the Post Cold War political thriller series around 1993, I cloned Abraham's theories into organizations I called the Foreign Affairs Roundtable and the Council of Lyon. The Council was named for the city where it first met, as the Bilderberg Group took its name from the hotel where it met first in the Netherlands.

Abraham said the groups involved an aristocracy of the financial elite. He said the multinational bankers had supported Lenin's Bolshevik revolution and provided loans that funded building of the Soviet empire. I used this idea in the book.

After the demise of the Cold War, dissident factions in the old Soviet Union tried to re-assert their influence and regain the power they had lost. I built the plot of Overture to Disaster around such a group seeking to undermine the work of the new Commonwealth of Independent States, formed from the former Soviet republics.

The story follows parallel plot lines, one that begins in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the other in Washington, DC where an operation is under way to remove a dissident from Iran using an Air Force special operations helicopter. The lines come together in Mexico when a Belarussian investigator meets the pilot of the doomed helicopter.

I hope to have the book available after the first of the year as an ebook for the Kindle. The conspiracy gets deadly before the end of the tale.

Chester Campbell

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