The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban.

  He will be the terror of mankind.

  Never more horror.

  And in Century 6, Quatrain 97:

  At forty-five degrees the sky will burn,

  Fire to approach the great new city:

  In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up,

  When one will want to demand proof of the Normans.

  The “Normans” are a bit inconvenient, but references to fire and terror from the sky fit with the aerial attack, argue Nostradamus’s followers, and New York city is around 40° 5’ N latitude (relatively close to “forty-five degrees”).

  As with the earlier prophecies, Nostradamus purportedly hid the name of the last antichrist in an anagram. This was “Mabus”, which can be arranged as “Usamb”, a single letter off Usama. Which is quite like Osama. To put the fear of the devil into everyone, students of Nostradamus point out that the “Mabus” prophecy rounds off with global destruction courtesy of a comet crashing into Earth. Funnily enough comet Elenin is expected to pass close to Earth in October 2011, and doomsayers suggest its gravitational effect will cause tidal waves, while its magnetic pull will topple the Earth off its axis.

  The sceptics’ argument against Nostradamus is that his writings are so voluminous – there are about a thousand four-line quatrains, many of which contain more than one prophecy – and so ambiguous that some actual events are bound to appear to align with the predictions simply through chance. Misinterpretations and mistranslations are also frequent; “Hister” might resemble “Hitler” but was actually a place near the Danube; “great new city” is a massacring of Villeneuve, outside Paris.

  Further Reading

  Henry C. Roberts, The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, 1947

  BARACK OBAMA

  Some people, you get the feeling, do not want Barack Obama as President of the USA.

  Whispers that Obama was not a US citizen first began to circulate during his run-off with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. If Obama was not born on American soil he would be ineligible to be President under Article Two of the Constitution. When Obama beat Hillary for the Democratic ticket, the “birthers” – as those who doubt Obama’s credentials are called – started to roar. As many level-headed commentators noted, the closer Obama – a black – got to the White House the louder the din about his citizenship ineligibility became.

  In an attempt to end the birthers’ speculations, Obama preelection released his short-form birth certificate, which clearly showed that he was born in Hawaii on 4 August 1961. Hawaii is a state of the union, and the short form is accepted by the US Department as conclusive proof of citizenship. Obama’s aides also pointed out that the child’s birth had been announced in Hawaiian newspapers the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in August 1961.

  Unpersuaded, some birthers even tried to file (unsuccessfully) lawsuits seeking to disqualify Obama from running for the presidency, and when he won anyway they tried to re-file the suits to stop him being sworn in. To no avail. Although the most stubborn birthers belonged to the baying dog wing of the American right, they had a mass, sympathetic audience; one poll taken after Obama became the forty-fourth President of the United States found that 47 per cent of Republican voters believed that Mr Obama was not born in the US. Another 22 per cent said they were unsure.

  If anything, Obama’s release of his short-form certificate in 2008 led to more questions than answers. Leading birther Jerome Corsi – he of the book The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality – informed any TV outlet that would listen that the birth certificate was ‘a fake … it’s been shown to have marks from Photoshop.’ Meanwhile, health officials in Hawaii were bombarded with requests to view the original certificate. This could only be released to someone with a tangible interest, but for clarification the departmental head man released a statement:

  I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawai’i State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawai’i State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawai’i and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008, over eight months ago.

  Undaunted, the birthers covered hoardings around America with a poster asking: “WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?”

  Property tycoon Donald Trump upped the ante by announcing to a TV interviewer that he had doubts over Mr Obama’s account of his birth, adding that Obama’s paternal grandmother had said she witnessed his birth in Kenya (no she hadn’t) and that false birth notices could have been placed by Obama’s grandparents to secure his citizenship (no they couldn’t: the notices were sent to the newspapers by the Hawaiian health department).

  In April 2011 President Obama bowed to the inevitable, and released the full-length version of his birth certificate. This confirmed the details of the short certificate released in 2008 that Barack Hussein Obama was indeed born in Hawaii.

  The reaction of the birthers? The Drudge Reportproclaimed the certificate a fake concocted with image-editing software. And a stubborn whole quarter of the US population still believed that he was a foreigner.

  Shoosh. They don’t know the half of it. According to www.davidicke.com Obama ain’t only from abroad, he’s from another universe, being a Reptilian Humanoid from a planet far, far away. Mind you, Obama once did a very good job of catching a fly in a TV studio.

  When the president calls his press conference to protest that he is not actually a lizard in human form, he may wish to take the opportunity to knock on the head all the other paranoid anti-Obama conspiracies. In no particular order of unimportance, these include the theory that Obama is the love child of Malcolm X, that Obama killed his gay lover, is a covert Muslim intent on turning the Land of the Free into a theocratic dictatorship (check out the pres’s speeches backwards), is an Illuminati, is the anti-Christ, is the puppet of the New World Order …

  All the Obama conspiracies have one thing in common. They are ways of saying that they don’t want a black in the White House without actually saying it.

  OCTOBER SURPRISE

  In January 1979, the Shah of Iran was forced to flee the country after mass streets protests. His place as ruler was taken by the Islamic opposition leader Ayatollah Khomeini, returned from exile in Paris.

  The Shah had been America’s Man, the Ayatollah was most certainly not. Neither were his followers who in the following November seized the US embassy in Tehran, took more than sixty staff hostage and announced that they would only be released when the Shah was returned for trial and the US unfroze $12 billion in Iranian assets held in Stateside banks.

  The plight of the hostages exercised the American public – but not as much as it exercised American politicians. The year 1980 was presidential election year, and the hostage crisis went to the top of the political agenda. White House incumbent Jimmy Carter faced a strong challenge from Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, and his VP running mate, George Bush, former head of the CIA. Polls put Reagan and Carter neck and neck, and Bush went on record that he feared an “October Surprise” whereby the Democrats suddenly achieved the release of the hostages and got a poll boost.

  Alas for the hapless Carter he did not secure the hostages release. The spectacle of Uncle Sam looking powerless against an uppity country difficult to find on a map did not play well with the American electorate, so Governor Reagan took the prize of the White House.

  In his inauguration speech on January 20, 1981, Reagan promised a patriotic new birth for America: “Let us begin an era of national renewal. Can we solve the problems confronting us? Well, the answer is an unequivocal and emphatic ‘yes’.”

  The Great Communicator was not joking. Minutes later, it was announced that the hostages had been freed.

  Reagan was clearly a more efficient, ass-kicking Pres than Carter … or had there been skulduggery? The “Oct
ober Surprise” conspiracy theory alleges that it was the Republicans – contra George Bush – and not the Democrats who had done a deal with Iran to win the presidential election. Confused? You won’t be.

  The conspiracy theory states that in October 1980, Bush and Reagan’s campaign manager, William Casey, held negotiations with Iranian officials in Paris and Madrid to delay the release of the fifty-two hostages still held (some had been previously released on health and humanitarian grounds). Thus Carter was unable to profit from their release, and had to skulk off to a peanut farm in Georgia, while former B-movie actor Reagan saddled up for Washington DC. What did the Iranians get out of the deal? The handsome reward of arms for their war against Iraq.

  What proof, your honour, for the October Surprise conspiracy? It is tantalizing but circumstantial. A congressional probe in 1983 declared that Honest Ron Reagan’s campaign had set up a network to spy on Carter and his negotiations with the Iranian regime. And there are witnesses for the prosecution, the most eminent being former Iranian president Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, who claimed to have received a message from the Iranian foreign ministry about the direction of discussions with the Reagan camp. A host of arms dealers and private spooks over the years have stepped forward to state they organized the discussions between the Reaganites and the Iranians, including Jamshid and Cyrus Hashemi, Ari Ben-Menashe and Ahran Moshell.

  It should also be noted on the rap sheet that during the Iran– Contra scandal Reagan grudgingly admitted that the US had ransomed hostages by illegally selling arms to Iran (using the profits to fund Nicaraguan right-wing rebels). If Team Reagan could do a dodgy deal in office why not out of office?

  That said, any fair-minded judge would find the spook and gun-runner “witnesses” for the October Surprise theory as suspect a bunch as you could wave a gavel at. Ari Ben-Menashe will serve to damn the lot; this supposed former Mossad agent Ben-Menashe claims to have fitted Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak with a homing beacon – an espionage stunt that would have tested Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible mode. A number of the gunrunners on the list are popular with various police forces. And claiming to be the guy that set up one of the arms deals of the century is clearly a good business card.

  By 1992, the October Surprise brouhaha had reached such a crescendo that the House of Representatives investigated the charges. The subsequent report, “The ‘October Surprise’ Allegations and the Circumstances Surrounding the Release of the American Hostages Held in Iran”, found that “the credible evidence now known falls far short of supporting the allegation of an agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iran to delay the release of the hostages”. The House investigation did find that William Casey, an ex-OSS/CIA bigwig, had been fishing in very murky waters. There was no “credible” evidence that Casey had been in Madrid when the meeting with Iranians was alleged to have taken place – but then the key pages from his desk diary had been torn out.

  The phrase “now known” is the rub. One suggestive piece of evidence was forwarded too late for conclusion. It was sent from Moscow – and disclosed that the Kremlin’s spooks had monitored the October Surprise deal between Reagan’s team and the Iranians.

  The stink of conspiracy still hovers over the timing of the release of the US hostages from Tehran.

  Further Reading

  Robert Parry, Trick or Treason, 1993

  Gary Sick, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, 1992

  THE OCTOPUS

  A “unified field theory” is the Higgs boson of conspiriology, the presumption that there is one entity holds everything together. Danny Casolaro a 44-year-old freelance journalist from Virginia believed that he had found the omnipotent underground cabal that ran the planet. Casolaro called the transnational master conspiracy “the Octopus”.

  In the early afternoon of 10 August 1991, a nude male body was found in the bath of room 517 in the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There were a dozen slashes to his wrists, and the blood had sprayed over the walls. Near the corpse was a note that read “Please forgive me for the worst possible thing I could have done.”

  The cadaver was that of Danny Casolaro. Martinsburg’s boys in blue immediately concluded that it was a routine suicide, and so the county coroner decided against an inquest and released the body to a mortician. Casolaro’s body was embalmed that evening, before the next of kin had been notified. This was illegal. It was certainly unfortunate, because had Danny Casolaro’s family been notified they would certainly have asked for an autopsy. When eventually informed of his brother’s death, Anthony Casolaro, a medical doctor, announced that Danny had gone to Martinsburg to interview a “Deep Throat” who would give him the final proof of the Octopus’s existence. Danny had also told his brother, “If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was accidental.”

  Danny Casolaro had named the Octopus well. He had, he claimed, first discovered its existence whilst researching October Surprise, the alleged deal between Reagan and Iran to hold the fifty-two US hostages in Tehran until after the 1980 presidential election so as to embarrass Jimmy Carter, but gradually realized that the mega-cabal had tentacles in the BCCI banking scandal, the Inslaw/PROMIS theft of surveillance software, the Medallin drug cartel, Iran–Contra – to name just a few of its long-reaching arms. In a draft of a book on the Octopus, Casolaro portrayed the Octopus as “a web of thugs and thieves who roam the earth with their weapons and their murders, trading dope and dirty money for the secrets of the temple”.

  Casolaro’s overwrought, overexcited manuscript does little to advance his case for the Octopus’s existence. A grandiose, overarching stream of consciousness, the manuscript redefines every event of the twentieth century without a back-up fact. Also, any suggestion that Casolaro was “offed” by the Octopus because he was getting too close to the truth, was damned by the belated autopsy done by the state medical examiner, who concluded that the wounds of Casolaro’s wrists appeared to be self-inflicted. Meanwhile, local officials determined that the suicide note found in room 517 was written by Casolaro himself.

  The national media had long dismissed Casolaro as a flake. His suicide was simply proof of his craziness. The fact that the autopsy revealed traces of antidepressant only confirmed his mental fragility.

  Not everyone, however, was convinced that Casolaro died by his own hand. There was suggestive evidence to suggest the contrary:

  •

  According to a review of the autopsy by a pathologist at George Washington University, the gashes on Casolaro’s wrists did not have the usual “hesitation marks” of the suicide. One cut went so deep as to sever a tendon making it impossible to hold the razor responsible.

  •

  The assistant head housekeeper at the Sheraton discovered two bloody towels under the sink. “It looked like someone threw the towels on the floor,” she told investigative reporter John Connolly. This was before the arrival of the emergency crews.

  •

  The accordion file containing Casolaro’s latest researches was missing.

  There were other oddities in the case. A waitress in the Sheraton’s cocktail lounge recalled that Casolaro had been drinking there with an “Arab or Iranian” man. He was never located. And at Casolaro’s funeral two unknown figures appeared, one of whom placed a medal on Casolaro’s casket and saluted. Casolaro had never served in the military.

  Undoubtedly Casolaro had been mixing with some shady characters towards the end of his life. One of his “informants” was Michael Riconoscuito, a self-professed intelligence operative cum science genius. Riconoscuito claimed to have developed gene warfare for the CIA, along with Gerald Bull’s supergun for Iraq, plus the modifications of the Department of Justice PROMIS software, believed by many conspiracists to be implicated in October Surprise. Riconoscuito was up to his neck in the PROMIS controversy, because he had been assisting Inslaw, Inc., who were alleging that the DoJ had pilfered the PROMIS software from them. In his notes,
Casolaro identified Riconoscuito as “Danger Man”. He lived down to his nickname: aside from being a narcotics trafficker – a little misdemeanour he went to the penitentiary for – he was involved with the Wackenhut Corporation, a CIA subcontractor based at the semi-autonomous Cabazon tribal homeland. Another Wackenhut associate, the smooth Robert Booth Nichols, also provided Casolaro with “intelligence”. Three days before his death, Nichols warned Casolaro, “If you continue this investigation, you will die.” But Casolaro wasn’t sure whether Nichols was threatening him or warning him. Or which investigation he was referring to; Casolaro had recently discovered that Robert Booth Nichols himself was tied to the Gambino mob and, for good measure, the Yakuza. Worst still, Casolaro reputedly knew from the DoJ that Nichols had offered to snitch on the Gambinos – and that was very dangerous information to know.

  For the record, Nichols claimed to be out of the country when Casolaro committed suicide, or was suicided.

  Although the Octopus as an omnipotent conspiracy theory is more the stuff of thriller than of history, Casolaro was wading in a murky swamp with some dark-hearted creatures. The list of why and who had cause to off Casolaro is almost endless. To all the above can be added: he may have stumbled across information on a Wackenhut–CIA “dirty job” that no one wanted aired; a Judiciary Committee’s Investigative Report on Inslaw/PROMIS declared “As long as the possibility exists that Danny Casolaro died as a result of his investigation into the Inslaw matter … it is imperative that further investigations be conducted.”

  While a subsequent report by DoJ Special Counsel Nicholas Bua released in 1993 on the PROMIS case declared Casolaro’s death to be suicide, conspiracists noted that Bua was not the independent counsel requested by the Judiciary Committee.