The Invisible Government

“Prominent Soviet and American citizens will hold a week-long unofficial conference…” So began a 1961 New York Times report on a meeting arranged by the Council on Foreign Relations. To Dan Smoot, that gathering said more about America’s true direction than President Kennedy’s much-touted summit with Khrushchev. In The Invisible Government, Smoot names the CFR as the central mechanism of control in U.S. policy — a network more consequential than elections or party lines.

Smoot, a former FBI agent, traces the thread from George Washington’s warning against entangling alliances, through Colonel Edward House’s influence on Woodrow Wilson, to the 1919 dinner in Paris where the Council on Foreign Relations was conceived. From there, he follows the money — Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford — and the growing dominance of the CFR in shaping State Department decisions and mass-media narratives.

The book unfolds chapter by chapter through the institutions that interlock with the Council: the Foreign Policy Association, the Committee for Economic Development, the Business Advisory Council, the Advertising Council. Smoot exposes how United Nations propaganda, foreign aid schemes, and globalist conferences are sold to the American people as benevolence, while steadily eroding independence. Names like Rostow, Kennan, Cousins, Mead, and Benton appear not as isolated actors but as linked parts of a system.

What makes The Invisible Government unique is its evidentiary weight: rosters, publications, and congressional records, not rumor. Smoot builds the case that America’s sovereignty is under calculated assault, with the CFR at the hub of an elite machine bent on merging the United States into a socialist world order.

For readers determined to understand how policy is made — and unmade — not in Washington alone but in private councils, tax-exempt foundations, and boardrooms, Smoot’s work remains indispensable. First printed in 1962, it reads today as both historical record and urgent warning: freedom survives only when the hidden levers of power are dragged into the light. (2020ed, pb, 291pp)