The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  All such nefarious purposes for HAARP are denied by US officialdom, who point out that the HAARP site holds open days every summer. Since HAARP is situated in an inaccessible corner of Alaska, this offer may not be so generous as it seems. Critics also wonder why HAARP is managed by an official from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) rather than a boffin from a university science department.

  HAARP is not the US’s only “ionospheric heater”; there are others at Fairbanks, Alaska, and at the Arecibo observatory in Puerto Rico. Russia has one (Sura), near Nizhniy Novgorodlol, and the EC one at Tromsø, Norway.

  Even if HAARP and the other ionospheric heating projects are as innocent as they claim, is tampering with the ionosphere good for the earth? A scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute once compared HAARP to “an immersion heater in the Yukon”. Meteorologists have been less benign, pointing out that the “effects of HAARP on the climate are completely unknown”. Global warming, anybody?

  HAARP is a covert weapon of doom: ALERT LEVEL 5

  Further Reading

  Nick Begich and Jeanne Mannings, Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, 1995

  Jerry E. Smith, HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, 1998.

  RUDOLF HESS

  Scotland, the late morning of 10 May 1941. Out of the spring sky to the east a lone Me110 German fighter appears over Glasgow and circles unhurriedly as though searching for something, before its pilot bales out over the village of Eaglesham, to the south of the city. On his apprehension on the ground by local soldiers, the Luftwaffe pilot announces in English that he is Captain Alfred Horn and adds: “I wish to see the Duke of Hamilton. Will you take me to him?”

  A few days later, “Captain Horn” is revealed by the British authorities to be none other than Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of Germany. Hitler, from Berlin, denounces Hess as a madman who stole an aircraft to go on a private peace mission. The British confine Hess until immediately after the war, when they too claim Hess is mad – but not too mad, sane enough to stand trial at Nuremberg for war crimes. There, despite his “sanity”, Hess is unable to recognize fellow Nazi bigwigs and betrays little recognition of events in his own life. Nevertheless he is sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau and dies, apparently by his own hand, in 1987, aged 93. British documents relating to the case are put under lock and key for 65 years.

  Even in the briefest recounting, the story of Rudolf Hess overflows with questions and contradictions. How could the Deputy Fuhrer “steal”, from the very public surroundings of Augsburg Messerschmitt works, an Me110 which just happened to have been specially adapted (at his own instigation) with long-range fuel tanks? Why was Hess’s Me110 not accorded the usual Glasgow greeting given to the Luftwaffe – sirens, flak and interception by Fighter Command? Why did Hess want to meet the Duke of Hamilton? Why is there such a long time-lock on the Hess documents? And (the question of questions): was it actually Hess or a double who stood in the dock in Nuremberg?

  Rudolf Hess is invariably viewed through the lens of his 1941 mission, which provides a portrait of a sincere if somewhat neurotic loner who, cast out from the inner sanctum of Nazism, wished peace in a time of total war. Hess was the Good Nazi, a status underlined by his lenient sentence at Nuremberg: the other main leaders of Nazi Germany were condemned to death or, like Goring, committed suicide. Hess was condemned to prison. In truth, Hess was an ardent anti-Semite and, along with Hitler, the founder of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1920. So close and loyal to Hitler was Hess thereafter that fellow Nazis dubbed Hess “the Fraulein” – Hitler’s wife. Foreign journalists also noted the strength of the men’s relationship: Pierre van Passen of the Canadian Evening World thought Hess to be Hitler’s “alter ego”. Time did little to diminish the closeness. There was no fall from grace for Hess; he disliked some aspects of the bloody purge of the SA, and Hitler was no fan of Hess’s “biodynamic” eating habits, modelled on the alternative philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, but otherwise the men were in complete accord. If they hadn’t been, Hitler would not have maintained Hess as his right-hand man.

  So, when he flew to Scotland in 1941, Hess did not do so as a lone, powerless, out-of-favour maverick. He can only have gone as Hitler’s personal peace emissary. Hitler’s later rants against “madman” Hess were merely attempts to lay down a smokescreen over a diplomatic debacle. (Tellingly, Hitler took little or no action after 1941 against Hess’s family, as was his wont with traitors; on the contrary, he ensured that Hess’s wife remained in her villa and received a state pension.) Hitler desperately wanted peace with Britain in mid-1941 because he sought above all to turn his entire military attention to the real enemy: Bolshevik Russia. War with Britain had never been Hitler’s intention; indeed, in Mein Kampf he had saluted Britain as Germany’s “most valuable ally in the world”. His fatal miscalculation had been to presume that Britain would endlessly turn a blind eye to the Nazi appropriation of central Europe.

  Hitler’s hope for reconciliation with Britain was not an unreasonable one. Although it is generally swept under the national carpet, there existed in wartime Britain a distinct vein of sentiment which, for reasons of pro-Nazism or pro-pacifism, did not want the conflict to continue. One peace proponent was Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, RAF wing commander and privy councillor, and a member of the Anglo-German Club. Something of Hamilton’s sentiments regarding the war can be gauged by his letter to The Times of 6 October 1939, when the war was a month old:

  Sir,

  Many, like yourself, have had the opportunity of hearing a great deal of what the men and women of my generation are thinking. There is no doubt in any quarter, irrespective of any party, that this country had no choice but to accept the challenge of Hitler’s aggression against one country in Europe after another. If Hitler is right when he claims that the whole of the German nation is with him in his cruelties and treacheries, both within Germany and without, then this war must be fought to the bitter end. It may well last for many years, but the people of the British Empire will not falter in their determination to see it through.

  But I believe that the moment the menace of aggression and bad faith has been removed, war against Germany becomes wrong and meaningless. This generation is conscious that injustices were done to the German people in the era after the last war. There must be no repetition of that. To seek anything but a just and comprehensive peace to lay to rest the fears and discords in Europe would be a betrayal of our fallen.

  I look forward to the day when a trusted Germany will again come into her own and believe that there is such a Germany, which would be loath to inflict wrong on other nations such as she would not like to suffer herself. That day may be far off, but when it comes, then hostilities could and should cease, and all efforts be concentrated on righting the wrongs in Europe by free negotiations between the disputing parties, all parties binding themselves to submit their disputes to an impartial equity tribunal in case they cannot reach agreement.

  We do not begrudge Germany Lebensraum, provided that Lebensraum is not made the grave of other nations. We should be ready to search for and find a colonial settlement, just to all peoples concerned, as soon as there exist effective guarantees that no race will be exposed to being treated as Hitler treated the Jews on 9 November last year [Kristallnacht]. We shall, I trust, live to see the day when such a healing peace is negotiated between honourable men and the bitter memories of twenty-five years of unhappy tension between Germany and the Western democracies are wiped away in their responsible co-operation for building a better Europe.

  Hamilton’s letter, which may have been covertly backed by Neville Chamberlain, was not just for British consumption: it was evidently designed to alert Nazi Germany to the fact that there were Britons who would deal with them. Overtures from Nazi Germany duly arrived, via the floating Nazi emissary Albrecht Haushofer – the son of Hess’s friend and mentor Professor Karl Haushofer. The younger Haushofe
r not only knew Hess but was a friend of Hamilton, hence the familiar tone he uses in his letter to Hamilton of 23 September 1940:

  My dear Douglo

  . . . If you remember some of my last communications in July 1939 you and your friends in high places may find some significance in the fact that I am able to ask you whether you could find time to have a talk with me somewhere on the outskirts of Europe, perhaps in Portugal . . .

  On receiving Haushofer’s letter, Hamilton apparently showed it to the Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, both of whom were well known to be lukewarm for war. The letter was deliberately kept from Churchill the bulldog. According to Double Standards (2001), the account of the Hess mission by Picknett, Prince and Prior, there then followed months of arrangements for Hess’s secret flight to Britain – made with Hitler’s connivance – to deal with an elite pro-peace lobby which had sufficient control of a sector of the RAF to ensure no one shot down Hess’s Me110 as it neared Scotland. Two Czech pilots with the RAF, Vaclav “Felix” Bauman and Leopold Srom, later recounted that they intercepted Hess’s Me110 but, as they moved in for the kill, Bauman was told by his radio controller, “Sorry, Felix, old boy. It is not possible. You must return. Now.”

  Although Hamilton would later profess total amazement that Hess was seeking him out, it is more likely that he was expecting the Deputy Fuhrer. According to eyewitnesses, Hamilton was shocked and agitated when he found that “Horn” had been captured by the Home Guard – Hess had bungled the operation by failing to land at Hamilton’s house, Dungavel. After the plane had crashed noisily and “Horn” been publicly captured, any chance of a secret meeting between Hess and the pro-peace group had gone.

  The Hess affair massively increased Churchill’s power vis-a-vis the peace wing of the British establishment (which included the Duke of Kent and ex-Prime Minister Lloyd George). Not only had the peacemongers committed an embarrassing faux pas, they had given Churchill a pawn in a disinformation campaign. As Pierre van Passen noted in That Day Alone (1941), Churchill publicly pretended to take Hess’s peace proposal seriously – in return Hitler de-intensified the Blitz and diverted his focus towards the Soviet Union. When the Wehrmacht’s tanks rolled into Russia in July 1941, Britain was no longer alone in the fight against Nazism. Henceforth it was unlikely to lose a war that only weeks before Hess’s flight had seemed unwinnable.

  There was, though, the problem of what to do with Hess. Initially, the ex-Deputy Fuhrer was imprisoned in the Tower of London, then at Mytchett Place, Surrey, then at Maindiff Court near Abergavenny in Wales. Confusingly, intelligence reports by Nazi Abwehr spies in Britain placed Hess in Scotland, in the western Highlands, at the same time he was in Wales. How could Hess be in two places at once? Either the Abwehr was mistaken – or, fantastically, there were two Rudolf Hesses.

  The Hess “doppelgänger” theory was given credence in 1979 in The Murder of Rudolf Hess by Dr Hugh Thomas, a military surgeon who had examined Hess in Spandau prison six years before. To Thomas’s befuddlement, his examination of Prisoner Number Seven failed to detect the First World War bullet wound that Hess was known to have received. Thomas’s book prompted other researches, many of which ostensibly confirmed the doppelgänger thesis. Under influence of the truth drug sodium pentothal in 1944 at Maindiff Court, “Hess” apparently refused to recognize the names of intimates, including Karl Haushofer and Willy Messerschmitt. Then there was his bizarre inability at Nuremberg to remember former colleagues. Amnesia might account for these mental lapses; less easy to explain is the fact that the dental records of the Hess held in 1941 seem to belong to someone other than the person held at Maindiff in 1943. And why did Hess the prisoner at Spandau refuse to see his wife and son for 26 years?

  Thomas hypothesizes that the real Hess was shot down (on Goring’s instructions) and that it was the doppelgänger Hess who arrived in Scotland in 1941. Aviation records, including testimony by Hess’s aircrew, refute this: Hess’s Me110 bore the identification code VJ OQ and the Messerschmitt which crashed in Scotland bore this marking. (A section of fuselage is on display in the Imperial War Museum, London.) A more plausible explanation is suggested by Peter Allen in The Crown and the Swastika (1983): the doppelgänger was substituted while Hess was in British custody. Allen cites in evidence the recollections of Charles Fraser-Smith, the intelligence service gadget-maker who was the inspiration for Q in the Bond movies. In the immediate aftermath of Hess’s arrest, Fraser-Smith was asked to make an identical copy of Hess’s uniform. Fraser-Smith could think of no reason for the request unless the uniform was to be worn by a double. According to him, MI6 held a top-level meeting in 1975 to discuss the identity of “Hess”.

  If the Hess incarcerated in Spandau was the doppelgänger, where was the real one? Intriguingly, Picknett, Prince and Prior suggest that the fate of the real Hess was tied into the mysterious plane crash which killed George, Duke of Kent, on 25 August 1942. On that day the Duke’s RAF Sunderland flying boat crashed into Eagle’s Rock, Caithness, Scotland, an event an MOD inquiry found to be caused by: “A/C [AIRCRAFT] BEING ON WRONG TRACK AT TO [SIC] LOW ALTITUDE TO CLEAR RISING GROUND . . . CAPT OF A/C CHANGED FLIGHT-PLAN FOR REASONS UNKNOWN & DESCENDED THROUGH CLOUD WITHOUT MAKING SURE HE WAS OVER WATER.”

  The Duke’s flying boat was piloted by some of the RAF’s most experienced crew. By operational rules it should not have been flown over land. Immediately after the crash, the MOD announced that all 15 crew had been killed and their bodies recovered. A day later a survivor, Andy Jack, wandered dazed into a crofter’s cottage. That made 16 men aboard the doomed Sunderland, one more than the take-off complement. The extra man was, Picknett, Prince and Prior suggest, Hess himself, who had been picked up from a nearby loch by Kent, the king’s brother and a known softliner on Germany, with the intention of taking the Deputy Fuhrer to neutral Sweden. Kent’s Sunderland, it later transpired, had been painted white – the colour for flights to neutral countries. Numerous records relating to the Duke’s crash are missing from the Public Record Office.

  A frequent objection to the doppelgänger theory is that the false Hess would never have admitted to war crimes at Nuremberg and accepted life in prison. He would have shouted his innocence to the court ceiling. Unless, that is, the false Hess had been brainwashed. This seems fanciful . . . until the success of the Russians in the 1930s Show Trials and the CIA with its MK-ULTRA programme is recalled.

  Almost fittingly, the death of “Hess” in Spandau on 17 August 1987 was as much a mystery as his life had been. During a walk in the prison garden, Hess’s guard was called away to take a telephone call. When he returned he found Hess lying in the garden hut with electrical cable wound around his neck. Two days later a post-mortem by the British army concluded that that the cause of death was suspension (hanging).

  Matters might have rested there, except that Hess’s family secretly arranged an independent autopsy when they received the corpse for burial. The conclusion of the independent post-mortem, carried out by a Dr Spann, was that Hess’s death was due not to suspension but to strangulation. The pattern made on the neck of Prisoner Number Seven by the electrical cord was horizontal; this is impossible in hanging, where the pattern is a V rising towards the point of suspension. Moreover, the 93-year-old Hess was nearly crippled by arthritis and the effects of strokes. According to his nurse, Abdallah Melaouhi, it would have been impossible for him to have raised his arms or found the dexterity to tie the cord to the window latch to hang himself. Prisoner Number Seven could not even tie his shoelaces any more.

  Under pressure from the Hess family and a BBC ‘Newsnight’ programme featuring Abdallah Melaouhi, in 1989 the British government ordered a review of Hess’s death. After receiving a report from Scotland Yard, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided there was no convincing evidence to show Hess had been murdered. When the Labour MP Rhodri Morgan asked to see the Scotland Yard report, his request was denied. Further attempts to view the Yard’s
investigation have been refused under “Public Interest Immunity”, the legal clause used by the government when disclosure of information might not be in the national interest.

  Wolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer’s son, is certain his father was murdered, and he believes he knows who did it and why. For Wolf Hess the prisoner in Spandau was, to his satisfaction, his father, and he dismisses the doppelgänger theory outright. (To him the inconsistent and missing records are merely evidence of the British tendency towards inefficiency and cock-up.) Under pressure from the Soviet Union and a worldwide humanitarian campaign, Hess was about to be released in late summer 1987. This the British could not allow, because the released Hess would have revealed the full details of the peace proposals with which he flew to Britain in 1941. So Hess was murdered by two soldiers (from the SAS, according to several sources) infiltrated into Spandau.

  Of course, if Prisoner Number Seven was the Hess doppelgänger, he still would have required “termination” – precisely because his identity as the false Hess could not be allowed to be discovered. Dead doppelgängers tell no tales.

  Was Hess murdered to prevent his disclosing that his 1941 mission was official business with a peace wing of the British establishment? ALERT LEVEL 9