The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

by Jon E. Lewis

  Under Basson’s tutelage – allegedly – Coast was involved in lethal covert operations “Barnacle” and “Duel” in the 1980s in which hundreds of regime opponents, notably captured ANC guerrillas, were murdered by use of toxins, their bodies then dumped at sea. Coast has also been linked to biochemical experiments on captured ANC members and the mass killing of Marxist rebels in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) by providing the government there with cholera and anthrax. In 1979, the world’s largest outbreak of anthrax took place in Rhodesia. Eighty-two people died.

  When F. W. de Klerk became South Africa’s president in 1989 he quickly scuppered Project Coast’s offensive programme, since it hardly sat well with his desire to end apartheid. Numerous Coast officials were fired, incriminating documents and CBWs destroyed. Thereafter, Coast was devoted to manufacturing crowd control substances, some of which were drugs more usually associated with recreational use. Between 1992 and 1993, more than 900 hundred kilos of a crystalline form of Ecstasy was produced under Project Coast.

  Old, murderous habits, it seems, died hard. In January 1992, Mozambican government forces were purportedly attacked with CBWs by the South African apartheid regime; several hundred soldiers claimed to have been exposed to a substance released from a plane flying above them. Four of them later died. It was widely suspected that the Coast front company Protechnik was the likely source of the lethal agent; the UK and US afterwards heavily pressured South Africa to terminate Project Coast, partly for humanitarian reasons, partly because it was feared that Coast’s know-how would fall into terrorist hands.

  Basson was given a one-year contract to dissolve Project Coast, after which he became an independent CBW consultant, but his subsequent globe-trotting occasioned the US and Britain to make démarches expressing their concern that the good doctor was selling his knowledge of CBWs to pariah states such as Libya. To keep Basson under control, the South African Government hired him as the head of an uncontroversial official department in 1995. As a method of keeping the dog on the chain, this was not entirely successful; two years later, after a tip-off from the CIA that Basson was about to flee the country, Basson was caught with a thousand Ecstasy pills and four trunks full of secret documents related to Project Coast. The Es were almost certainly from stock manufactured by Coast for non-lethal crowd control. After some heavy persuasion, Basson testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1998; he was the TRC’s last witness and gave limited, evasive testimony, with his lawyers making frequent interjections. Enough was heard, however, for Dr Wouter Basson to be tried on sixty-seven charges, ranging from fraud to murder whilst working on Coast. Basson denied all charges, and the judge, one Mr Hartzenberg, dismissed many of them, ruling that because they had occurred in Namibia and other foreign terrains, Basson could not be tried on them. Then, after thirty months of trial, Hartzenberg grandly rejected the testimony of all of the prosecution’s 153 witnesses (which included Coast scientists and operatives) and granted “Dr Death”, as the media had nicknamed Basson, amnesty

  To date, there remain concerns over whether or not Basson actually destroyed the CBW agents or merely relocated them. Hundreds of kilos of chemicals and agents were unaccounted for when inventory was later taken by the Government.

  South Africa continues to have a CBW programme but says it is strictly defensive. The country is now a member of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

  Further Reading

  Stephen Burges and Helen Purkitt, The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, 2001

  Chandré Gould, Peter I. Folb et al, Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme, 2003

  PROJECT MONTAUK

  Or, fast forward to the future without a Delorean car.

  Conspiracy wonks believe that a series of top-secret experiments conducted in a vast cavernous underground laboratory built beneath the Montauk Air Force Station on the eastern tip of Long Island enabled teleportation and time travel.

  Whispers about strange happenings at Montauk began circulating in the early 1980s when one Preston Nichols claimed to have recovered suppressed memories of his involvement with the lab. Around the same time, a man called Al Bielek began lecturing on his own recovered memories which linked Montauk to the Philadelphia experiment, the US Navy’s supposed invisibility experiment in the forties. Bielek maintained that the USS Eldridge, on which he had served as matelot, had been teleported forty years hence to Montauk, where the lab’s supremo was none other that Nikola Tesla, inventor of Free Electricity. (A busy boy was Al; he was confusingly also Ed Cameron, who worked on the Manhattan atomic bomb project, or so he says.) The lab’s time tunnel allowed travel forwards and backwards and to alien planets. The website of Al Bielek – www.bielek.com – contains a timeline of his travels: he got to to 2,749.

  The secrets of Montauk contain some other conspiracy favourites. Genetic engineering? Tick. PSI ops experiments? Tick. The giant Surface Air Ground Environment (SAGE) radar on the site was reportedly used for mind-control tests on abducted teenagers.

  Alas, there is no documented evidence that Montauk is, or ever has been, a lab for a real-life version of TV’s Time Tunnel show. Bielek’s website is a classic case of the self-referential “proofs” offered by the weird wing of conspiracy. Al says Preston Nichols worked at Montauk; Preston says Al worked at Montauk; Stewart Swerdlow says Al and Preston toiled at the Montauk base; Al and Preston say Stewart worked there … Bielek’s website states that he “paid a big price for the privilege” of travelling in time and meeting little green creatures.

  You’ll also pay a high price if you want to know more about his adventures. His PC-DVD costs $39.99. Visa and Mastercard both accepted.

  The Montauk base closed down several years back. The site is now home to Camp Hero State Park.

  Further Reading

  www.bielek.com

  PROJECT PAPERCLIP

  As US forces advanced through the Wagnerian ruins of the Third Reich in May 1945, they stumbled upon research facility after facility that indicated that the Germans had technologies far beyond their own.

  This was especially the case in aeronautics and rocket science – which in itself led to the conspiracy theory that the Nazis of the Thule Society had hitched up with aliens – and so the US deemed it advantageous to “relocate” leading German scientists and technicians across the Atlantic, where their expertise could be put to work on behalf of Uncle Sam. Or, as Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe put it:

  Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research. If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited.

  Importing the German boffins Stateside also denied their use to the perfidious Russians, who were quickly going from being friends to foes. (Actually, America also wanted to deny the technology to the British, who remained so-called “friends”.) There was a little local difficulty, however, in that some of the German scientists were full-blown members of the SS, even war criminals – and Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism” would be excluded from a welcome in the Land of the Free. To circumvent this tiresome legal and moral objection, in 1946 the US War Department began Project Paperclip, named after the technique of identifying useful German personnel by putting a paperclip on their file; sought-after German scientists had their records cleansed of mentions of war crimes/SS and Nazi membership or were given wholly false records to enable their entry into the US. During Paperclip more than 1,600 German technicians and scientists were hired in, many of them beginning their new lives at the military research facili
ty of Fort Bliss, Texas.

  Werner von Braun, the V-2 rocket man, was one of the most prominent SS members whitewashed and recycled by the Truman government. He ended up playing a leading role in NASA, masterminding many of the moonshots. A number of those processed through Paperclip had partaken in medical “experiments” in Dachau and other Nazi concentration/death camps; Hubertus Strughold, later called “the father of space medicine” and designer of Nasa’s on-board life-support system, had headed a team at Dachau and Auschwitz which had frozen inmates and put them in low-pressure chambers to study the effects. Paperclip hireling Arthur Rudolph was hardly higher on the moral scale; another die-hard Nazi, he was chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles.

  So dense was the Paperclip paper trail cover-up that many of the SS/Nazi hirelings were never properly identified thereafter.

  Project Paperclip. Or how the US establishment learned to stop worrying about morals and love the bomb.

  Further Reading

  Clarence G. Lasby, Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War, 1975

  PROPAGANDA DUE (P2)

  During a raid on the Arezzo villa of Italian businessman Licio Gelli in March 1981 for evidence of his possible link to the Vatican Bank’s laundering of Mafia money police turned up something far more sinister about Signor Gelli than dealings with dodgy money. He was the leader of the banned Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (Propagation Two). And Propaganda Due (P2) was scheming to take over Italy.

  A list of 962 P2 conspirators found in Gelli’s safe included three cabinet ministers, forty MPs, the heads of the Army and Navy, police chiefs, intelligence officers, fourteen judges, numerous industrialists (among them one Silvio Berlusconi) and Victor Emmanuel, Prince of Naples. Shortly afterwards, police found under the false bottom in Gelli’s daughter’s briefcase a copy of a document entitled Piana di Rinascita Democratica (“A Plan for the Rebirth of Democracy”). The title was a misnomer: the document set out a plan for a fascist coup in which unions would be banned and the media put under state control. The fallout from the discovery of the P2 list and Piana di Rinascita Democratica was enough to bring down the Italian Government. Later a court indictment charged that P2’s infiltration of the Italian state had “the incredible capacity to control a state’s institutions to the point of virtually becoming a state-within-a-state”.

  The origins of P2 date back to 1877 when a Masonic Lodge was chartered by the Grand Orient of Italy as Propaganda Due; a century later the Lodge had become so infiltrated by the Mafiosi that the Master of Grand Orient shut it down and expelled its Worshipful Master, Licio Gelli. The response of Gelli? To pick up the Lodge’s membership list and set up his own, essentially private Lodge, P2.

  Born in 1919, Gelli was a Mussolini-era fascist who had fought with the SS on the Eastern Front before fleeing to South America, where he was a financial backer of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. Returning to Italy, he became a Mason in 1963 before taking over P2 in 1966. Under his tutelage P2 expanded nearly a hundredfold to 1,000 members, including branches – all funded by Mafia lira – in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Raul Lastiri, Argentina’s president during part of the “Dirty War” in the seventies was a P2 member, So was Jose Lopez Rega, the Social Welfare minister under Peron.

  The Mafia wasn’t P2’s only financial provider. According to P2 supergrass Mino Pecorelli, the Lodge was funded by the CIA, and Gelli himself was a CIA officer. (Pecorelli was later found shot dead.) A 1990 article in the London Observer cited declassified US secret papers which linked Gelli to the CIA’s Rome station and the continuance of the notorious Operation Gladio, the CIA-funded and (armed) anti-Communist network set up in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. There have been frequent accusations of P2 complicity in the 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the 1980 Bologna railway bombing, events which were part of the “strate-gia della tensione” intended to create the conditions for a P2 coup.

  Two of Gelli’s principal sidekicks were Michele “The Shark” Sindora, a banker in the clutches of the Mafia, and Roberto Calvi, chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, Italy’s largest private bank. Sindora and Calvi were duly hired by another P2 member Archbishop Marcinkus, head of the Vatican bank, to manage the Vatican’s money; when police raided Gelli’s safe in Arezzo they found evidence that Calvi had created hundreds of fictitious bank accounts to launder Mafia drug money. An ensuing audit of Banco Ambriosiano, Italy’s largest bank, revealed that 1.3 billion dollars was missing from the bank’s account. Calvi fled to London. On 18 June 1982, Calvi was found hanging at the end of a rope under Blackfriar’s Bridge, his pockets stuffed with bricks. It is widely assumed that “God’s Banker” was “suicided” by either P2 or the Mafia because he intended to name P2 members involved in corruption. The London coroner’s conclusion was “cause of death” unknown; an Italian court, meanwhile, formally indicted Gelli for conspiring to murder Roberto Calvi.

  Calvi is just one of the few associated with the P2 scandal to have died a mysterious death or disappeared off the face of the Earth. Sindona died in a Milan prison cell complaining he had been poisoned. Gelli vanished from a Swiss prison where he was being held for extradition, and has never been seen since.

  Some investigators charge P2 with the mysterious death of John Paul I. After announcing on 28 September 1978 that he intended to remove Archbishop Marcinkus from the Vatican bank, John Paul I was found dead next morning.

  P2 was formally banned by the Italian authorities in 1981. Its “work” might be said to linger on. Just before he disappeared into thin air, Gelli told La Repubblica newspaper: “I look at the country [Italy under Silvio Berlusconi], read the newspaper, and think: ‘All [the Piana di Rinascita Democratica] is becoming a reality little by little, piece by piece.’ ”

  Further Reading

  Luigi DiFonzo, St Peter’s Banker, 1983

  Philip Willan, The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi, 2007

  David Yallop, In God’s Name, 1984

  REPTILIAN HUMANOIDS

  Long, long ago, David Icke (rhymes with bike) was a soccer player for Coventry City in England. Thereafter, it was all downhill in a handcart. He played for Hereford United, became a BBC sports commentator, became a Green Party activist, before dressing entirely in turquoise and informing the world that he, Dave Icke, was the Son of God. Could one go lower?

  David Icke answered that himself with his book The Biggest Secret (1999), in which he claimed that a race of 12-foot lizards known as the Babylonian Brotherhood from planet Draco have colonized Earth. If you think that 12-foot lizards might be easy to spot, more fool you; the critters can shape-shift by day to look like humans.

  Got a feeling of déjà vu? Yes, that’s right: the TV SF series V had much the same premise.

  Icke’s twist is to put a little Marx into the mix. The reptilians are the ruling class to the human proles, and the scaly-skinned ones make up all the past and present royal families, the presidents of the USA and entire crew of leading financiers. Just so that the poor proles don’t catch on to what is going on, the reptilian humanoids rule through various front organizations, such as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilaterial Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Knights Templar. Naturally, the conspiratorial goal of the repto-humans is the New World Order (although their weakness for drinking human juice means that sometimes they have to have a blood-break from the great work).

  In one mad moment Icke syntheses science fiction, New Age spiritualism and all popular conspiracy theories.

  To be fair to Icke, he dislikes some lizards more than others. He has a particular downer on the British Royal Family, but then they did murder Princess Diana (who blurted out her in-laws’ lizard nature to Icke) and they do control the gateway to the great underground reptilian city, which is situated on one of their Scottish estates. Scotland. A bit cold, surely, for lizards?

  David Ic
ke’s books sell by the barn load and his meetings are well attended. Which only goes to prove that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time.

  Further Reading

  David Icke, The Biggest Secret, 1999

  David Icke, Children of the Matrix, 2001

  SARS

  February 2003. A Chinese-American businessman flying from China to Singapore became severely ill with what appeared to be pneumonia, obliging his flight to land in Vietnam for his hospitalization. Despite the best efforts of the staff at the French Hospital of Hanoi, the 48-year-old businessman died. Realizing that they were dealing with a mysterious and highly infectious virus, the hospital contacted the World Health Organization (WHO), which issued an alert warning the world of the arrival of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

  Panic – and face masks – spread across the world. The outbreak lasted until the summer of 2003 by which time over 8,000 cases had been confirmed, and 800 deaths reported.

  Midway through the epidemic, Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, stepped forward to inform reporters he thought SARS was not a natural occurrence, but man-made because “there is no vaccine for the virus, its makeup is unclear, it has not been very widespread, and the population is not immune to it”.