Behind closed doors (of course), they are meeting this weekend in Lisbon. Some call them "the shadow government," "the Establishment," the "global elite" that runs the world.

They call themselves simply ... the Trilateral Commission. (Chills run up spine.)

Depending on which conspiracy theory you subscribe to -- and the Trilateral Commission has found its way into many -- this 19-year-old organization is anti-American, anti-democratic, anti-Christian or anti-worker, and is scheming ultimately to abolish the sovereignty of nations and establish one world government!

According to Lyndon LaRouche, fringe political candidate and convicted tax cheat, the Trilateral Commission is behind the international drug trade. A writer affiliated with the far-right Liberty Lobby says the commission is forever plotting to raise taxes on Americans, siphoning the money overseas. Evangelist Pat Robertson believes it is somehow linked to Freemasonry and the occult, that it springs "from the depth of something that is evil."

Preposterous, say members of the Trilateral Commission. It is merely a "discussion group" on world affairs, composed of high-level corporate and public-policy types from North America, Western Europe and Japan. The commission seeks only to promote international cooperation, for the betterment of everybody. Nothing sinister.

Its annual reports and task force papers are available for the public to read. Its membership list isn't secret. Just ask and the commission will send you stuff. Anyone who can dial directory assistance can get its New York phone number.

Still, plenty of ordinary, educated people have no idea what the Trilateral Commission is or what it does, even though its former members include George Bush and Jimmy Carter. There is a shroud of mystery around it.

The press secretary for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton's presidential campaign didn't even know that Clinton is on it! (Yes, Clinton is a Trilateralist too. Coincidence? Oh read on, my wide-eyed friend.)

Now the truth can be told about the 325 people on the Trilateral Commission, and the many previous members:

They do run the world!

The thing is, it has nothing to do with belonging to the Trilateral Commission. The TC is like a club for people who run the world anyway.

Like Paul Volcker, former head of the Federal Reserve System, who is the commission's new North American chairman. And Akio Morita, chairman and chief executive officer of Sony, the Japanese chairman. And Count Otto Lambsdorff, leader of Germany's Free Democratic Party, the European chairman.

Who else is on it? Well, as of last April, top executives of AT&T, ITT, Xerox, Mobil, Exxon, the Chase Manhattan Bank, First Chicago Corp., General Electric, TRW, Archer Daniels Midland, PepsiCo, RJR Nabisco and Goldman Sachs (not to mention Nissan, Toshiba and Fuji Bank). And such former foreign-policy ultracrats as Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert S. McNamara and George Shultz. And five U.S. senators, including John D. Rockefeller IV (of course). And House Speaker Tom Foley. And some professors.

There is a handful of women, including Katharine Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Co. (Chills run up spine.) A few black people too. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, for instance. But basically we're talking about lots and lots of middle-aged white guys.

Who's not on the Trilateral Commission? Not one professional athlete, playwright or pop star. Hey, who do you want running the world? Ted Danson?

From Right to Left Maybe because it meets behind closed doors, maybe because it's packed with powerful international capitalists, maybe because one of its principal founders was banker David Rockefeller, whose surname reads like "666" to those who demonize the Eastern Establishment -- whatever the reason, some folks just suspect the worst of the Trilateral Commission.

"These are not the types of people who get together for innocuous chitchat," says Jim Tucker, who writes for the Spotlight, newspaper of the Washington-based Liberty Lobby.

Let us survey the thickets of anti-Trilateralism.

"With the takeover by the Trilateral Commission of the United States government, through Jimmy Carter, there was an explosion of the drug culture and related degeneracy throughout the country."

That's from "A Program for America," published in 1985 by the "LaRouche Democratic Campaign." "It is a largely unspoken reality," the book continues, "that the bankers and the IMF {International Monetary Fund} encourage dope growing and traffic as 'profitable free enterprise' -- for the bloodsucking bankers!"

Co-conspirators, according to LaRouche, include the British monarchy, the Soviet Union and the "Zionist Lobby."

Three years ago, on the stage of a crowded rock-and-roll club in downtown Washington, a young black man in paramilitary garb asked a largely white audience: "Who runs this world?" After a pause, he said, "The Trilateral Commission." That was Professor Griff, then a member of the rap group Public Enemy. In a subsequent newspaper interview, Professor Griff mentioned the commission while describing a "wicked" global Jewish conspiracy.

In his 1991 book "The New World Order," Pat Robertson -- founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and a brief challenger for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination -- writes portentously:

"A single thread runs from the White House to the State Department to the Council on Foreign Relations to the Trilateral Commission to secret societies to extreme New Agers. There must be a new world order. ... There must be world government, a world police force, world courts, world banking and currency, and a world elite in charge of it all.

"I do not believe that normal men and women, if left to themselves, would spend a lifetime to form the world into a unified whole in order to control it. ... No, impulses of that sort do not spring from the human heart, or for that matter from God's heart."

Tucker, like Robertson, challenges the Trilateralists' "cover story" that they're encouraging international cooperation for everyone's betterment. "We can have trade with other nations, we can welcome their tourists, we can send food to starving children in Biafra," he'll tell you. "But not a U.N. flag flying over Old Glory."

He calls himself a longtime observer of the Trilateral Commission as well as the Bilderberg Group, which since 1954 has sponsored annual off-the-record policy discussions among prominent Western Europeans and North Americans. (Unlike the TC, the Bilderberg group has no formal membership. It is run by a chairman, a steering committee and an international advisory group.) Tucker sees Trilateralists, Bilderbergers and the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations -- established in 1921 and long led by David Rockefeller -- as a single elite network of globalists.

Tucker has traversed the United States and Europe to be near their meeting places, he says. Once, he even crashed a Trilateral Commission meeting. "I didn't understand it because the guy was speaking German. It was kind of dull. A few minutes later, though, I was tossed out." With a friendly chuckle, he adds, "It's a lot of fun being a right-winger, you know?"

Tucker also says he's got a source inside the Bilderberg group "whose name I only know as Pipeline." And it was Pipeline who provided Tucker with this stunning scoop in the April 20 edition of the Spotlight: Last June, Bill Clinton was "anointed" the Democratic presidential nominee by the Bilderberg group!

"I think the whole thing is rather ludicrous," says Clinton campaign spokesman Jeff Eller. "Governor Clinton made the decision to run and wasn't handpicked by anybody."

Criticism of the Trilateral Commission comes from the far left as well. To Holly Sklar, who edited the 1980 anthology "Trilateralism," the commission "represents the interests of multinational corporations and banks," which means it's contrary to the interests of Third World countries and workers all over. It wants wages kept low. It wants voters kept apathetic and polarized.

The Trilateral Commission is not a "conspiracy" and is not "omnipotent," Sklar says. "But that doesn't mean it's not influential." For example, she says the commission set out to economically "co-opt" OPEC, persuading countries like Saudi Arabia to put their petrodollars back into Western banks, and to buy weapons from the West, instead of investing in developing countries.

"I think that their vision of world order is not a world order that is good for most people," she says. "{It has} led very much to a system where a few people are enriched at the expense of very many."

Global Cooperation "I certainly don't see our purpose as one of protecting the interests of multinational corporations," says Charles B. Heck, North American director of the Trilateral Commission. "We're trying to think about foreign policy issues in as broad a framework as we can. I see us serving a very broad public interest."

Heck has heard all the attacks and critiques before. In fact, he used to do a lot of radio talk shows, particularly around 1979 and 1980. "That seemed to be when the mythology was most intense."

People had taken note of the number of former Trilateralists in the Carter administration. There was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser, the man considered the ideological godfather of Trilateralism. And also Walter Mondale, Cyrus Vance, Harold Brown, W. Michael Blumenthal, Andrew Young.

During the 1980 presidential campaign, Bush's Trilateralist background is said to have disturbed Ronald Reagan's supporters on the far right. On top of that, third-party candidate John B. Anderson was a Trilateralist too.

In Heck's view, right-wing anti-Trilateralism has always been rooted in simple isolationism. "This country finds it difficult to be so interdependent with the rest of the world, given our history and our national traditions," he says. "It's a hard lesson for {Americans} to grasp."

The idea behind creating the commission, he says, was that "the United States would never again be in such a singularly dominant position as in the immediate post-World-War-II era, and that leadership in the world would have to be shared." Now, such matters as the ecology -- a new focus of Trilateralist study -- will require global cooperation, Heck says.

And that doesn't mean one world government. Nor does it mean that the Trilateral Commission even speaks with one voice, he says. It isn't a lobbying group.

"There are wildly overblown notions out there about what a group like this does and can do," he says. "There aren't lists of recommended actions {that attendees} leave with and commit themselves to implement."

Heck, in fact, expects about half of the commission's members to miss the Lisbon conference this weekend. We're talking about people, he says, who tend to be busy. Among the topics to be discussed are regional trade agreements, migration and refugees issues and post-Cold-War international security.

Living Well A few working journalists are on the Trilateral Commission. And if a solid, straight-standing American journalist won't give you the real lowdown on what's happening behind closed doors, no one will.

"It does not run the world," says Time magazine Editor-at-Large Strobe Talbott, who's been a Trilateralist for at least six years. "Present company emphatically excluded, it's made up of a number of highly influential people. The body itself does not presume some sort of unitary influence. In fact, quite the contrary. ... There's a lot of diversity.

"The proceedings I would describe as much more like a large and high-powered seminar than a parliament or a board of directors," he says.

David Gergen, editor-at-large at U.S. News & World Report, agrees. "These things sound powerful until you go to them," he says. "Then you find out that these are people who are genuinely interested in discussing things with each other. When private citizens can have those discussions in a frank and open way, that's helpful."

Invited by David Rockefeller to join the commission last year, Gergen will address the Lisbon conference, along with Talbott, on the American political scene.

Why don't these annual Trilateral get-togethers generate much news coverage?

"Why should they?" Talbott says. "People are not coming there to make news." (To ensure an uninhibited discussion, Trilateral Commission meetings are deemed to be "on background," which means Gergen and Talbott can't quote the participants.)

And how does the gathering measure up as a social event? Cocktail wieners aplenty, or what?

"I would not call the proceedings spartan," Talbott says. After all, these are people "who know how to live well and like to live well."

He adds, though, "these are people who don't have to go halfway around the world for a good meal or a good bottle of wine. They come for something else, and that's the content of the discussion."