Wikileaks is really important and totally fascinating. I was on today and found a bunch of docs about the Bilderberg meetings. I skimmed through a couple and found them to be fairly predictable for being a bunch of powerful people hoping to shape the future in some way.
The following link is a short history of how the meeting started and what they hoped to accomplish written by one of those responsible in 1956, two years after the meetings started. In the quotes below he explains the motivation for the meetings, why they are private, and concerns about not appearing to be a "political mafia." Keep in mind that these documents have been secret until very recently.
https://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Bilderberg_Group...
A few years ago a large number of people began to feel anxious about a growing distrust of America which was making itself manifest in Western Europe and which was paralleled by a similar distrust of Western Europe in America. This feeling caused considerable apprehension on both sides of the Atlantic and in 1952 I felt that it was of the first importance to try to remove this suspicion, distrust, and lack of confidence which threatened to jeopardize the post-war work of the Western Allies.
I therefore approached H.R.H. Prince Bernhard, Dr Paul Rykens, and M. Paul van Zeeland with the suggestion that we should organize some unofficial and private meetings to discuss the difficulties and dangers which were causing us so much anxiety.
The second point we had to consider consisted in ensuring that frank conversations could take place without running the risk of being misinterpreted by the press and that there should be no interminable speeches for the sake of publicity. It was clear, therefore, that such conversations had to be conducted privately, unofficially, and confidentially, and for this reason we decided not to admit the press to our meetings, restricting publicity in general to one or two very short communiques which do not go into any details, nor mention any individual speakers, in order to ensure that neither the subject of our discussions nor the names of the participants should be given any publicity. Experience has proved this course to be the right one, since our debates take place in a spirit of complete frankness and discretion, and participants are never afraid that anything they say will be used against them.
In order not to be accused of starting an unofficial political "mafia", we decided from the outset not to consider ourselves a policy-making body but to have as our principal aim the smoothing over of difficulties and tendencies among countries and the finding of a common approach in the various fields—political, cultural, economic, and social. Moreover, we do not contemplate taking any direct action. We draw the attention of existing organizations to the points in question; what those organizations do remains their own responsibility. For this side of our work, however, we have always had the tacit approval of the Governments of the countries to which the participants belong.
And here's a link to the most recent meeting notes available from 1980.