The Trilateral Commission is one of the few subjects on which John Kiriakou says he changed his mind because of a single first-hand account.
He used, in his own words, to “piss all over people’s analysis” when they started talking about the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg and the Shangri-La conference.[1]
That earlier posture is on the record. Pressed in 2017 on whether he had problems with the official version of 11 September, Kiriakou said he did — but drew a line first: “I’m not what you might call a 911 truther, I don’t believe that there was a controlled explosion or that Jews did it or the trilateral commission.” What he did believe was narrower and documentary: that the twenty-eight pages redacted from the 9/11 Commission report, which the American public is not allowed to see, contain evidence of official Saudi government involvement.[2][3] The Commission was, in that period, a stand-in for the kind of claim he refused to make.
The account
What changed it was somebody to whom he says he used to be very close, and about whom a court order exists barring him from speaking in any public forum — she rose high enough in a corporate structure to be invited, and went.[1][4] Kiriakou says he could not wait to hear what it was like. Her answer: “it’s a lot of really rich, really important people talking about arms deals.” All of it about arms deals — except Davos, which she said was where they talked about how to manage the global economy. Asked whether that meant they really do set policy, she said yes, she had seen it with her own eyes.[5][6]
He has given the same account since, in slightly harder terms. The meetings she attended he lists as the Trilateral Commission, the Shangri-La summit and Davos, and her verdict as unqualified: “they all take place just to sell weapons and weapon systems. That’s all anybody ever talks about.” The contrast she drew was between the billing and the business — “the politicians think the big thoughts and, you know, this is what I’d like to do and what do you think of this idea with uh you know, clean energy or whatever. But when it comes down to it at the end of the day, it’s all about selling weapons.”[7][8]
Within that set the Trilateral Commission holds a particular rank in his description — “of all of these different groups” it is “the one that’s most highfalutin”: the Henry Kissingers and Hillary Clintons of the world meeting the Tony Blairs and the chief executives of the world’s biggest corporations. What they nominally discuss is international policy — what would be best for the United States, or the European Union, or international banking. “But in the end, it’s really all about making military sales.”[8][9]
Hiding in plain sight
Kiriakou’s framing is deflationary rather than conspiratorial. These organisations are real and open: the Trilateral Commission has a website, Bilderberg lists all its attendees by name, “and you’ll recognise 80% of them.”[10][11] He notes drily that Bill Clinton was put on it after leaving office because he was bored — and that Jeffrey Epstein claimed membership too, which prompts the question Kiriakou puts to the whole story: “how do you even get there, buddy? You’re a kid from Coney Island.”[12][13]
Why arms deals
Asked why arms deals would dominate, Kiriakou’s answer is arithmetic. A full third of the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget goes to weapons and weapons systems — and that is before what the United States sells to other countries whose leaders attend these conferences.[14]
Asked the same question a second time — why gun sales should be of such high importance — he answered structurally rather than numerically: “that’s how the American economy runs. Uh post-9/11, we’re in a full-time permanent wartime economy.”[9][15] Put to him that arms trafficking therefore sits at the top of the pyramid of society, he did not disagree, and moved straight to the mechanism that keeps it there: the Pentagon has taken seventy-five years to arrange matters so that it does business with manufacturers in literally every one of the 435 congressional districts.[15]