The BAE Systems Affair and
The Anglo-Dutch Imperial Slime Mold
by John HoefleThe weapons-for-oil deal between BAE Systems and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia provides a useful window into the manner in which the Anglo-Dutch-centered international financial oligarchy operates. The oligarchy is essentially a private criminal enterprise which stretches across the globe, operating through a network of government agencies, private institutions, and both publicly owned and private corporations and financial institutions. Some of these relationships are out in the open, while others are hidden.
The British Empire's historic role in the Asian opium trade is a good example of how the oligarchy functions. As documented by EIR in the book Dope, Inc., the British used Hong Kong as their base of operations, with Scottish trading companies such as Jardine Matheson both moving the product and setting up the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. (now HSBC) to handle the prodigious financial flows. As a British colony, the government of Hong Kong was run by the British monarchy, but the power was that of the British East India Company and the other private interests which controlled the British monarchy and the Empire, and the method by which this power was administered was, and is, Venetian.
This report looks at some of the corporate structures involved in the BAE deal, and unavoidably involves a straightforward connect-the-dots approach, but it is important for the reader to keep in mind that, while individual corporations are involved, the source of their corruption lies without, like an infecting virus. One must look at the larger operation in perspective, to understand how it actually works.
The BAE-Saudi deal is essentially an oil-for-weapons swap involving the largest British weapons manufacturer, and a nation that is essentially a creature of the London-centered international oil cartel, in which Royal Dutch Shell and BP are major factors. Associated with this BAE-Shell-BP nexus are a number of important investment and commercial banks, other weapons manufacturers, and raw materials companies.
We start with the BAE Systems board of directors:
- BAE chairman Richard Olver is a former director and deputy group chief executive of BP, and a director of Reuters, the British news/propaganda arm which is headed by a Knight Commander of the British Empire, Sir Niall FitzGerald.
- BAE chief executive officer Michael Turner is a director of Lazard, the Venetian bank with ties to the British Round Table group, the French Synarchy, the Venetian circles around Assicurazioni Generali, and the United States. Lazard is also closely connected to the international war materials cartels, and to Royal Dutch Shell.
- BAE director Philip Carroll is a former president and chief executive of Shell Oil Company, the Houston-based U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell. Carroll is also a former chairman and chief executive of Fluor, the giant engineering company currently headed by Lord Robin Renwick, a vice chairman of J.P. Morgan Cazenove. Additionally, Carroll is a member of the advisory board of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Houston's Rice University, a school which has a long history as a British outpost in the United States.
- BAE director Sir Nigel Rudd is deputy chairman of Barclays, the largest bank in the world by assets. Barclays has interlocking directorships with not only BAE, but Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Cazenove, raw materials powers Rio Tinto and Freeport McMoRan, and British newspaper publisher Trinity Mirror.
- BAE director and chief operating officer Walt Havenstein, who heads BAE's U.S. unit, is a former employee of both Lockheed Martin's Sanders unit and Raytheon, and is said to have extensive knowledge of ultra-secret electronic warfare systems.
- BAE director Michael Hartnell is a retired finance director of British plastics and packaging company Rexam, and is a director of Lonmin, the notorious mining company formerly known as Lonrho. Lonmin chairman Sir John Craven is also chairman of the private bank of the wealthy Fleming family.
- BAE director Dr. Ulrich Cartellieri is a long-time member of the international advisory board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a former official and director of Deutsche Bank, and a current and former director of a number of German industrial companies.
- BAE director Andy Inglis is a former managing director of BP and head of its exploration and production arm.
- BAE director Sir Peter Mason is the retired chief executive of AMEC plc, a British engineering firm with ties to N.M. Rothschild.
- BAE director Roberto Quarta is a partner with the U.S. private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which has deep ties to the Morgan and Rothschild interests in the United States.
- BAE Director Peter Weinberg is a partner in the boutique investment bank Perella Weinberg Partners. Joseph Perella is a prominent mergers and acquisitions banker who was formerly a partner with current Lazard head Bruce Wasserstein. Weinberg is a former senior partner with Goldman Sachs, and the son and grandson of prominent Goldman Sachs bankers.
Interlocking Directorates
Royal Dutch Shell, the product of a union between British and Dutch petroleum interests, is one of the most important companies in the world, and a major player in Anglo-Dutch geopolitical maneuverings. Royal Dutch Shell's World War II-era chief Henri Deterding was a notorious backer of Adolf Hitler, and the company's banker in France, Lazard, was instrumental in creating Banque Worms out of a Shell-connected transport company; Worms was at the core of the Fascist Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France. Royal Dutch Shell is even closer to the Rothschild banking interests, which took a stake in the company in exchange for some Russian oil properties. Royal Dutch Shell has also funded cultural warfare operations against the United States and the rest of the world, including funding the creation of the environmental movement. Shell has current or recent interlocking directorship relationships with a host of companies of interest to this report, including Dutch financial firm ING Group and manufacturers Akzo Nobel and Unilever, Rio Tinto, Belgian raw materials powerhouse Société Générale de Belgique, U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing, and a host of financial firms including Lloyds TSB, UBS, AXA, and Aegon.
BP traces its roots back to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, became one of the largest oil companies in the United States with the purchases of Amoco and Atlantic Richfield, and is the dominant oil company on Alaska's North Slope. Several years ago BP dropped the name British Petroleum in favor of the initials, and now portrays itself as environmentally friendly. BP interlocks with Unilever, Akzo Nobel, HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Goldman Sachs, Rolls-Royce, Lloyds TSB, General Electric, Bank of America, Tata Steel, KPMG, GlaxoSmithKline, and Roche Holdings.
Many of these companies also have interlocks among themselves, and with other companies of interest. For example, Dope, Inc.'s HSBC shares interlocks with BP, Shell, gold producer Anglo American, the Financial Times and Economist, Cathay Pacific Airlines, Imperial Chemical Industries, pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline, Rolls-Royce, the Kleinwort Trust, and investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs, which has historic ties to Kleinwort Benson, shares directors with both HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland. The Royal Bank of Scotland interlocks with BP, Goldman Sachs, Textron, Lloyds TSB, UBS Warburg, J.P. Morgan Cazenove, Swiss Re, mining company Xstrata, pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca, Citigroup, and the Prince's Trust. Lloyds TSB and HBOS, the other two of the top five British banks, plug into this same network in multiple places.
This extended network is part of the oligarchical apparatus that Lyndon LaRouche has described as a "slime mold." It is dynamic in that it changes with the times, absorbs or creates new parts while excreting the remains of decaying parts, while retaining its essential Venetian character and methodology. Individual parts come and go, but the slime mold itself lives on, absorbing as much of the world as it can.
In closing, we present the case of Textron, a major U.S. weapons contractor. One of the directors of Textron is Lord Powell of Bayswater, who, as Charles Powell, was private secretary and foreign affairs and defense advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Now retired from government and made a life peer, Lord Powell, who was formerly with Jardine Matheson, is or has been an advisor to Rolls-Royce, private equity fund Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, Barrick Gold, and others. He is also the chairman of Sagitta Asset Management, whose principal investor is Wafic Said, a Syrian-born British businessman close to the Saudi royal family, who is credited with helping set up the al-Yamamah arms deal. Another director of Textron is Lawrence Fish, the chief executive of Citizens Financial Group of Rhode Island, the tenth-largest bank holding company in the United States. Citizens Financial, in turn, is owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, on whose board Fish also sits. In 1974, in a deal arranged by Lazard, Textron bought 45% of the ailing aerospace company Lockheed, and Textron CEO G. William Miller also became the CEO of Lockheed.
When it comes to the military-industrial complex and the Anglo-Dutch slime mold, it is a very small world.
