Inside the Council for National Policy

Vazsonyi, a concert pianist who writes a column syndicated by Knight-Ridder, said CNP gave him a chance to meet people who shared his views.

"I knew very, very few people in the political world. I knew lots of musicians, but nobody in politics. Then someone said to me, 'There's a place for people who are and have been interested in what you're interested in, and you might like to be known by them.'

"That," he said, "was really the hook."

Quiet — Just the Way They Like It

CNP may simply be press-shy because of traditional qualms about the establishment media's secular, often politically liberal perspective, and because "they attribute things that individual members may do to us," Baldwin says.

The London Guardian linked arch-conservative gun-rights activist Larry Pratt with Attorney General John Aschroft by saying "the two men know each another from a secretive but highly influential right-wing religious group called the Council for National Policy."

More recently, when California gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon disclosed his campaign's contributors, The Associated Press made sure to note that four members of CNP had donated to Simon's campaign — as if conservatives donating to conservatives was worthy of a news story all its own. (Simon's father, the former treasury secretary, was a CNP member).

Other CNP press leaks have been less the product of liberal media snooping than of internal jockeying. When James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, told a CNP gathering in 1998 that he was thinking of withdrawing support for the Republican Party, rival conservative leaders made sure the national media got word of the speech.

The CNP remains obscure. Experienced Washingtonians often mistake them for another organization, the liberal Center for National Policy. The Washington Times reported Jan. 23 that Sen. John Kerry spoke to the Council for National Policy about AWNR drilling, when, in fact, the Massachusetts Democrat spoke to the Center for National Policy, a very different organization. Both the Council and Center are not to be confused with the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Or the National Center for Policy Analysis.

Porteous' group, The Institute for First Amendment Studies, posted the CNP's roster on its Web site and managed to slip past security at several CNP meetings throughout the 1990s and soon published details notes of the proceedings.

If their summaries are reliable — and the IFAS swears they are — the from-the-fly-on-the-wall thrill and the occasional agitated quotation for Democratic opposition research files do little to sustain the belief that the CNP is ruling America behind those French doors of the Fairfax hotel conference rooms.

"There's nothing wrong with what they are doing," Porteous said. "It's just that they're ultraconservative and a lot of people don't agree with that."

"I don't think they are out there pounding their chests," said Joel Kaplan, a Syracuse University journalism professor who has studied CNP's ties to conservative projects. "But I don't think that they're hiding either."