Four weeks before the Rio summit opened, a man called George Hunt walked into a small video studio in Boulder, Colorado, and asked the camera to roll. He read from a script. He apologised on tape for not being a professional actor and said his memory would not serve him with what he wanted to say. Then he laid out, on the record, what he had seen with his own eyes inside the meetings that produced the Rio agenda.
Hunt was not an activist. He ran a small environment company. He taught small business management at college. He was a Christian, conservative, polite, and careful with names and dates. None of that matters except for this: when the people who organise summits invite a man like that into the room as an official host, they assume he will be flattered, take the badge, and stay quiet. They picked the wrong man.
In 1987 he had served as an official host at the Fourth World Wilderness Congress in Denver. In 1991 he attended a follow up meeting in Estes Park. He went to caucuses in Des Moines. He kept his receipts. He kept his recordings. And in May 1992, with the Rio summit four weeks away, he sat down and tried to warn the public about what was coming.
He sent the tape out. He called it a video letter. He asked anyone who watched it to do one thing. Show it to five other people. A judge down the street. A councilman they knew. A neighbour. Pray, he said, that something might come of it. He really felt it was not too late.
It was, of course, already too late. The Rio summit went ahead. The treaties were signed. The architecture he was warning about is now thirty four years old and so embedded in the daily news that nobody recognises the foundations anymore. But the tape exists. So do the names. So do the clips. So does the Cecil Rhodes document he was handed at the Des Moines meeting, which we will come to in chapter VI.
What follows is what Hunt witnessed, told as Unmasked is telling it, in our voice, with his evidence on the record. Read it as you would read a court file. The witness is dead now. The exhibits are not.
He picked the wrong man to invite into the room.