The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  Nonetheless, as the electronic surveillance transcripts of Angelo Bruno, Stefano Magaddino and other top organized crime leaders make clear, there were in fact various underworld conversations in which the desirability of having the President assassinated was discussed. There were private conversations in which assassination was mentioned, although not in a context that indicated such a crime had been specifically planned. With this in mind, and in the absence of additional evidence with which to evaluate the Aleman account of Trafficante’s alleged 1962 remarks, the committee concluded that the conversation, if it did occur as Aleman testified, probably occurred in such a circumscribed context.

  As noted earlier, the committee’s examination of the FBI’s electronic surveillance program of the early 1960s disclosed that Santos Trafficante was the subject of minimal, in fact almost nonexistent, surveillance coverage. During one conversation in 1963, overheard in a Miami restaurant, Trafficante had bitterly attacked the Kennedy administration’s efforts against organized crime, making obscene comments about “Kennedy’s right-hand man” who had recently coordinated various raids on Trafficante gambling establishments. In the conversation, Trafficante stated that he was under immense pressure from Federal investigators, commenting “I know when I’m beat, you understand?” Nevertheless, it was not possible to draw conclusions about Trafficante actions based on the electronic surveillance program since the coverage was so limited. Finally, as with Marcello, the committee noted that Trafficante’s cautious character is inconsistent with his taking the risk of being involved in an assassination plot against the President. The committee found, in the context of its duty to be cautious in its evaluation of the evidence, that it is unlikely that Trafficante plotted to kill the President, although it could not rule out the possibility of such participation on the basis of available evidence.

  KISSINGER ASSOCIATES

  According to the Bible Code conspiracy, the Good Book contains hundreds of secret predictions. In Death in the Air, Bible code-breaker Dr Leonard G. Horowitz cracks the beast of all cryptograms, the identity of the Devil. “Among the names of leading suspects,” Dr Horowitz advises, “[Henry] KISSINGER is the only name that decodes to 666.”

  Mind you, you don’t have to be a Bible Code basher to believe that Dr Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, is evil. British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens, in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, calls for Kissinger to be prosecuted “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”. Hitchens believes Kissinger’s identifiable crimes include “The deliberate mass killing of civilian populations in Indochina and the personal suborning and planning of murder of a senior constitutional officer in a democratic nation – Chile – with which the United States was not at war … this criminal habit of mind extends to Bangladesh, Cyprus, East Timor, and even to Washington, DC.”

  The “senior constitutional officer” Hitchens referred to was General Rene Schneider, former Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army; it is asserted that Kissinger ordered Schneider’s assassination because he refused to back plans for a military overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende. Schneider’s family tried to sue Kissinger in a Washington, DC, federal court; the case was dismissed, not on its merits, but because the political question doctrine made it non-justiciable. In connection with Kissinger’s alleged role in the disappearance of citizens in South America during Operation Condor, a cross-national scheme by which right-wing dictatorships “disappeared” opponents, Kissinger had had to sidestep legal summons from investigators in Spain, Chile, Argentina and France.

  When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the musical satirist Tom Lehrer quipped, “It was at that moment that satire died. There was nothing more to say after that.” Kissinger had only recently instigated the mass carpet bombing of Cambodia to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes. Neither did Kissinger’s thesis that a limited atomic war was winnable, as advanced in his Nuclear War and Foreign Policy, immediately seem the stuff of which Nobel Peace Prize winners are made. Reputedly, the discourse led to Kissinger becoming the inspiration for Kubrick’s film, Dr Strangelove. And Among Kissinger’s hawkish bon mots are the classics: “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law forbidding the President from ordering assassination,” and, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.”

  After Kissinger left office, his musings were still in demand on the international power circuit. He also knew anybody who was anybody. In 1982, Henry Kissinger – born Heinz Kissinger, in Germany in 1923, by the by – founded a private New York-based international consulting agency. In the words of Hitchens, the said Kissinger Associates “exists to facilitate contact between multinational corporations and foreign governments”. Kissinger co-opted a number of big names, such as former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and NATO chief Lord Carrington, and with such luminaries, collective know-how and connections, Kissinger Associates could hardly fail. And it didn’t. Within five years, the company had paid off its foundation loans, and was turning over $5 million per annum. Kissinger Associates does not disclose its clients’ identities, and when Kissinger himself was asked to head the 9/11 inquiry he stood down rather than reveal the company’s client list as asked to do by Democrats concerned about conflicts of interest. Still, some information leaks out – or is burbled out by CEOs only to anxious to boast their connection to Dr Kissinger – and Kissinger Associates’ known clients include such mega-players as Union Carbide, Coca-Cola, HSBC, American Express, Fiat and Heinz.

  Given Kissinger’s track record, it hardly comes as a surprise that pertinent questions have been raised about the activity of Kissinger Associates in, inter alia, the BCCI banking scandal, the ecological catastrophe in Indonesia caused by mining client Freeport McMoran, loans and exports to Hussein’s Iraq, and undue influence on Capitol Hill on behalf of clients, even client states. (Despite Henry Kissinger’s avowed anti-Communism, he is big in China, and has lobbied on China’s behalf; he was an almost lone Western voice supporting the Communist dictatorship’s crackdown on democratic protesters in Tiananmen Square.) Kissinger Associates’ staff also have the useful habit of dropping in and out of government – Brent Scowcroft and Laurence Eagleburger both served in the regime of George H. W. Bush, for example – which, it is suggested, gives the Associates unparalleled access to power, plus inside information which can be turned to unfair commercial advantage.

  Kissinger Associates goes from strength to strength. So, inevitably, do suspicions about its influence.

  Watch this space.

  Further Reading

  Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2001

  www.tetrahedron.org

  KKK

  To accuse the Ku Klux Klan of conspiracy is a little like accusing Osama bin Laden of fanaticism, or the Pope of Catholicism. It is plain obvious. After all, running around in bed sheets (to hide identity, rather than to pretend to be a ghost at a fancy dress party) in the execution of sticksville plots to lynch uppity “Niggas” squares precisely with the dictionary definition of conspiracy as “a secret plan or agreement to carry out an illegal or harmful act, esp. with political motivation”. What is less recognized, however, is that the Klan from the 1960s has been a terrorist organization, of which three pertinent questions can be asked:

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  Did the Klan sponsor the assassination of Martin Luther King?

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  Was the Klan behind the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995?

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  Did the Klan, as some believe, inject popular foods and drinks to make black men impotent?

  Deriving its name from “kyklos” the Greek for “circle”, the Ku Klux Klan was founded by six Confederate soldiers in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865. Initially the Ku Klux Klan – invariabl
y called the “Klan” or the “KKK” – was a high-spirited quasi charity which looked after Civil War veterans, but it soon turned into a violent network opposed to Reconstruction and for Segregation. The KKK costume of an all-white robe, mask and pointed hood became a symbol of fear and loathing across the ex-Confederacy.

  By the end of the decade, the KKK had tens of thousands of members in the South, prominent among them the former Reb cavalry general, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Under Forrest’s headship, the Klan evolved a whole set of Masonic-like names and rituals, with the South becoming the “Invisible Empire”, and the leader the “Grand Wizard”. Each state was titled a “Realm”, headed by a “Grand Dragon”. Forrest, however, was unable to stop the KKK’s hood-long lurch towards terrorism, and in 1869 ordered the Klan to disband. The membership ignored him, and if anything ramped up its night attacks on the black community in the Southern states. With the South burning, President Ulysses Grant passed laws in 1870 and 1871 to outlaw and suppress the organization. Thousands of Klansmen went to the pen. Within a decade the Klan was merely a bad memory.

  Bizarrely, the Klan was reborn by a movie, Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griff th’s 1919 epic but racist masterpiece in which an heroic South stands proud against Northern no-gooders and lascivious blacks. After watching the movie, a certain failed preacher by the name of William J. Simmons determined to resurrect the Klan. Astutely, Simmons got on board the project the savvy Indiana businessman David Curtiss Stephenson. The new Klan grew exponentially; by 1924, the KKK had four million members nationwide; in Indiana one in four adult males was a Klansman. The key to Simmons’s/Stephenson’s success was to widen the hate-base of the Klan: Catholics, Jews and union activists joined blacks in the KKK’s gallery of loathing. Underneath the public political campaign of legitimate voting drives, hustings and boycotts, the Klan widely indulged in violent intimidation in the old-style white hoods with the dramatic addition of flaming crosses.

  Then, in 1925, the Klan II’s bubble burst as quickly as it had inflated. Stephenson, who was by now the Grand Dragon of twenty-two states (and a rich man on Klan membership dues), was found guilty of the rape and murder of his secretary; one of the causes of her death was from septicaemia, caused by Stephenson’s multiple bites to her body. Embarrassed Klan members could not rip up their membership cards quickly enough; by 1930, Klan membership, hit by the double whammy of the Stephenson scandal and the moneyless Depression, had sunk to 30,000. To absolutely ensure its own demise, the Klan then allied itself with Nazi groups in the USA, such as the German-American Bund, leading to accusations of disloyalty. Thirty years later, KKK membership was estimated at 3,000.

  This truncated Klan turned to outright terrorism. During the Civil Rights era the Klan was implicated in a string of outrages: the assassination of NAACP member Medgar Evers in Alabama; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; the shooting of Detroit civil rights activist Viola Gregg Liuzzo; the murder of black Army veteran Lt Colonel Lemuel Penn; the shooting of Civil Rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964.

  Then there was the assassination of Martin Luther King. Dr Martin Luther King had a dream of racial harmony, but King’s dream was a nightmare for racists. At 6.11 p.m. on 4 April 1968, as he lounged on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King was fatally shot. The shot which killed him was traced to a flophouse opposite, where a rifle was retrieved bearing the fingerprints of James Earl Ray. Two months later, after a massive manhunt, Ray was captured in London travelling under a false passport. He was extradited to Tennessee, where he was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.

  Days after his sentencing, Ray began protesting his innocence, claiming he had only made an earlier confession of guilt on the advice of his lawyer, so he would avoid the possibility of execution. Numerous other observers of the case weighed in on Ray’s behalf, because aspects of the conviction did not stack up:

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  Ray was a two-bit petty criminal, who somehow funded an escape to England with a false passport.

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  He was not a trained sniper, but pulled off a difficult single shot to assassinate King. And the bullet from King’s body was never matched to the supposedly responsible rifle.

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  The drunk who identified Ray as a denizen of the flophouse recanted when sober.

  Although the 1977 House Select Committee on Assassinations disbelieved Ray’s claim that he was a guiltless patsy, it did allow the “likelihood” that Ray did not act alone. The Select Committee noted further that FBI files “revealed approximately 25 Klan-related leads” in the King assassination, but that the passage of time, conflicting testimonies, and a lack of cooperation from witnesses meant that the leads should be discounted. But two of these leads were always suggestive. First, was the evidence of diner waitress Myrtis Hendricks. The Select Committee recorded:

  2. In an interview with an agent of the Dallas FBI field office on April 22, 1968, Myrtis Ruth Hendricks, accompanied by Thomas McGee, maintained she had overheard discussions of a conspiracy to kill Dr. King. Hendricks said that while working as a waitress at John’s Restaurant in Laurel, Miss., on April 2, 1968, she heard the owner, Deavours Nix, say he “had gotten a call on King”. Nix was then head of intelligence and the grand director of the Klan Bureau of Investigation for the White Knights of Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi (WKKKKOM) the most violent Klan organization during 1967 and 1968. Hendricks said that on April 3, 1968, she saw in Nix’s office a rifle with a telescopic sight in a case, which two men put in a long box in the back of a 1964 maroon Dodge. Hendricks alleged that on the following day Nix received a phone call announcing Dr. King’s death before the news was broadcast on the radio. Hendricks left Laurel shortly after Dr. King’s death to join her boyfriend, Thomas McGee, in Texas.

  The Bureau had independently confirmed that John’s Restaurant was a gathering place for known Klan members and that members had been there on April 3 and 4, 1968. Nevertheless, it found no corroboration of the Hendricks rifle story. The committee’s review of FBI files concerning the White Knights’ activities uncovered informant information similar to the Hendricks’ allegation. In addition, statements attributed to Samuel H. Bowers, the imperial wizard of the WKKKKOM, in John’s Restaurant on April 5, 1968, raised the possibility of his involvement in the assassination. As a result of this information and an indication that it was not developed further in the FBI investigation, the committee pursued the lead.

  Myrtis Hendricks denied the substance of her allegation when contacted by the committee. While admitting that she had worked for Nix, she said she was afraid of her former boyfriend, Thomas McGee, but refused to elaborate further. The committee’s attempt to interview FBI informants who had furnished relevant information was unsuccessful. The informants were either unavailable or uncooperative.

  The Committee did note, however, that “Laurel, Miss., the scene of the alleged activities, lies between New Orleans and Birmingham. James Earl Ray traveled between these two cities in March 1968.”

  More recently, two other pieces of information have surfaced to tie the KKK to MLK’s death. According to a 1993 report in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, rogue government agents in the South recruited KKK members for local ops during the sixties – and some of these Klan stooges were in Memphis on the day of King’s assassination. And, FBI records turned up by researchers Larry J. Hancock and Stuart Wexler show that Ray knew of a $100,000 bounty being offered by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi to kill Martin Luther King Jr before Ray escaped from a Missouri prison prior to reaching Memphis.

  In his definitive book of the King assassination, Killing the Dream, historian Gerald Posner speculates that “there was a conspiracy [to kill King], but on a very low level. Someone, I’d guess part of a racist group, probably agreed to pay him [Ray] maybe $25,000 or $50,000.” Posner, it should be said, is no paranoid conspiracy loon. He thinks JFK was murdered by a lone nut.

 
The KKK’s connection to Timothy McVeigh, the bomber who brought down the Alfred P. Murrah building in downtown Oklahoma City on 19 April 1995 is straightforward. When the FBI raided McVeigh’s house they found overwhelming evidence that he was a member of the KKK, which he probably joined in 1992. That said, he seems to have been a disaffected, inactive member who was more committed to other far right organizations, specifically the Aryan Republican Army, a group of Midwest bank robbers and racists, whose explosive kit he seems to have borrowed. Or been supplied with.

  The Klan’s own take on McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is a convoluted scheme whereby the Feds committed the outrage to blacken the Klan. Why, the FBI would go to such efforts to discredit such small political fry is unclear. Following paramilitarization in the 1970s, the Klan had split into some one hundred autonomous or semi-autonomous fragments, and declined until its main variant had no more than 2,000 members. The Klan’s place on the racist right of the US has long been taken by the militias and neo-Nazi groups.

  As for the KKK running major companies with a view to lacing their products with drugs to make black men impotent, this is a plain and simple urban myth. Kentucky Fried Chicken is the favourite target of the legend, with the Colonel reputed to put saltpetre in with the spices, and have 10 per cent of profits put in the Klan coffers. Actually, the Colonel is long dead, and 10 per cent of KFC’s profits, even 10 per cent of the Colonel’s will – if it did a have a pro-Klan clause, which it didn’t – would leave a public paper trail wider than a four-lane black top. Marlboro (you get three K shapes from the chevrons on the packet!), Kools and Coors have all been the target of similar rumours that they are tools of the Klan. They are not.