King Jacob Rothschild's Family Fortune: way above Rich List

[TonyGosling]

https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheLabo ... 205545036/

The Rothschild Gang: Shadow Conspiracy Or Rumor?
Economy Watch Jun. 1, 2011, 4:55 AM
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-rot ... mor-2011-6

The Rothschilds are the most famous banking family in history. In the 19 th century they lent money to Kings and governments and funded both sides in the Napoleonic wars. They once saved the Bank of England from collapse with their own money. But how did they come to be so fabulously wealthy? In this two-part feature we first look at their rise from the ghettoes of Frankfurt, and then in part two we ask why they have been accused of everything from deliberately starting wars, to assassinating presidents and controlling the entire global financial system.

In The World's Richest Family - You Didn't Know About (Part 1) EconomyWatch journalist David Smith finds out how the Rothschilds came to be:

From their five European bases, the Rothschilds became masters of the political universe. They lent money to Kings, including England's George IV, dined with Prime Ministers like Disraeli and Gladstone, funded the creation of a pan-European rail network and financed wars, including both sides in the Napoleonic Wars.

Their status was put most eloquently by the contemporary newspaper Nile's Weekly Register in 1835:

"The Rothschilds are the wonders of modern banking...peering above kings, rising higher than emperors, and holding a whole continent in the hollow of their hands....not a cabinet moves without their advice."
Of Baron Nathan Rosthchild, the head of the English branch, the newspaper said:

"He holds the keys to peace or war. They are the brokers and counselors of the Kings of Europe and of the Republican chiefs of America. What more can they desire?"
The Rothschilds didn't just lend money to royals, they also behaved like royalty by marrying each other constantly. In 1836 Nathan's son Lionel married his first cousin Charlotte Rothschild, who was herself the daughter of Nathan's brother James, who had married his niece. In other words, her father was also her great uncle. Of Nathan's seven children, four married Rothschild first cousins. Such inbreeding was genetically questionable, but it bred loyalty and kept money safely in the family.

The Rothschilds ability to form symbiotic links with the powerful became notorious.

Read the rest of The World's Richest Family - You Didn't Know About (Part 1) on EconomyWatch.

In The World's Richest Family - You Didn't Know About (Part 2), David Smith investigates the veil of conspiracy surrounding the Rothschilds:

We can trace the roots of this antipathy as far back as the 19 th century when the Rothschilds were the supreme financiers of the world. At that time, the family was already being accused of financing wars for their own financial gain. The German writer Friedrich von Scherb wrote in his 1893 history of the family that:

"The house of Rothschild has arisen from the quarrels between states, has become great and mighty from wars. The misfortune of states and peoples has been its fortune."
This view that wars could not be fought without the support of Rothschild finance was shared by the left-wing English writer JA Hobson, who wrote in his book Imperialism: A Study (1902) that the Boer Wars had been funded by a small group of Jewish-German financiers, principally the Rothschilds, for economic gain.

"Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any European state, or a great state loan subscribed if the house of Rothschild and their connections set their face against it?" he wrote.
These accusations that the Rothschilds were unscrupulous, even amoral, financiers may not shock us too much today. But the claims made against them began to take on a more anti-Semitic flavor in Germany after the 1 st World War.

[TonyGosling]

Rothschilds financed Munich-based pan-European union- still very strong to this day - Hapsburgs still in charge!
According to his autobiography, at the beginning of 1924 his friend Baron Louis de Rothschild introduced him to Max Warburg who offered to finance his movement for the next three years by giving him 60,000 gold marks. Warburg remained sincerely interested in the movement for the remainder of his life and served as an intermediate for Coudenhove-Kalergi with influential Americans such as banker Paul Warburg and financier Bernard Baruch. In April 1924, Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the journal Paneuropa (1924–1938) of which he was editor and principal author. The next year he started publishing his main work, the Kampf um Paneuropa (The fight for Paneuropa, 1925–1928, three volumes). In 1926, the first Congress of the Pan-European Union was held in Vienna and the 2,000 delegates elected Coudenhove-Kalergi as president of the Central Council, a position he held until his death in 1972.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_v ... l_activist

[TonyGosling]

Q&A with Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson talked about his book, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, on the power of social networks throughout history and their influence in the present.

The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgKhsq7FQQw[/youtube]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgKhsq7FQQw
March 14 2018
Niall Ferguson and Brian Lamb for CSPAN


The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook,

[html]<iframe width=512 height=330 src='https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone ... l-ferguson' allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' frameborder=0></iframe>[/html]



Niall Ferguson
It's the kind of genre that looks like history, and usually involves some historical narrative, but it's nearly always detached from any scholarship. There's fake history as well as fake news. And most conspiracy theory history is fake history.

00:02:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
This makes it very difficult for the professional historian to write about these subjects. I mean, who wants to write about the Illuminati if most that is already out there is crazy stuff.

00:02:34
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And who wants to really talk about the Freemasons of the American Revolution? If you write about that, won't you just find yourself on the same shelf in the bookshop as the crazy books?

00:02:46
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I've noticed over my career, that these actually quite interesting and important subjects have been abandoned by professional historians and left to the cranks and the conspiracy theorists.

00:02:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And that's a pity because there are stories to be told about all of them; about the Illuminati, about the Rothschild's, you name it, there is some history there, but it's just very different history from the conspiracy theories.

00:03:13
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And part of the point of "The Square and the Tower" is to say, we should be able to talk about these subjects without being classified with the cranks and the conspiracy theorists.

00:03:24
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
Before we get too far into the book, let's catch up about you. I mean, you're well known in some circles in this country, for things like "The Ascent of Money", PBS series – documentary series. What was that, and when did you do it?

00:03:38
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Ten years ago, I published a book and produced a television series called, "The Ascent of Money", a financial history of the world. And this series was designed to give people some historical context for the crisis that I saw coming.

00:04:02
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, 2006, '07 I was writing quite a lot about the coming financial crisis. What struck me when I would spend time on Wall Street was that the people who were running the investment banks knew no financial history beyond their own careers. They certainly weren't prepared for a financial crisis on the scale of 1929, which was what they got with the failure of Lehman Brothers.

00:04:24
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I'm a great believer that historians can help us with the present and even with the futures that we contemplate. What I tried to do in "The Ascent of Money" was to say, look here, Wall Street, the chances are very high that a major financial crisis will happen. That's what history leads us to expect.

00:04:35
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
What can we learn about the financial system from history? I don't really understand anything until I know it's history. That's how I operate.

00:04:41
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I wanted to tell this story of money, where do banks come from, what's the bull market, what's the stock market? Why do we buy houses with loans called mortgages? So, I wrote a book that essentially gave the reader a sense of where the financial system came from and why it was very likely to suffer a major crisis.

00:04:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
The crisis happened just after the book came out. I think Lehman went bust just a few weeks after the publication of the book, which was interesting, and meant that I had at least something to say about what was happening in real time as financial history was being made.

00:05:14
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Ten years later, this book is trying to do something similar for Silicon Valley; that is to say, I'm saying to Silicon Valley, history applies to you. History didn't begin with the Google IPO or the founding of Facebook. History goes a long way back and it's relevant to you.

00:05:32
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
But I'm also saying to readers interested in history, network science is pretty important, and historians need to understand it. And if you don't really understand how networks work, you will not only fail to understand the present, but you'll actually have some trouble understanding the past.

00:05:45
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, it's a bit like "The Ascent of Money" goes to Silicon Valley. That's a rough characterization of this book. And any of your viewers who enjoyed "The Ascent of Money", will I hope, enjoy this book.

00:05:54
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
Where did you grow up?

00:05:55
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
In Glasgow, in Scotland. You can tell from my odd accent that I'm from the British Isles, but I actually come from that peculiar part of the British Isles; Scotland, which is one of those countries with a superiority complex, rather than an inferiority complex.

00:06:07
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Most small countries have an inferiority complex. But the Scots have long thought that they invented the modern world, that they run the United Kingdom, and that where ever they go they will find traces of their forefathers' endeavors, including the United States with its many traces of Scottish influence. But that's where I grew up and I was encouraged to think that Scotland had a special mission to transform the world.

00:06:46
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
And what were your parents doing?

00:06:49
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
My father was a doctor. My mother, now retired, was a physicist who taught physics. So, I come from a relatively scientific family. My sister is a professor of physics at Yale. She's the clever one.

00:07:07
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I was the black sheep of the family in that I drifted into what some people think of as a social science and others think of as one of the humanities; history. So, I study the change particles called human beings, and the way in which they behave.

00:07:29
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
But I think my – my family gave me a couple of advantages; at least two. And one was a tendency to think about the world with the framework of the Scottish Enlightenment. Through my grandfathers' I was the heir of a certain intellectual legacy that goes back to Adam Smith and David Hume, and the great thinkers of 18th century Scotland.

00:07:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And I think the other advantage that they gave me was to think of history as a branch of literature. So, there were history books in the house, but side by side with the great books of fiction. And so, I was introduced at an early stage to the idea that above all, history must be literature. It must be readable.

00:08:16
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
A. J. P. Taylor was a historian that I remember occupying some space on my parents' bookshelves. And that inspired me to find history attractive as an intellectual endeavor, but also as a literary endeavor.

00:08:27
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
Your college education; how extensive was it and where was it?

00:08:32
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Well extensive is a funny word to use because in some ways an Oxford education is intensive. One reads history. I spent three years as an undergraduate at Oxford reading history.

00:08:48
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
That was a wonderful opportunity. I had grown up in Glasgow. To me, Oxford was nirvana; a kind of promised land of not only stunning architecture, but also brilliant minds.

00:09:02
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I couldn't believe that it was possible to be employed to sit in a book lined study and divide one's time between reading books, writing books, and talking about books with students.

00:09:18
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
These Oxford dons – we would call them professors in the United States, seemed to me the luckiest human beings alive. And all I wanted to do once I saw their lifestyle, was to have it myself, to have a lifetime spent in this realm of books.

00:09:35
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It was very inspiring to be at Oxford in the early 1980's for another reason. Britain was in a great state of fervent. Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. Most universities lent in the direction of the left.

00:09:50
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
To be pro-factual was to be in a minority. We were – I became one of these young Thatcherites. We were a feisty minority who enjoyed making the case for the Thatcher government.

00:10:03
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I had a certain political education at Oxford, as well as an academic education. And Oxford being Oxford, unlike American universities, there's only one exam. It's at the end; finals. Everything hinges on that.

00:10:18
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
What you do in the proceeding years is kind of up to you. I didn't go to many lectures. In fact, I went to hardly any lectures. I did learn to play the double bass. I dabbled in student journalism. I found that I couldn't act.

00:10:34
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I tried pretty much everything except sport and found that I wasn't really that good at any of the things other than writing history essays so that the final -- in the final phase in final year, I reverted back to being a historian just in time.

00:10:51
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
When you're talking about networks in your book, Oxford is a network, Magdalen College, I would assume is a network.

00:10:59
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Absolutely.

00:11:01
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
There are some 35 colleges are more at Oxford. What does it mean for you that you were at Magdalen College inside Oxford as far as networking?

00:11:11
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Absolutely. To go to Oxford and to go to one of the most prestigious -- the most prestigious college, Magdalen, is to be admitted into the network of the British elite.

00:11:23
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Right there, the contemporaries that you meet will include future leaders, will include future editor, there’s a sense in which Britain is still, as it has been for centuries, run by people who went to Oxford and Cambridge.

00:11:39
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
You go to the Oxford Union which is the debating society, what you're really seeing is students preparing for the House of Commons, practicing, getting the hang of standing at the dispatch box. And some my near (ph) contemporaries of gone to great things.

00:11:57
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Rather to my own incredulity, Boris Johnson is now the foreign secretary. That's not something I would have predicted back then, it's probably something that he would've predicted.

00:12:11
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, I think Oxford admits you to the network that is sometimes called the establishment, that still to a surprising extent runs Britain. I didn't really appreciate that at the time I think.

00:12:25
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I only retrospectively appreciate the extent to which that was admission into a very important network that extends into politics, that extends into the media, and that extends into business.

00:12:39
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And the -- from that point onwards, in your life without even necessarily being aware of it, when you meet somebody at a cocktail party in London, a transaction occurs which goes like this, oh, did you go to Oxford?

00:12:55
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Oh, which college? When were you there? Do you know X? Oh, yes, I know Y. Now people who haven't been admitted to that network can’t play that game.

00:13:06
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It's the central activity of social networks, exchanging information and building a connection that then has utility in the present. Because of course if you and I went to Magdalen, we have a set of common experiences and that builds a kind of trust.

00:13:26
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, the chances are that any future transaction that we embark on or project that we decide to do together that will be based on that underlying mutual understanding. That’s how social networks work and Oxford introduced me to that world.

00:13:45
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
In your book, you talk about Oxford and how it relates to Cambridge. I want to get back to this in a second. I want you to tell us about the apostles.

00:13:56
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Yes.

00:13:57
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
But after you graduated and came to this country, how many different places have you taught in the United States?

00:14:06
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
I first taught at New York University for a couple of years and then went to Harvard. And I was professor at Harvard for 12 years and only recently moved to Stanford, so three. I’ve given multiple guest lectures here, there and everywhere, but those three institutions of the ones where I've spent time.

00:14:29
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
So who are or were or can be an apostle and what are they?

00:14:33
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Cambridge had a very remarkable institution that doesn't really have equivalence anywhere else. The Cambridge apostles were -- are because it still exists a society of extreme intellectual exclusivity.

00:14:49
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It dates back to the 19th century. It was an intellectual discussion society. Members would meet, give papers, be brilliant, eat sardines on toast. That's about it. Doesn't sound like much, does it?

00:15:04
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
But it was really and remains one of the most prestigious societies that one could be elected to. And the process of election was an arduous one. Only rarely were elections made. So, the apostles remained relatively few in number.

00:15:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
It was probably the height of its intellectual influence in the 1910s and 1920s, when John Maynard Keynes, certainly the most influential economist of the 20th century was a member, along with his friend Lytton Strachey, one of the great iconoclastic writers of that generation.

00:15:47
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
And they look down from a great height on everybody else. They regard himself, not without some cause as very clever indeed.

00:15:58
Brian Lamb
Brian Lamb
You’re write, they were in a word insufferable.

00:16:03
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
They were pretty insufferable actually. Reading the younger Keynes's correspondence of the subject makes you realize that a very exclusive network has a kind of nasty side to it. It was quite misogynistic.

00:16:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
The apostles of the early 1900s, certainly tended gay, nothing wrong with that. But the kind of misogyny that kept -- accompanied that particular chapter in Cambridge history doesn't look well today. But they were primarily an intellectual group.

00:16:44
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
One interesting consequence of their elitism and that's the only word for it was a disdain for all the conventional wisdom that Britain had inherited from the Victorians. So, if you are the crème de la crème intellectually, naturally, you're far too clever to believe in free trade, or gold stand or any of the things of that the Victorians believed in. The British Empire.

00:17:03
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
So, the interesting about the apostles was that by the 1920s they were questioning most of the conventional wisdom of the previous generation. But what then happens, and this is really why I write about the apostles in the book, was something surprising, they got hacked by the Russians. Sounds rather like a contemporary problem, there’s nothing new under the sun.

00:17:22
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
The Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB had a very ingenious strategy in the 1930s and that ingenious strategy was to try to recruit agents, operatives from within the commanding heights of the English establishment.

[TonyGosling]

VICTOR ROTHSCHILD, SOVIET SPY
MARCH 27, 2018 MARK HACKARD
https://espionagehistoryarchive.com/201 ... oviet-spy/

The mystery of Lord Victor Rothschild’s (1910-1990) connections to Soviet intelligence has vexed researchers for over a half century now. As the scion of an ultra-wealthy banking house and confidante to Winston Churchill, Rothschild was an influential figure in Britain’s power elite for decades, occupying key positions in counterintelligence, the energy sector and strategic policy planning. But was he also the notorious Cambridge Spy Ring’s “Fifth Man,” a spy for Moscow who could access the crown jewels of UK secrets?

The Cambridge network – consisting of Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross – has gone down in history as one of Soviet secret service’s most successful penetrations, to the shame of the British establishment. Long after their exposure, Rothschild was well-situated as a grey cardinal of UK politics, seemingly untouchable.

In 1994 investigative author Roland Perry wrote The Fifth Man, implicating Rothschild as a Soviet asset based on interviews with anonymous KGB veterans in Moscow. Yet Perry couldn’t obtain the direct proof he needed to clinch the case.[1] Now, new evidence has surfaced, suggesting that if not the Fifth Man, Rothschild was indeed working for Soviet foreign intelligence alongside the Cambridge Five from the 1930’s up to the initial stages of the Cold War. The source is none other than the first chairman of the KGB, General Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov (1905-1991).

Ivan Serov KGB
An enforcer for Stalin and Khrushchev, General Ivan Serov served as the first chairman of the KGB from 1954 to 1958.
Ivan Serov was a physically brave and ruthless NKVD officer who specialized in mass deportations and quelling internal unrest under Stalin. In 1954 he was chosen to head the newly reconstituted state security apparatus, the KGB, by Nikita Khrushchev, who considered Serov reliable from their time in pre-war Ukraine. “Ivan the Terrible,” as the Western press christened him, led the KGB until 1958, when the Politburo sent him to head the GRU, Soviet military intelligence. Ousted in 1963 after the exposure of GRU Colonel Oleg Penkovsky as a CIA-MI6 agent, Serov was soon lowered in rank, excluded from the Party, and forced into retirement. Though relegated to oblivion, the cashiered Kremlin enforcer kept a diary – a fact that was known to the KGB as early as 1971. Serov concealed his writings within the walls of his Moscow dacha’s garage, and they were only discovered in 2012, some two decades after his death.

Serov’s diaries, published in Russian as Notes from the Suitcase (Zapiski iz chemodana), reveal a myriad of details on NKVD wartime deportation operations, the treacherous games played amongst Stalin’s lieutenants, and a first-hand account of how the Red Army crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. While Serov was not a professional intelligence officer, some of the most fascinating entries concern the espionage operations that he oversaw as chief of the KGB and GRU. And the question of Lord Victor Rothschild – whether he acted as a Soviet asset – is finally put to rest.

Serov describes meeting Rothschild while accompanying Khrushchev on his April 1956 visit to London:

I met with Victor Rothschild only once, at the embassy. This person was well-known from very long ago as an “heir” to the Philby affair and others. He knew perfectly well that these people, having certain inclinations, were connected to us, and used them to pass on information to Moscow, including false information.

Overall, useful ties with him ended with the formation of Israel.

As you remember, the British government was always against the creation of Israel, while Rothschild, to the contrary, aided this.

All materials on the Palestinian problem in the 1940’s and on the British position were received by our intelligence service in the 1930’s-40’s. After Burgess and Maclean’s escape, he only appeared at official receptions at our embassies and met with the ambassador, Mikoyan or Malenkov.

In London he made an unpleasant impression on me. He didn’t inspire trust. I’ve met many such hustlers in Bessarabia and Romania, as well as in Germany after the war.

The contact, according to the program of the visit and issues for discussions with the British, was interesting, of course. But Rothschild always pursued only his own goals. In his own way, Rothschild also compromised Philby and others. Ties with him put the information passed on by them in doubt.

We were helped by such solid, serious, moral and non-mercenary people who shared our views, such as Bernal, Ivor Montagu, and major scientists. Rothschild was just a fellow traveler.[2]

The ex-chairman of the KGB opens his passage with a stunning claim – Victor Rothschild not only knew of his school friends’ espionage, he actively supplied information to Moscow Center through their network[3]. Back in their Cambridge days, Rothschild, Burgess, and Blunt had all been members of the Apostles, a campus society characterized by Marxist intellectual speculation and homosexual activity. But as Serov makes clear, Rothschild the ‘fellow traveler’ was not under Soviet control. Rather, it is implied he was pursuing another aim entirely – the creation of a Jewish state, a family dream fulfilled in the aftermath of the Second World War. The role of the Rothschilds in founding Israel is undisputed[4]; the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was due largely to the energies of young Victor’s uncle, Lord Walter Rothschild[5]. Secret diplomacy, double-dealing, the use of spies, and even terrorism all formed an indispensable part of the drama. And now Serov’s revelation would suggest that by the end of the 1940’s, the Soviet Union had outlived its utility in the eyes of the legendary financial dynasty.

Stalin had been among the first to support the fledgling State of Israel; after all, the political spectrum of the new nation-state leaned heavily socialist, and a large portion of its immigrants had come from the Eastern Bloc. Armaments from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia helped tip the balance in favor of the Zionist cause during Israel’s War for Independence, what Palestinian Arabs rather less enthusiastically have termed an Naqbah, “The Catastrophe.” At the time of Israel’s formation, the Kremlin believed Ashkenazi settlers, refugees and emigres – some of whom had fought in or alongside the Red Army against Nazi Germany – would deal a blow to Western imperialism in the Middle East. As Serov’s entry indicates, Rothschild and the Cambridge network helped inform the Soviet leadership and perhaps further undermine Britain’s weakening grip on the Palestine Mandate[6].

Soviet hopes for a red stronghold on the Levant, however, would evaporate quickly. Stalin was in firm command of international communism, but the Zionist movement proved well beyond his grasp. Events from the 1948 assassination of playwright and Jewish Antifascist Committee chair Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk to the Doctors’ Plot show that the “Father of All Nations” was unable to bring Zionism under his control. The postwar purge of prominent Jews in the Soviet Union conformed to Stalin’s standard practice of eliminating any and all perceived potential threats to his rule.

While Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion initially pursued a policy of balance between East and West[7], he came to steer his country toward the Atlantic alliance – Israel needed a dependable great-power patron with a wealthy and influential Jewish diaspora community, and the United States fit the bill. Less than a generation into Israel’s existence, under the Johnson Administration, Washington and Tel Aviv cemented extensive security cooperation (read: billions in arms contracts and economic aid) that continues to this day.

The Soviets would counter Israel’s westward shift by backing not only the dispossessed Palestinians, but also secular Arab states in the region such as Syria, Egypt, and eventually Iraq. In the context of the Cold War, it made sense for Israel to arrange intelligence sharing with Western powers, especially the United States. The CIA’s pointman for the Israeli relationship throughout the first half of the US-Soviet struggle was Company counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, who happened to be a longtime drinking friend and understudy of none other than Kim Philby.

The demise of the Cambridge Five, beginning with the flight of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951, roughly coincided with Israel’s gradual but steady integration into the Western camp. Working in Washington as the MI6 liaison, Philby knew from the freshly-decrypted Venona intercepts that Maclean’s career as a Soviet agent (codename “Homer”) was coming to an end. He sent the debauched Burgess, who was also serving at the British Embassy and living in his house at the time, to warn Maclean and facilitate his escape. As it turned out, both Cambridge school mates vanished behind the Iron Curtain, leaving Philby under a dark cloud of suspicion and forcing his resignation. The master spy played it cool, laid low, and eventually made his way to Beirut five years later as an MI6 asset under journalistic cover (additionally re-establishing contact with the KGB).

Philby’s final unmasking in Beirut during the winter of 1962-63 was the result of Rothschild action, a fact that most accounts have passed over without critical analysis. While Anatoly Golitsyn, the KGB major who defected to the CIA in 1961, is popularly attributed to have confirmed Philby’s identity as a Soviet agent, it was Victor Rothschild who sealed his fate. The ostensible reason for the legendary mole’s exposure was his unfavorable attitude toward Israel, as conveyed on the pages of The Observer and The Economist. Flora Solomon, an ardent Zionist whom Philby unsuccessfully had attempted to recruit in the 1930’s, became incensed at his pro-Arab, anti-Israel journalistic slant and decided to reveal what she had known for decades. Solomon, whose son would found Amnesty International, reported Philby to a figure perched high in the British security establishment: Lord Victor Rothschild[8].

Rothschild Victor House of Lords

If Serov’s diary is genuine, then Rothschild would have no interest in Philby being brought back to the Old Bailey to stand trial, risking his own exposure. Much better to have the Cambridge Five’s brightest star spirited away to Moscow than spilling secrets of high criminality in the establishment. As MI6 was about to close in with a group of officers headed by old friend Nicholas Elliott, Philby received a warning[9]. Anthony Blunt, his spy days largely behind him and now ensconced as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, went to Beirut under the pretext of a botanical excursion in December of 1962, mere weeks before Philby’s escape. The documentary film maker George Carey notes he was ostensibly in search of the frog orchid, a flower that grows wild in England, yet nowhere in Lebanon[10]. So who sent Blunt, the KGB’s London residency or his longtime associate Victor Rothschild?

Moscow Center wouldn’t need to send Anthony Blunt all the way to Beirut to tip his old school friend off to the oncoming danger. Philby was already in contact with his immediate handler, a certain Petukhov stationed nearby under Soviet diplomatic cover, and Yuri Modin, his longtime control officer. Modin had in fact warned him of Golitsyn’s defection in the summer of 1962, instructing him “not to return to Britain because of the danger of arrest, and to make contingency plans for his escape.”[11] Modin himself thought that through its seeming incompetence, MI6 “had actively encouraged him to slip away.”[12] The most powerful elements of the British ruling class, personified by Victor Rothschild, wanted Philby safe and silent behind the Iron Curtain so that higher-level elite treachery would remain hidden from public view.

During his lifetime, Lord Victor Rothschild threatened to sue anyone into penury for claiming he had worked for Soviet intelligence. Hardly would he believe that one day, from the grave, the former chief of the KGB would expose him as a spy.



[1] Leitch, David. “Rothschild ‘spied as the Fifth Man.’” The Independent, 22 October 1994, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 44440.html.

[2] Serov, Ivan. Zapiski iz chemodana. Ed. Aleksandr Khinshtein. Moscow: Olma Media Group, 2016, pp. 543-544.

[3] The late Stanislav Lekarev, a veteran of the KGB First Chief Directorate who had worked in London, claims that Rothschild was first contacted by Soviet intelligence in August of 1934 at a symphony. His recruiter was supposedly the illegal Theodore Mally (“Otto”). Lekarev posits that Rothschild was not an agent in the ordinary operational sense, but rather was handled as a high-level agent of influence.

Lekarev, Stanislav. “Baron Viktor Rotshil’d: Istoriia sponsora kembridzhskoi piaterki.” Argumenty nedeli, 1 Feb. 2007. http://argumenti.ru/espionage/n40/33679.

[4] “History.” Yan Hanadiv, http://www.yadhanadiv.org.il/general-page/history. Accessed March 21, 2018.

[5] “Walter Rothschild and the Balfour Declaration.” The Rothschild Archive, https://www.rothschildarchive.org/conta ... eclaration. Accessed March 26, 2018.

[6] Hines, Nico. “How Secret Russian Spy Kim Philby Helped Set Up Israel.” The Daily Beast, 6 May 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-russi ... mised-land.

[7] Shlaim, Avi. “Israel between East and West, 1948-1956.” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 36:4, November 2004, 657-673.

[8] Weiss, Philip. “Kim Philby’s last straw.” Mondoweiss.net, 23 May 2015, http://mondoweiss.net/2015/05/philbys-last-straw/.

[9] Carey, George. “Kim Philby: The spy who went into the cold.” BBC News, 18 Nov. 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-24803131.

[10] Norton-Taylor, Richard. “Was Philby tipped off before defection to Moscow?” The Guardian, 14 Nov. 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/def ... 14/mi6-mi5.

[11] McIntyre, Ben. A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. London: Crown Publishers, 2014, p. 242.

[12] Ibid, p. 277.

[TonyGosling]

N.M. Rothschild and Sons, the London merchant bank handling the sale
BRITAIN SELLING $12 BILLION BP STAKE
By Timothy Harper and Special to the Tribune
Chicago Tribune August 21, 1987
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- ... story.html

LONDON — In what would be the largest public share offering in history, the British government Thursday announced that it will sell $12 billion worth of shares in British Petroleum Co. PLC.

The offering marks the most ambitious selloff so far in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher`s campaign to ''privatize'' government-owned industries.

The more than $30 billion raised over the last eight years by selling off British Airways, British Gas, British Telecom and more than a dozen smaller companies has put Thatcher in the enviable position of being able to both cut taxes and increase government spending.

Along the way, the number of Britons owning shares has increased to more than 15 percent from under 5 percent.

No date for the selloff was announced, and no price will be set for shares until N.M. Rothschild and Sons, the London merchant bank handling the sale, has gauged demand.

The government holds a 31.5 percent stake in British Petroleum, which is worth an estimated for 6 billion pounds ($9.7 billion), and it will also sell a block of new shares for 1.5 billion pounds ($2.4 billion), officials said.

In past privatization issues, critics have complained that the prices were set unrealistically low in order to ensure that the offerings were vastly oversubscribed. One recent study estimated that $500 invested in 15 privatization issues, a total investment of $7,500, would now be worth $16,740.

In two earlier privatization issues, however, people who bought and held onto British Petroleum ended up losers. Shares sold for 363 pence in 1979 and 435 pence in 1983. BP closed on the London Stock Exchange Thursday at 353 pence ($5.66).

Anthony Alt, a managing director of Rothschild, said the British Petroleum offering, in the manner of past privatization issues, would be handled in such a manner that purchases would be guaranteed for small investors.

''As you know, it is one of the aims to widen and deepen share ownership,'' he said, ''and a substantial portion of this share offer will be reserved for the man in the street.''

Alt also said that more than 20 percent of the stock--a record for a privatization--will be sold abroad. In the past, there was heavy demand in the United States for depository shares (ADRs) representing British privatization issues.

Currently 6 percent of BP is foreign-owned, whereas more than half the oil company`s assets are abroad. Last month it bought for $7.8 billion the shares of Cleveland-based Standard Oil Co. that it did not already own, lifting it to No. 3 among world oil companies.

By buying all of Standard Oil, BP has raised its presence in the United States and stands to gain from Standard`s large Alaskan reserves should oil prices start to rise again. Standard is the second-biggest U.S. oil producer after Exxon Corp.

The portion of BP stock earmarked for foreign investors may be reduced if the domestic demand is overwhelming, Alt said. That may well occur. Earlier sales of state companies, such as the utilities British Gas and British Telecommunications, have been heavily oversubscribed.

Up to now, the biggest sale of a state-owned company has been the 5.6 billion-pound ($9 billion) stock offering of British Gas. British Telecom was sold for about 4 billion pounds ($6.4 billion).

Once known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Co., BP was among the first companies to tap the oil fields in the Middle East. It has recently become a big producer of North Sea oil and, through its American subsidiary, extracts oil from Alaska.

Its net income fell 49 percent last year, to 817 million pounds ($1.32 billion), because of the sharp drop in oil prices. But its earnings jumped nearly 50 percent, to 317 million pounds ($510 million), in the most recent quarter.

[TonyGosling]

The Government was last night plunged into fresh controversy over "sleaze" with Labour allegations of "jobs for the boys'' when it emerged that Lord Wakeham had joined the merchant bank NM Rothschild and Sons six months after stepping down from th e Cabinet.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wake ... 69724.html

Gordon Brown, the Shadow Chancellor, called on the Nolan Committee on standards in public life to investigate the bank's appointment of Lord Wakeham, who handled the privatisation of the regional electricity companies as Secretary of State for Energy. Rothschild was one of the Government's advisers on the electricity sell off.

The appointment put the Government back on the defensive with the Nolan committee inquiring into MPs' outside interests, and it enabled Labour to deflect from its own difficulties on Clause IV back to its allegations about Tory "sleaze."

It raised renewed concern about the conduct of ministers. Next week the Nolan committee will be studying the employment of ministers leaving office. It will call Sir Norman Fowler, former Conservative Party chairman, Lord Armstrong, the former Cabinet secretary, and Lord Younger, the former defence secretary.

Lord Wakeham may earn up to £50,000 a year for his part-time post with the merchant bank, which was also involved in coal privatisation.

Mr Brown said Cabinet ministers should be banned for up to five years from joining companies if there was a conflict of interest. He called on the Nolan committee to lay down as a minimum requirement on ministers "a decent interval - probably a whole Parliament" to ensure they did not benefit from decisions they had made in Cabinet.

"The public will be dismayed that some people who have been in the Cabinet making decisions about privatisation are now sitting on the boards of companies benefiting from these privatisations. That makes the case for changes and for new rules very strongindeed,'' Mr Brown said."It is wrong to be involved in the privatised industries one year and benefit from the privatisation the next."

But Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, chairman of the bank, said the appointment would "broaden and deepen the experience of the bank's board".

Lord Wakeham, recently appointed chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, last night did not answer questions when he left PCC headquarters in London.

He is the latest in a line of senior Tory politicians to leave the Cabinet for directorships, and joins ex-chancellor Norman Lamont on the Rothschild's board. Ex-Cabinet ministers who have joined boards of companies involved in the privatisation programmes include John MacGregor (merchant bankers Hill Samuel), Lord Tebbit (BT), Lord Walker (British Gas), Lord Young (Cable and Wireless) and Sir Norman Fowler (National Freight Consortium).

[TonyGosling]

NM Rothschild pitches motorway privatisation plan

(TIMES ONLINE) A radical plan to raise £100 billion by privatising the motorway network has been presented to the three main political parties by NM Rothschild, the influential investment bank.

Rothschild, an architect of several privatisations, made its pitch in the weeks running up to the summer recess on July 21, Whitehall sources said. Bankers told leading politicians that the sale of the roads overseen by the Highways Agency — all motorways and most big trunk roads — could help revive battered public finances.

Toll-road companies and infrastructure funds would compete to operate and maintain stretches of the network.

In one version of the scheme, the government would pay for upkeep through a system of “shadow” tolls. A more radical, and less politically palatable, option would be for companies to charge motorists directly through toll booths or electronic card readers. The RAC Foundation, a motorists’ group, advocated privatisation in a report last week.

The Rothschild plan has already won the support of Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader and Treasury spokesman.

“This is an attractive, positive idea which could release considerable resources to the public finances and may have real environmental merits,” Cable said. “The scale of it is vast — it makes rail privatisation look like small beer.”

Theresa Villiers, the shadow transport secretary, said the Conservatives had “no plans” to back Rothschild’s proposals: “Rothschilds, like many other banks and consultancies, have approached me and my team on a range of ideas for our transport network, including their ideas for our road infrastructure, but we are not working on any proposals for privatisation of the strategic road network and have no plans to do so.”

Motorway privatisation was considered by John Major’s Conservative administration, which sold British Rail, but was rejected.

A spokesman at the Department for Transport said: “It is not unusual for organisations to suggest ideas to government departments but ultimately all policy is decided by ministers and there are no plans to sell off a stake in the Highways Agency.” Rothschild declined to comment.

The bank was behind many of the key privatisations of the 1980s and 1990s, including British Steel, British Gas and British Coal. It has close links to the Conservatives, having employed several senior Party figures including Lord Lamont, John Redwood and Lord Wakeham. Oliver Letwin, the former shadow chancellor, works there part-time.

Politicians of all Parties are seeking ways to decrease the need for large tax rises or heavy cuts in public services. The bank bailouts and a recent collapse in tax revenues has seen public sector debt rise to more than £800 billion, 56.8% of GDP — up from 35.5% just two years ago.

Road tolls are unpopular, however. When Labour mooted road pricing two years ago, more than 230,000 signed a petition on the Downing Street decrying the plan .

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 814923.ece

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Rothschild’s Vote of Confidence: BlackRock Emerges as a Strategic Partner

Behind paywall

https://medium.com/@sportnft2022/rothsc ... 0779cc166a

Sep 18, 2023

Rothschild, the renowned global investment bank, has recently placed its faith in BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm. This strategic partnership between two financial powerhouses signifies a significant development in the financial services industry. In this article, we delve into the details of Rothschild’s decision and explore the potential implications of this collaboration.

Rothschild’s Rationale

By aligning with BlackRock, Rothschild aims to tap into the extensive expertise and resources that the asset management giant possesses. The move showcases Rothschild’s recognition of BlackRock’s reputation for generating superior investment returns across a wide range of asset classes. Through this partnership, Rothschild aims to fortify its position as a leading global financial institution and enhance its ability to deliver exceptional investment advisory solutions to its clients.

BlackRock’s Strengths

BlackRock’s robust investment management capabilities, global reach, and vast array of financial products and services make it an attractive partner for Rothschild. With a presence in over 100 countries and managing trillions of dollars in assets, BlackRock has demonstrated its ability to navigate complex market conditions while producing consistent long-term performance. This strategic alliance further solidifies BlackRock’s standing as a preferred asset manager for top-tier financial institutions.

Collaborative Opportunities

The Rothschild-BlackRock partnership presents numerous collaborative opportunities across various areas of finance. Rothschild’s extensive network and deep industry knowledge, combined with BlackRock’s investment prowess and technology-driven approach, could result in innovative investment strategies, tailored wealth management solutions, and enhanced risk management frameworks. In an ever-changing financial landscape, this alliance positions both firms to adapt and thrive in the face of evolving market dynamics.

The Future Outlook

With Rothschild placing its faith in BlackRock, the two firms are poised to create a powerful force within the financial services industry This collaboration not only elevates Rothschild’s position in the market but also providesRock with an opportunity to deepen its relationships with important institutional clients. Moreover, the joint expertise of both firms may fuel advancements in sustainable investing, promoting responsible financial practices and shaping the future of responsible capitalism.

Rothschild’s decision to partner with BlackRock represents a significant move within the financial industry, solidifying both firms’ positions as leaders in their respective fields. By leveraging BlackRock’s investment acumen and global reach, Rothschild aims to enhance its advisory capabilities and better serve its clients. This alliance not only amplifies the potential for innovative investment solutions but also underscores the importance of collaboration and strategic partnerships amidst an ever-evolving financial landscape. As the partnership unfolds, the possibilities for growth and market influence for both Rothschild and BlackRock are set to expand, reshaping the future of finance.

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

Read distraction-free on Substack
Agents for the Rothschilds
https://escapekey.substack.com/p/agents ... othschilds

Feb 13, 2026

In 2016, the publisher De Gruyter released an essay by Rainer Liedtke titled Agents for the Rothschilds: A Nineteenth-Century Information Network1.

Drawing on the Rothschild Archive London — correspondence from over one hundred business agents working for the various Rothschild houses — Liedtke documented a recruitment and intelligence operation that spanned the European continent and reached into Latin America for most of the nineteenth century.

The paper describes a system in which agents were placed in locations where the Rothschild banks did not maintain a permanent presence. These agents carried out business transactions, gathered political and economic intelligence, and forwarded information that enabled the family to make decisions ahead of competitors and, frequently, ahead of even governments.

Liedtke notes that what we now would consider insider trading ‘was commonplace in nineteenth-century finance and part of the salary package of employees of financial institutions’. The agents were not merely tolerated in this practice — they were compensated through it.

The recruitment criteria tell their own story. Trust was paramount, and two principal routes existed for earning it: being a relation of the family, or having worked within one of the houses for a considerable period. Marriage was the preferred option, and these marriages ensured that important business locations were ‘covered in the long run by trustworthy representatives’.

Liedtke is explicit about one boundary:

… such men never gained access to the decision-making circle of the family but instead maintained their own business interests separately, albeit profiting significantly from contacts to the Rothschild network.

The agents were operationally essential, but they remained permanently outside the core. Only born Rothschilds were fully trusted. The ‘quintessential criterion’ for whether a Rothschild bank existed in a given city was whether a Rothschild was willing to move there.

He also documents a deliberate policy of heterogeneity. Despite being Jewish, the Rothschilds employed non-Jewish agents as a matter of strategy. A homogeneous network, Liedtke explains, would be ‘self-referential’ — limited to the social circles its members already moved in.

Diversity of background expanded the network’s reach into drawing rooms, ministries and trading floors that a uniformly Jewish network could not access. Agents sent to locations where they had no prior ties were valuable precisely because they lacked local loyalties — their ‘foreignness’ meant their primary allegiance remained with the principals abroad, uncompromised by existing relationships in the places where they operated.

Liedtke records a shift over time in what the principals expected. In the early decades, the network’s value lay in raw market data — commodity prices, exchange rates, shipping movements. After the telegraph commoditised this kind of information in the mid-nineteenth century, the agents’ importance shifted towards strategic political assessment: who was likely to form a government, which minister could be cultivated, what policy was being contemplated before it was announced.

Only one vulnerability recurs in the archive. August Schönberg, dispatched to New York and later known as August Belmont, declared himself the Rothschild agent on Wall Street without authorisation. The distance between New York and London made control impossible. Belmont could not be dislodged, and the family was forced to tolerate an agent who had, in effect, gone rogue.

Liedtke treats Belmont as the system’s one significant failure.

Fritz Stern’s Gold and Iron2 (1977) provides the most detailed case study of the template in action. Gerson von Bleichröder — whose family bank functioned as a ‘branch office in Berlin of the Rothschild banking house’ — became Bismarck’s personal financial agent, managed his portfolio, bribed officials on his behalf, financed wars while bypassing parliamentary opposition, and served as intermediary between European finance and the Prussian state. Bleichröder’s ‘remarkable and long-running relationship with the Rothschilds made his services doubly worthwhile to both Bismarck and Germany’.

Yet Bleichröder was never admitted to the inner circle of power. After Bismarck’s death, he ‘dropped out of German historiography like a stone in water’ — the agent vanished while the principal endured.

The consequences of Bleichröder’s agency extended well beyond Bismarck’s portfolio. Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, Bismarck sent Bleichröder to Versailles as his financial adviser to negotiate the terms of the French indemnity. Bleichröder advised on the amount — he had recommended four billion francs; the final figure was five billion, roughly a quarter of French GDP — and subsequently handled the technical processing of reparation payments on the German side. For these services he received the Iron Cross, a military decoration awarded to a banker.

On the French side, it was Alphonse de Rothschild, head of the Paris house, who led the syndicate that raised the bonds to pay the indemnity3. Bleichröder’s own firm then organised a German syndicate to purchase those French bonds. The Rothschild network profited from both ends of a five-billion-franc transaction that reshaped the European balance of power.

The humiliation of the 1871 terms drove France’s demands at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which opened on the 18th of January — the anniversary of Wilhelm I’s proclamation at Versailles in 1871. Clemenceau sought explicit revenge. The resulting reparations of 132 billion gold marks wrecked the German economy, and it was those reparations that created the institutional justification for the Bank for International Settlements, established in 1930 to administer the payment schedule.

The BIS, however, was modelled on more than the reparations problem. At the Brussels International Monetary Conference of 1892, Julius Wolf, a professor at the University of Breslau, had submitted a project for internationally issued, gold-backed clearing certificates administered by a joint institution in a neutral country — in effect, a globalisation of the clearing house architecture.

The Origin of Global Governance

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10 March 2025

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At the same conference, Alfred de Rothschild, a former Director of the Bank of England, presented his own paper advocating the London Bankers’ Clearing House as a system approaching ‘perfection’ and arguing against a physical coinage solution in favour of paper certificates representing quantities of metal.

Wolf’s proposal extended onto the international plane exactly the architecture Alfred de Rothschild was championing domestically. The Rothschild agent who shaped the 1871 terms thus set in motion a chain of consequences — the humiliation, the revenge, the reparations, the institution — that landed on a design presented alongside Alfred de Rothschild’s own advocacy at the same table.

Own nothing. Control everything.

14 June 2025

The function the BIS was designed to perform — clearing sovereign obligations between states, intermediating capital flows across borders — 


The function the BIS was designed to perform — clearing sovereign obligations between states, intermediating capital flows across borders — had previously been performed by multinational merchant banks, the Rothschilds foremost among them. Bleichröder processing reparation payments on the German side while Alphonse de Rothschild raised the bonds on the French side was the BIS function carried out by private agents.

When the institution was constituted in 1930, its founding governance reflected this lineage. The entire American share subscription went not to the Federal Reserve but to a consortium of private banks led by JP Morgan. Parts of the Belgian and French issues also went to private shareholders. In the 1930s, nearly a third of all issued capital was privately held. The corporate form was explicitly chosen, in the words of the Oxford handbook entry, to ‘insulate the Bank from governmental interference’.

An internal Federal Reserve Bank of New York memo from 1929 warned that the bankers’ plan ‘suggests too great of power conferred on private stockholders’ and that private ownership ‘introduces the pressure of profits as opposed to the motive of public service’. The US government did not ratify Federal Reserve board membership until 1994; private shareholders were not bought out until 2001–2005, and only after an arbitration fight.

For over seventy years, the central bank of central banks had private banking interests sitting in its equity.


Black Tuesday
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12 March 2025
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The clearing house template also migrated into international politics.

In 1916, Leonard Woolf — commissioned by the Fabian Society and a close friend of Keynes — published International Government, which applied the same layered mediation to relations between states: voluntary associations intermediating between governments, permanent secretariats above them, subsidiarity distributing responsibility downward while authority flowed upward.

International organisations would progressively siphon sovereignty off individual states.


International Government
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The League of Nations was built on this blueprint, and the United Nations inherited it. The same architecture was deployed across both finance and politics within a single generation — and frequently by the same people.


Dumbarton Oaks
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The period during which Liedtke’s archival coverage begins to thin — the late nineteenth and early twentieth century — coincides precisely with this institutional migration. The private functions the agent network had performed for a century were being absorbed into formal organisations: the BIS for sovereign clearing, the League and later the UN for political mediation, the CFR and Chatham House for transatlantic policy coordination. Cecil Rhodes’s vision for the latter — a network of elite influence bridging the Anglo-American world — ran through Rothschild financing from its inception.

The agent network did not disappear, but its function changed. Where the nineteenth-century agents had managed the family’s direct business, the twentieth-century successors would manage the institutional architecture that replaced it — operating not within the Rothschild banks but within the sovereign and multilateral bodies that now performed the Rothschild banks’ historical role at a vastly larger scale.

The family’s reach extended into state intelligence as well.

Victor Rothschild served in MI5 during the Second World War, and his London flat functioned as a gathering point for fellow members of the Cambridge Apostles — a secretive Cambridge society whose membership in the early 1930s, according to MI5’s own files, was ‘nearly all’ communist. Several of those who frequented the flat, including Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, were later exposed as Soviet agents.

Woolf and Keynes were also Apostles — as documented in declassified MI5 records and published accounts by former intelligence officers.


The Cambridge Apostles
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Victor later served as research director of Shell, where in 1966 he commissioned James Lovelock to write an essay titled 'Some thoughts on the year 2000'. Lovelock has acknowledged that this work was instrumental in setting him on the intellectual journey that produced his Gaia hypothesis — the view of Earth as a self-regulating organism that would, decades later, provide the conceptual foundation for planetary-scale environmental governance.


The Gaia Hypothesis
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26 November 2025
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Niall Ferguson’s two-volume The House of Rothschild4 (1998–1999), written with unprecedented access to the family archives, documents the broader pattern: a transnational business partnership ‘preserved over five generations through family loyalty, written agreements, and intrafamily marriage’. Between 1824 and 1877, fifteen of twenty-one Rothschild marriages were between direct descendants.

Adam Kuper — who analysed Ferguson’s archive material in a 2001 paper for Social Anthropology5 — arrived at a similar figure: more than 70 percent of marriages in this period were with a father’s brother’s daughter or father’s brother’s son’s daughter, arranged specifically to sustain the partnership between branches. Kuper concluded that the Rothschilds were likely ‘the only banking family who had such an explicit strategy of endogamy’. He also found that the pattern ceased abruptly when the rise of joint-stock companies changed the banking environment — the family could no longer staff every node with born Rothschilds, and the role of marriage recruits and external agents became correspondingly more important.

Thus, across four independent academic studies the method is clear: agents placed where the family requires presence but does not wish to reside, recruited through marriage or long service, compensated through access rather than salary, deliberately heterogeneous, publicly visible and socially prestigious by association, but permanently excluded from the family’s decision-making core.

What these sources collectively describe is a private intelligence operation — one that enabled the family to act ahead of competitors and governments for the better part of a century.

The question is whether this method continued into the late twentieth century.

The Epstein Correspondence
The three Epstein essays published on this Substack over the past week traced a network of connections radiating outward from Jeffrey Epstein to figures associated with the Rothschild family. The correspondence released following the US Virgin Islands litigation and the January 2026 DOJ release — over six million pages in total — provides a considerable documentary record.

The most extensively documented relationship is with Ariane de Rothschild, who appears in approximately 5,500 documents in the archive, a volume exceeded by only a handful of figures. Born Ariane Langner in San Salvador, she married Benjamin de Rothschild of the Edmond branch in 1999 — and later became the first person without Rothschild lineage to head a Rothschild-branded financial institution. In Liedtke’s terminology she is a marriage recruit, though the correspondence shows her operating as considerably more.


Blended Finance
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As documented in the third essay of this series, the correspondence establishes a three-tier reporting line running from Jacob Rothschild through Ariane to Epstein.

Jacob initiates — drafting family governance letters, brokering introductions, offering to raise acquisition opportunities with bank CEOs.

Ariane executes and reports — every significant Jacob communication forwarded to Epstein’s inbox, usually with a one-line reaction.

Epstein manages downward — Ehud Barak, Larry Summers, the operational network — and reports upward to Ariane, who defers upward to Jacob.

The $25 million contract, the DOJ coordination through a former White House Counsel, and the systematic forwarding of confidential intra-family correspondence all run in the same direction: the family principal visible only through the intermediary’s forwards, the intermediary operationally present and signing contracts, the agent below managing intelligence and operations.

When Epstein was asked, he denied. On 30 August 2016, Boris Nikolic emailed him a two-word question: ‘Jacob Rothschild?’ Epstein replied: ‘No’. He denied knowing Jacob, yet sat on large amounts of Jacob’s forwarded emails.


Epstein
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Epstein II
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Epstein III
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11 Feb
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Parallels
The parallels with Liedtke’s framework are visible in almost every element of the documented network.

Epstein was positioned in locations — New York, the US Virgin Islands, Paris — where the Rothschild banks did not maintain direct operational control but had significant interests. He gathered intelligence of the most privileged kind: Treasury meeting minutes forwarded by Peter Mandelson while serving as Business Secretary, advance notice of the €500 billion Euro bailout, strategic assessments of Rothschild inter-branch dynamics relayed to him by Ariane herself.

In March 2014, Ariane told Epstein she wanted to discuss Ukraine in an upcoming meeting; he replied that the upheaval ‘should provide many opportunites, many’6. This was the kind of political assessment that Liedtke describes as having replaced raw market data once the telegraph made commodity prices universally available.


He was compensated through access to deal flow and investment opportunities rather than a salary. The $25 million Rothschild contract was ostensibly for ‘risk analysis’ and ‘algorithm-related services’, with payment explicitly linked to outstanding matters between the Edmond de Rothschild group and US authorities. The $158 million in Leon Black advisory fees and the Wexner property transfer followed the same logic — each was payment for services within a specific domain.

The compensation model also functioned as a control mechanism. If an agent’s income depends entirely on continued access to the network’s deal flow, withdrawal of that access is equivalent to financial annihilation. The agent does not need to be explicitly threatened. The structure of the compensation ensures loyalty automatically, which is why disloyalty was, as Liedtke notes, ‘an extremely rare occurrence, because almost nobody wanted to put a usually profitable relation with the foremost financial dynasty of its time at risk’. The profitable dependency is the leash.

The first essay in this series described his funding model as deliberately distributed: ‘Ariane cannot use him if he belongs to Jacob. Summers cannot use him if he belongs to Ariane’. An agent funded by multiple parties and owned by none could route between them. Liedtke describes the identical arrangement in the nineteenth century: agents who were ‘open for offers from all bidders and not steeped in local intrigues’.

His lack of institutional affiliation served the same function as the ‘foreignness’ Liedtke identifies. Epstein held no government office, ran no bank, led no intelligence agency, held no academic post. His allegiance ran to the network, not to any national or corporate body within it.

The network around him was remarkably heterogeneous: Israeli military intelligence, British royalty, American Treasury secretaries, Silicon Valley founders, Yale network scientists, Latvian cryptographers, Mongolian presidents, Gulf sovereign wealth. Each node gave access to institutions and individuals the others struggled to reach — precisely the rationale Liedtke identifies for the Rothschilds’ deliberate recruitment across social, religious and national lines.

And the boundary held. Epstein was operationally essential, but he was never part of the inner circle — someone who ‘profited significantly from contacts to the Rothschild network’ while maintaining ‘business interests separately’.

The Belmont Problem
The Belmont problem also has its modern counterpart. When Epstein was denied his fee on the Gates-JPMorgan impact investing vehicle he had helped design, the correspondence shows his shift in behaviour. Draft emails appear in the archive containing allegations about Gates’s personal conduct and a fabricated resignation letter written in the voice of Boris Nikolic, Gates’s chief science adviser, confessing to complicity. Whether these were sent is secondary — their existence demonstrates Liedtke's identified vulnerability — the system's single recurring failure: the agent who accumulates enough independent knowledge to threaten the principals.

Belmont emancipated himself through distance. Epstein attempted to leverage himself through disclosure. The switchboard that knew what each node had done — because it had facilitated the connections — turned on the network when denied its fee.

Johann Rupert, the South African billionaire in direct business partnership with the Rothschild family since 1997, has stated publicly that Ariane ‘hid her relationship’ with Epstein from family business partners — the precondition for exactly the kind of leverage a disgruntled agent might attempt.

The attempt was never completed. On 29 July 2019, Epstein’s lawyers met with FBI and SDNY prosecutors and raised, in general terms, the possibility of their client’s cooperation. A cooperating Epstein would not have been a peripheral witness. He would have been the routing table documenting itself — every introduction, every strategic instruction, every intelligence flow mapped from the only position that saw all of them simultaneously. Twelve days later, he was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Belmont, operating at a distance that made control impossible, was tolerated. Epstein, operating at a distance that made cooperation possible, was not. The nineteenth-century resolution of the agent vulnerability was exile. The twenty-first-century resolution was permanent.

The Marriage Recruits
The marriage-recruit pattern documented by Liedtke, Kuper and Ferguson for the nineteenth century has direct contemporary parallels beyond Ariane de Rothschild.

Lynn Forester married Sir Evelyn de Rothschild in 2000, with the introduction reportedly facilitated by Henry Kissinger at the Bilderberg conference. She has since maintained an extraordinary public profile — from the Council for Inclusive Capitalism to the Vatican partnership with Pope Francis — operating as Liedtke describes: a link between the family’s interests and the institutions those interests seek to influence.

The correspondence between Lynn Forester de Rothschild and Hillary Clinton, documented in the Podesta and Clinton server emails, shows a reporting pattern similar to the Ariane-Epstein channel.


Inclusive Capitalism
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29 May 2025
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Marcus Agius is perhaps the cleanest example of the template in plain sight. In 1971, he married Katherine de Rothschild, daughter of Edmund Leopold de Rothschild of the English branch — a Roman Catholic marrying into the Jewish banking dynasty, matching the deliberate cross-religious recruitment Liedtke documents. After 34 years at Lazard, rising to chairman of the London branch and deputy chairman of Lazard LLC, Agius became chairman of Barclays in 2007.

Simultaneously, he served as chairman of the British Bankers’ Association, which administered LIBOR, as senior non-executive director of the BBC’s executive board, and as one of only three trustees of the Bilderberg Group. The scale of what a single marriage-recruit placement controlled warrants emphasis. LIBOR was the benchmark interest rate for an estimated $350 trillion in financial instruments globally — mortgages, derivatives, corporate loans, sovereign debt. Agius chaired both the bank that rigged the rate and the association that administered it7. A marriage recruit, living on the family estate at Exbury in Hampshire, occupied the position that set the price of global money while simultaneously chairing the body responsible for the integrity of the rate-setting process. He resigned as Barclays chairman in July 2012 following the manipulation scandal. His country home remains Exbury. The Rothschild Archive’s own website files his wife under her maiden name.

Hillary Clinton’s behaviour suggests a similar position — positioned on both sides of the impact investing pipeline, setting the standards, approving the OPIC tranche, and benefiting from the flow.

Stern’s Bleichröder ran a branch office in Berlin of the Rothschild banking house while serving as Bismarck’s personal financial agent. Agius chaired Barclays while living at the family estate. The marriage, the placement at a major financial institution, the accumulation of positions across finance, media and transatlantic policy, and the residence on Rothschild property are all matters of public record.

Jacob Rothschild also maintained a direct relationship with Barclays leadership independently of the Agius connection — his March 2016 email to Ariane mentions lunching with Jes Staley8, who became Barclays CEO in 2015 — suggesting redundant paths into the same institution across different periods. The redundancy is consistent with the method. You verify assets you do not fully control by maintaining more than one route to them.




The Long-Service Path
Marriage, however, was only one of Liedtke’s two recruitment paths. The second — long service within the house — also has contemporary candidates. Wilbur Ross spent twenty-four years at Rothschild Inc. in New York before becoming US Commerce Secretary9. Emmanuel Macron worked at Rothschild & Cie Banque before entering the Élysée and the presidency10. Thierry Breton served as a senior adviser at Rothschild & Cie — a detail he omitted from his EU Commissioner CV — before taking charge of the European Commission’s internal market portfolio11.

In Britain, John Redwood moved from head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit to a directorship at N.M. Rothschild12; Oliver Letwin followed the same path, succeeding Redwood before returning to government as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster13. The Spectator noted the pattern as early as 1988, listing Rothschild alumni across Downing Street and the Treasury and observing that the bank’s privatisation expertise14 — developed advising the British government — was then exported to Spain, Malaysia, Singapore, Chile and Turkey.

And the heterogeneity criterion has its own specimen. Klaus Mangold, a German industrialist with no family ties, chaired both Rothschild GmbH and Rothschild Russia & CIS for more than a decade while serving as Honorary Consul of the Russian Federation15. Known in the German press as ‘Mr Russia’, he facilitated the Paks II nuclear project between Hungary and Rosatom, entering rooms in Moscow and Budapest that no Rothschild could.

The firm’s public alumni roster lists, among others, a former French president, a former German chancellor, a former governor of the Bank of England, and a former US commerce secretary.

The nineteenth-century agents operated within the family’s private banking network. Their twentieth and twenty-first-century successors operate within the institutional architecture that absorbed and replaced it — the central banks, the multilateral bodies, the regulatory commissions, the sovereign governments that now perform at state level what the Rothschild houses once performed privately. Ross at Commerce, Macron at the Élysée, Breton at the European Commission — these are not placements into the family’s business. They are placements into the institutions that now carry out the family’s historical function at sovereign scale. The agent register, it would appear, has not grown shorter with time.

[TonyGosling]

See dedicated Michael Crick paper thread
https://911forum.org.uk/viewtopic.php?p=182562

The Poll Tax:
Mrs Thatcher's Greatest Blunder?
by MICHAEL CRICK and ADRIAN VAN KLAVEREN
FRANK CASS of LONDON, Winter 1991,
ISSN 0950-9224
Michacl Crick is" reporter with BBC Panorama and the author of The March of Militant
(London: labcr, 19~6), and Adrian Van Klaveren is a BBC producer.
Contemporary Record, VoI.S, No.3, Winter 1991, pp. 397-416
PUBLlSHED BY FRANK CASS. LONDON
398 CONTEMPORARY RECORD

On the evening of Tuesday 12 March 1986 a small party was held at a
house in Kensington. Those present included some of the cleverest brains
in the country: Victor Rothschild, the scientist and banker who had once
directed the Think Tank; Oliver Letwin, a member of Mrs Thatcher's
policy unit; Sir Leonard Hoffmann, a high court judge; Christopher
Foster, a former LSE economics professor who ran Coopers and
Lybrand's public policy unit; and Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State
for the Environment. The evening's host was probably as bright as any of
his guests: a fellow of All Souls who since his teens had been tipped as a
future Prime Minister, the then Minister of State for the Environment,
William Waldegrave.
For 18 months the assembled company - politicians, civil servants,
academics and outside advisers - had been grappling with one of the most
difficult problems in British politics. Now, as they enjoyed food prepared
by Caroline Waldegrave, managing director of the Prue Leith cookery
school, it was time to celebrate. Between them these men and women had
apparently succeeded where numerous previous enquiries had failed.
They had devised a new scheme to finance local government spending,
and to replace the long-despised domestic rating system. It was designed
to make local authorities more accountable to their voters, and more
responsible in their taxing and spending. Although fewof those present
considered themselves Thatcherites ideologically, most of them admired
the Prime Minister and were pleased to have found a solution she
wholeheartedly approved of. When Mrs Thatcher spoke of a radical
manifesto for the next election, Kenneth Baker told the gathering, their
work was what she was talking about. Privately, however, some of
WilIiam Waldegrave's guests could not believe that the Conservatives
would ever carry out the scheme they had dreamed up.
The poll tax would soon be described by Mrs Thatcher as the 'flagship'
of her third term, but in retrospect it will probably go down as the iceberg
that sank her - her greatest blunder. Although disagreements over
Europe were the immediate cause of her downfall in the autumn of 1990,
it was theunpopularity of the poll tax or community charge which caused
somany Tory MPs to doubt whether Margaret Thatcher could pull off a
fourthelection victory. Indeed, in thechronicles of disastrous mistakes
made by British governments, the poll tax is one of the worst. What is so
remarkable is that so far only Mrs Thatcher herself seems to have been
blamed. The poll tax cost the Treasury billions in subsidies; it has caused
chaos in local government; it greatly damaged the Tories' election
prospects. The main proponents of the poll tax, who invented it well
before Mrs Thatcher gave her stamp of approval, managed to escape
unscathed. Indeed what is so remarkable is how easily several of them
have progressed to higher jobs in government.
For a complete account of how Mrs Thatcher and her party came to
adopt the poll tax we will have to wait until the public records become
available around 2015. Even then we may not get the full history. In
December 1990 BBC 'Panorama' began piecing together an interim
version of the story, attempting to trace the true origins of the poll tax,
and to ascertain exactly who deserves responsibility or blame. Eventually
our research was overtaken by the Gulf War, and it will never be used for
a 'Panorama' programme. But it isstill worth placing some of our work on
record.
Today many are understandably reluctant to talk about their role in the
affair. On the other hand, a few unrepentant souls are happy even to
exaggerate their contribution. Quite how the poll tax came to be adopted
between 1984 and 1986 is a fascinating tale, rich in irony and amusing
twists. Several intriguing questions have yet to be answered.
The story goes back to 1974 when Edward Heath appointed Margaret
Thatcher as Shadow Environment Secretary following the Conservatives'
February election defeat.....