The idea came from Jozef Retinger, a Polish political adviser who had spent the war years organizing exile governments in London and was alarmed by the strain growing between Europe and America. He thought the answer was a regular off-the-record conversation between people who could actually move the dial. He brought the proposal to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who agreed to promote it; to former Belgian prime minister Paul van Zeeland; and to Paul Rijkens, then head of Unilever. Bernhard called Walter Bedell Smith at the CIA, who handed the file to Eisenhower's adviser Charles Douglas Jackson. The guest list was assembled from two attendees per country - one conservative, one liberal. The Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek had a quiet location and enough rooms. It was chosen for those reasons.

What made Bilderberg distinctive was not the people but the rule. Under the Chatham House Rule, attendees may use any information they hear at the meeting, but they may not attribute it to a named speaker. The justification is candor: politicians and chief executives who would never say anything interesting on a hot microphone might actually say what they think when no one can later quote them. Former chairman Etienne Davignon defended this in 2011 by pointing out that the alternative was a press release. The cost is transparency. Critics across the political spectrum have noted, fairly, that senior policymakers meeting privately with corporate lobbyists in a hotel booked entirely for the purpose is exactly the sort of arrangement that warrants public scrutiny.

A steering committee of roughly thirty-six people - two from each of about eighteen nations - decides the program and the guest list. There is a chairman and an Honorary Secretary General, and a small office in Holland that picks the host country each year. The host then has to book an entire hotel for four days and arrange catering, transport, and security. Costs are covered by donations from corporations like Barclays, Fiat, GlaxoSmithKline, Heinz, Nokia, and Xerox. Around 120 to 150 people attend each year. There are no resolutions, no votes, no policy statements. The Swedish industrialist Marcus Wallenberg Jr. served on the steering committee and attended twenty-two times before his death in 1982. His grandson Jacob has been seventeen times. That is how the network sustains itself - through people who keep coming back.

Because the meetings are secret, people fill in the secret. From the 1970s onward, a small industry of conspiracy theories has grown around Bilderberg. Some on the left describe it as the boardroom of global capitalism. Some on the right describe it as the planning arm of world government. Fidel Castro wrote about it in Granma in 2010. Alex Jones has made a career of it. Jesse Ventura made an episode about it in 2009. The theories disagree wildly with each other about what Bilderberg is supposedly doing, which is itself a clue. Davignon's response, given to the BBC in 2005, has the merit of dry honesty: 'When people say this is a secret government of the world I say that if we were a secret government of the world we should be bloody ashamed of ourselves.' The truth is more mundane. It is a conference.

Hotel de Bilderberg is still in Oosterbeek and still operating, now as one of twelve hotels and an event venue in the Bilderberg chain. Guests can book a room there. The 71st Bilderberg Meeting was held from 12 to 15 June 2025 in Stockholm; the conference left its founding hotel behind decades ago and now travels, hosted by a different country each year. But the name stays. Seventy years after a few exhausted postwar diplomats sat down in the beech woods west of Arnhem and tried to think their way out of another world war, the place where they sat is still the word for what they started.