The CIBC retreat resort is actually outside King City, in King Township—a region of large, expensive horse farms, where members of the British Royal Family are hosted on their private visits to Canada. This marvelous centre, privately owned by one of Canada's main banks—Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce sits on over five kilometers of nature trails through forested terrain and rolling hills. It is no wonder that the Bilderbergers had decided on this exquisite location. From spa facilities and services featuring massage and skin-care/aesthetic treatments, saunas, and steam-rooms to a unique 200-meter in-door fully heated track suspended roughly two meters above the ground, to an in-door and out-door swimming and whirlpools, the CIBC Leadership Centre is located near numerous golf courses, riding stables, hiking and cycling routes, museums and other recreation sites. En fin, there was little chance that the Bilderbergers would get bored.

The Toronto media and news services were first alerted to this meeting by a series of faxes, phone calls and memos from Jim Tucker and myself, especially after it became known to me from deep undercover sources within the meeting that the 1996 conference was to be used as a staging ground for the imminent break up of Canada through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Quebec in early 1997, intended to fragment Canada with the aim of achieving Continental Union with the U.S. by 2000, pushed back to 2005 and now to 2007.

As a general rule, Bilderberg meetings are never mentioned in the media, since the mainstream press is fully-owned by the Bilderbergers. The veil of secrecy was torn off on May 30, 1996, the first day of the conference, by a front-page story in one of Canada's most widely read and influential newspapers, the Toronto Star.

Under the headline "BLACK PLAYS HOST TO WORLD LEADERS," John Deverell, a business reporter for the newspaper, noted that not only had Canadian publisher [Lord] Conrad Black offered $295 million to gain control of Canada's largest newspaper chain and weathered the subsequent annual meeting of his Hollinger Inc, but that—to cap his week—" . . . he's now the host for a four-day closely guarded meeting of world leaders and royalty just north of Toronto."

Deverell named some of the more than 100 hand-picked attendees from around the world, from the list we supplied him with, as "U.S. Defence Secretary William Perry; Prime Minister Jean Chretien of Canada; former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; Giovanni Agnelli, Honorary Chairman of Fiat; Paul Martin, Canada's actual Prime Minister and the then Finance Minister; Mario Monto, European Commissioner; David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank; George Soros, the Prince of Belgium, the queens of the Netherlands and Spain, as well as other business, political and academic elite."

Another article in the Toronto Sun, headlined "Big Hitters Gather: Vast Array Of International VIP's Talk Things Over At Secretive Bilderberg '96 In King City," noted that "[Conrad] Black, media baron and chairman of Hollinger Inc., and other permanent members of the group, are unhappy at suggestions by extremists of the left and right that the private event is part of a system of secret government."

This was the first time in the history of the Bilderberg Conferences that a major newspaper has ever scrutinized them in such a fashion. Normally, Bilderberg meetings are not even mentioned in the major media. Bilderbergers are not accustomed to having to provide explanations to anyone, particularly since certain of their members own or control major metropolitan newspapers, newspaper chains and wire services.

However, 1996 was no ordinary conference and Canada is no ordinary country. When the principal news outlets began checking our information through their government and private sources, it became clear that Canada, one of the world's wealthiest and most beautiful countries was to be ruthlessly partitioned by the Bilderbergers and the New World Order.

Bilderbergers should have known that when one's freedom is at stake, no amount of ownership of the press was to have prevented editors, copy editors, writers, secretaries and investigative journalists of Canada's television, radio and printed press from disseminating the truth for public consumption. What the Bilderbergers imagined being a trickle quickly turned into a flood and an avalanche that swept everyone of them off their feet. Only at the 1999 Bilderberg conference in Sintra, Portugal, did the Bilderbergers relax the extraordinary security measures that followed in the footsteps of their worst defeat, the 1996 conference in Toronto, Canada.

At 7:45 on the morning of May 30, 1996, 680-NEWS´ legendary radio journalist Dick Smythe, with the biggest metro Toronto audience, carried the following report which was re-aired at intervals as part of their news schedule.

Dick Smythe: "Well, this sounds like the plot of a conspiracy movie, as the world's movers and shakers meet in secret. Conrad Black is holding his annual Bilderberg Conference. Here's 680's Karen Parsons . . .

Parsons: "About 100 notables, including the Queens of the Netherlands and Spain, along with Henry Kissinger, the U.S. Defence Secretary William Perry and our Prime Minister, have gathered for the conference. Also along, the heads of Ford Motor Company, Xerox, the Bank of Commerce and Reuters. Black says there is a ban on reporters, so discussion will be intimate and candid. He says 'exchanges can often be quite heated.' Participants are required to take a vow of silence. Last year's conference was held in three mountaintop luxury hotels in Switzerland. This year, it's at a $60 million dollar luxury spa in King City."

Canadian Press also distributed a brief report on the previously-secret meeting, which was published by, among other newspapers, the Toronto Sun, with over 350,000 subscribers.

The press coverage became so intense that Kissinger was overheard by one of the staff reporters screaming at the Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien that "he will be damned if someone was going to screw this for him." David Rockefeller pulled Conrad Black aside during a break to ask him if he could "lean" on some people in the press to get them to "shut up about this?" The now disgraced and bankrupt Conrad Black was in way over his head. These boys, you see, are like schoolyard bullies. If you push back, they are at a loss for what to do.

I doubt that David Rockefeller, the billionaire banker, or Henry Kissinger, the consummate politician, or Conrad Black, the ultimate opportunist, or the plethora of kings and queens and their loyal subjects understand what freedom truly means to people who have never been enslaved.

Freedom and its loss . . . I seldom think of it during the intervals of our destiny. What am I doing chasing these people all over the world? With what objective? There must be a simpler way to earn a living. Except that I owe it to my dad . . .

April 19, 1975. This is the last time I saw my father alive, a big man in housecoat and slippers, looking at me from the photograph, my desperate eyes, the eyes of a 9-year-old child, scared, unable to image, to understand, not old enough to put myself in place of this bearded man, who only a few hours ago held me in his arms, but now is gone. Our memory . . . it is a rescue of the real from the uses the imagination might find for it. The intimacy of the moment, its silences, its heaviness . . . you, the reader, as an outsider, can share my feelings as long as you don't invade them.

My father was pronounced clinically dead for the first time 17 days later, that is on May 6, 1975. As a famous scientist and a man of great personal dignity and honor, he had spent his whole life fighting for the right of men to speak their mind. Perhaps, that isn't such an extraordinary thing in any country where freedom of speech forms part of a basic fiber of society. However, that was not the case in the old dictatorship of my country, the Soviet Union. He survived 17 days of brutal torture, 19 hours of pain per day multiplied by 17 days. Three hundred and twenty three hours of inhuman suffering, bestowed on him by the Soviet secret police. His testicles were crushed; right hand broken in eight places, one of his lungs was punctured from the dreadful blows he received from as many as five beasts who were beating him senselessly. I would like to tell you that he stood firm, that not a sound was heard from him, that he laughed at his assailants, that . . .

As I write these lines, oodles of tears are streaming down my face, in the name of that 9-year-old boy, in the name of that 40-year-old courageous man, in the name of a happy family destroyed. How much more pain do we want? How much more could we take?

As I bend over to pick up my broken pieces of recollection and proceed to carefully arrange them within accepted limits of physical time and space—30 years crumble between my fingers. My images of a scared child is a small monument to the fragility of hope, a futile attempt to use love to fend off the ghouls and dragons. How can I retain my privacy and have you accept my assertions?

Freedom and its loss . . . I seldom think of it during the intervals of our destiny. By that I mean that I didn't love my father in order to lose him. But I and you and we shall love our freedom most deeply if we are to lose it.

That photograph of my father still haunts me after all these years. My father survived the beatings and two clinical deaths, one in 1975 and the other two years later. My imagination moves beyond the flat world of a photograph which contains him and into the realm of the imagination. He is alive, he is alive because he moves, because he was alive at the moment that the memory resurrected him . . . but also dead—imagined people always are, already a memory.

Several days after his undeath, obituaries began to appear in the European press, . . . a renowned scientist dead at 40 . . . , scientist tortured to death . . . , dark clouds gather over inakomyesliesche movement as scientist dies of organ failure . . . , scientist in a coma . . .

Thinking back to the obituaries, to the sheets of newspaper, I think it is quite possible to see people as neither dead nor alive, but as mere paper. The joke I mean refers to our eagerness to leap from person to text, to forget the person for the text and the gossip, thereby acknowledging a kind death of the person, as if only the textual mattered to us. If textual is all that matters, then death becomes irredeemable, an endlessly discomposing face in the confines of our memory.

Could my obsession be an endless and futile effort, the impossibility of trying to reverse one's direction in time, of trying to walk not forward to the unfolding future but back into the barricaded past; all for the purpose of freeing the man from his undue suffering? But as hard as I try, I can never reach him because between reality itself and our limited consciousness or reality there is an enormous gulf. My imagination can never break the physical and metaphysical abyss that forever separates us. Since total reality is beyond our consciousness, we have not even a language that could express it. Consciousness, by the way, is something we each develop to the degree we feel and think for ourselves. Insofar as we merely accept the emotional and intellectual commonplaces of others, we remain dead.

So, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Black, Mr. Kissinger, the show is over. Easy, you know, does it, son. Let´s go, let's go. You sir, help that lady into her coat and let the door hit you on the backside. Wrong door, this show is not for you! Freedom, you know, must be zealously guarded against all intruders.

On June 1, "Big" Jim Tucker and I along with a small group of part-time Bilderberg chasers celebrated what was turning out to be an extraordinary success story. Every major newspaper in the country wanted an interview, television stations were constantly looking for updates, and radio stations were following us all over the city. We met at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen Street—Toronto's version of New York's Soho district. The Horseshoe Tavern, now some 60 years old is one of the city's original live music venues, the legendary bar where Canadian singing legends Stompin' Tom, Blue Rodeo, The Tragically Hip and The Watchmen got their first break; this tavern is still the place to see the bands that put the word "road" in roadhouse. As an anecdote, it was the venue featured on "Live on MTV" in September 1997, when the Rolling Stones band began their No Security Tour with a 75-minute show.

Earlier in the day, I had received a phone call from one of my sources who wanted urgently to see me before the end of the conference the next day. We agreed to meet at Calatrava´s Galleria adjoining Canada Trust Tower, one of the most inconspicuous places in all of Toronto, precisely because of its immensity, with droves of tourist gawkers passing through the premises photographing and videotaping the sites and sounds of Toronto's premier architectural attraction.

To get there, I decided to walk through Kensington Market, a Toronto version of Madrid's Rastro, located just west of Chinatown that becomes an open-air market on Saturday—the busiest day of the week. If anyone had been following me, I would have surely lost them in this matrix of busy streets and densely packed crowds. The market originated during British settlement in the 1790s and has since undergone many permutations due to flurries of immigration that brought in people representing more than 30 cultural backgrounds. As I turned the corner, I could see my contact browsing the newspaper stand, a plastic bag in left hand, with the free hand holding a rolled up magazine.

After a chance eye contact, and without acknowledging each other's company, I moved silently towards the revolving entrance of the Tower, where a friend of mine working for the real estate developer had arranged a room on one of the top floors of the building, overlooking the city skyline. I got into an elevator, nervously glancing behind me. My contact was to follow me five minutes later. As I entered a fabulous suite, the splendor of one of North America's most beautiful cities opened up and stood majestically before me. Toronto's business district, unlike that of New York is relatively small and is concentrated within several blocks.

Much had been accomplished in these last several days. For once, we clearly had the upper hand on the Bilderbergers. Press coverage was tremendous; Kissinger was royally pissed off, a definitive good sign. The European royalty hardly could have complained about press coverage. To their chagrin, in this case, it was utterly unwanted. The diabolical plans for the eminent break up of my adoptive country were temporarily put on hold. What else could one hope to accomplish in such a short time span? Still, I knew that this was a temporary reprieve. That these people will be back, lessons learned and notes taken. They wanted to crush any resistance, to rule the unwilling world with or without their consent, by guns or butter.

From 240 meters above ground, the city stood still. I was shut off from the bustle and sounds of this great metropolis by sound-proof window. At that moment, once again, I felt on the outside looking in. Would all this make a difference? Will people wake up to the imminent danger? Or will this be an "exciting experience," "have a nice day, son" as a slow moving passer-by replied when I patiently explained to him who was there and what they, the Bilderbergers, were scheming.

My thoughts were interrupted by a discreet knock on the heavy, wooden door.

"Come in," I replied, only slightly raising my voice. The source, wearing leather gloves, slowly crossed the threshold that separated the lightly decorated hallway from the heavy art deco decoration of the suite. The source intuitively moved towards the window, contemplating momentarily the extraordinary view of downtown and the harbour front area surrounded by lakeside promenades and landscaped waterfront, pathways—this is where downtown Toronto meets the lake.

"You stopped them this time around," said the source contemplating every syllable as if even a slight alteration in the register might have transmitted a different meaning. "The break up of Canada will go ahead as planned. It is a matter of time."

"Maybe . . . ," I said. "All is well, for now, until the next close encounter. Between now and then, quite a few of them will have died of old age, decease and fortuitous accidents."

"Fortuitous? For whom?" replied the source. He pulled out of the magazine he was tightly gripping with his right hand, hand-written notes, or rather scribbles which I hardly could have deciphered on my own.

"I thought note taking wasn't allowed," I quipped, smiling a full smile at him.

"Note taking is discouraged, my friend," he corrected me.

I glanced at the page. The familiar steady hand of a fountain pen left a blotchy imprint here and there, but overall, I could understand it all. I knew too well the source's writing, his fainting T´s and crooked R´s, diligently drawn out within the confines of a lined paper. I reflected momentarily what this courageous person was risking in meeting me and handing me this priceless information. Why weren't there more people like this in the world? Perhaps, there are, we just don't know them or the personal quiet fight they are waging thousands of miles away.

"I have to go," the source uttered quietly without looking up.

I mechanically extended my open hand in the direction of the source. Just as the source was about to meet my waiting hand with its outstretched palm, I lunged towards the source and gave him a bear hug.

"I won't waste your time thanking you because no amount of thanks can be enough for what you have been doing for us."

The source looked up." I have to leave."

"We'll leave as we have come up," I said, "in five minute intervals. I'll go down first."

"Don't you worry. I left my car in the underground parking. We can take the elevator down together," replied the source.

The source pulled on his leather gloves and pressed the designer metal elevator button. The blue light shone through its transparent surface. I could hear the whooshing sounds of the hydraulic lift speeding towards us from the bowels of the building at six levels per second. I turned to my source.

"When will I see you next?" With the sound of the bell, the doors opened. I took a step forward.

"Watch out!!!" screamed the source, grabbing at my arm and violently pulling it toward him. I mechanically looked at the elevator. In front of me, a chilling spectacle of an empty elevator shaft with certain death some 200 metres below awaiting me had the source not had the reflexes to pull me back from the abyss. I shuddered all over. A cold chill ran up and down my spine.

"The floor," I muttered, "Where is the floor?"

"We have to get out of here, now!" said the source. "Someone has jimmied the system. They have been expecting you!"

"Listen," said the source, "don't take the elevator. It isn't safe. Walk down the stairs and call the police. When they get here, I'll take advantage of the moment and take the elevator down to the garage. Go! Do it now!"

I skipped down the stairs two-by-two, pulling myself around the corners in short jerks with the wrist of my hand to get around the bend. My heart raced, as a result of a near-death experience and trying to tackle 200 metres of height in the shortest possible time. On one of the lower floors, I could hear the garbled voice of an immigrant security guard climbing the stairs towards me.

" . . . er, . . . ter, . . . mister, sir. Are you all right? What happened? I was called on the intercom on the second floor . . . someone manually to made elevator stop . . . only in emergency can to do this . . ."

I grabbed the man's forearm. "Could you please, call the police as quickly as you can?" I said, catching my breath in between every word.

The man pulled out his walkie-talkie. I could hear a high-pitched voice coming through from the other end of the line. I ran on. Five, four, three, two, one, ground level. I pushed open the heavy metal doors that opened on the main lobby. Two police cruisers were already parked outside. The first onlookers were beginning to gather on the other side of the revolving entrance doors.

"Are you the man who got stuck in the elevator?" said the Toronto police constable, pointing at me with his fat index and middle finger.

"Not exactly," I muttered shaking my head in disbelief. "I was about to enter into an elevator that was missing its principle component, that is the floor."

The cop gave a short cry. His short companion with sharp features, clipped moustache and hairy wrist looked over.

"You know, son, you are very lucky to be alive." The policeman stood with his knees slightly opened, his toes pointing outwards, holding his elbow between his thumb and his index finder.

"Only blind people survive these situations. A blind man would never step into an elevator without checking to see if the floor is there. We, however, take it for granted that its there. This is why it is a miracle that you survived. When the mafia wants someone rubbed out, this is one of their preferred methods."

June 1, 1996. I was about to turn 30. Too young to die. "Fuck them," I thought. This is far from over. We can still win this. I gave the pertinent details to the constable who incredulously looked at me from time to time . . . his eyes resting on the lower part of my face as if he were lip reading. The security guard with the impeccably bald and slightly chipped head asked me once again if I was all right. Several people on the sidewalk recalled having seen a stocky man in his 40s walking out of the building some five minutes before the police arrived. A police van and two policemen on motorcycles arrived. Yes, yes, the show had begun. It was the crowd's turn to take centre stage.

The wrong people remembered the right things and vice versa. A fat lady, who refused a chocolate candy because "she was on a diet," one of those colourful people who kept all she ever owned in her voluminous handbag, gave a lurid account of how she saw someone or rather something, with layers of newspapers wrapped on their feet storm or rather walk or perhaps stumble, no rather shuffle out at great speed. A street violinist remembered two men carrying a medium sized piano out of the building. A young lady with a poodle . . . but it is useless to recount all the misadventures of what these people might have seen or if they were even close enough to the vicinity of the crime to witness anything, unless their hopes were to somehow, to participate. Yes, yes, and participate they did, that large crowd of well-wishers and on-lookers and gawkers and charlatans. Put the pen away. The show is over. You sir, downstage, put your glasses back on! Officer, stop scribbling into your pad! Ladies and gentlemen, please could I have you all put your personal belongings back into your imaginary suitcases and leave the premises! The show is over!

The tramp stuck a half-eaten cigar into his mouth. A thin dapperish man with L-shaped sideburns, slowly walked by, pretending not to notice. Didn´t even turn his head! Two street hotdog vendors gloomily crossed the street, pushing their sausages over tram tracks, shooed away by the beat cop with a deprecatory shake of his sparsely populated head.

I walked out the other way, the same way I came in. That's it, easy does it, you know. The 1st of June is summer time in Andalusia, but here, in Toronto, summer was still two months away. A distinctly Russian man with a "hedgehog" haircut walked hand-in-hand with his lady complaining about someone named Vanya´s eating habits.

Close proximity to a majestic mountain is a mixed blessing, as someone once said, one is at once graced by the magnanimity of its pastures and the bounty of its slopes, and yet one can never see where one is sitting, under the shadow of what greatness, the embracing comfort of what assurance.

As a final thought, dear reader, remember: Our knowledge of history lends this tale a piquancy that can only come from watching people marching towards a tragedy that they could avoid if only they remembered the past.

Daniel Estulin is an award-winning investigative journalist who has been researching the Bilderbergers for over 13 years. Estulin was one of only two journalists in the world who witnessed and reported (from beyond the heavily guarded perimeter) the super secret meeting at the Dorint Sofitel Seehotel in Rottach-Egern, Munich, Bavaria, Germany, on May 5–8, 2005. He can be reached at d.estulin@ctconsultoria.com.

The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Online Journal. Email editor@onlinejournal.com Copyright © 1998-2005 Online Journal™. All rights reserved.