Conspiracy: History's Greatest Plots, Collusions And Cover-Ups

208 Pages·2006·2.48 MB·English

by  Charlotte Greig

Brought to you by KeVkRaY
CONSPIRACY
History's Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups
CHARLOTTE GREIG
This edition published in 2012 by Arcturus Publishing Limited
26/27 Bickels Yard, 151–153 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3HA
Copyright © 2006 Arcturus Publishing Limited
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission in accordance with
the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person or persons who do
any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution
and civil claims for damages.
ISBN: 978-1-84858-141-8
Picture Credits
Cover images: Corbis
Corbis, Getty Images, Mary Evans, Picture Desk, Rex Features, Topham
Picturepoint. For more information contact [email protected]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: THE WAR ON TERROR
9/11: The Events of 11 September 2001
The Bush-Bin Laden Connection
The Afghan Pipeline
The Oklahoma City Bombing
CHAPTER TWO: SECRET SOCIETIES
The Bilderberg Group
The Illuminati
Secrets of the Catholic Church
God's Banker
Skull and Bones
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
The Gemstone Files
CHAPTER THREE: THE UNKNOWN
The Roswell Incident
The Rendlesham Affair
Crop Circles
Men in Black
The Moon Landings
Is There Life on Mars?
The Hollow Earth
CHAPTER FOUR: WAR STORIES
Is Hitler Alive?
The Holocaust
The Sinking of the Lusitania
The Bombing of Pearl Harbor
Gulf War Syndrome: Fact or Fiction?
CHAPTER FIVE: POLITICAL COVER-UPS
The Watergate Affair
The Iran-Contra Scandal
The CIA and Salvador Allende
The Marc Dutroux Scandal
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Chappaquiddick
The Waco Incident
Mind Control: MKULTRA
CHAPTER SIX: MURDER MYSTERIES
Who Shot JFK?
Marilyn Monroe: Suicide or Murder?
The Assassination of Malcolm X
The Death of Princess Diana
The Jonestown Massacre
John Lennon and the FBI
The Shooting of Tupac and Biggie
CHAPTER SEVEN: CELEBRITY INDISCRETIONS
Elvis Lives
The Profumo Affair
The Lindbergh Kidnapping
Paul is Dead
INTRODUCTION
Post 9/11 we are in a golden age of the conspiracy theory. The success of Michael
Moore's Fahrenheit 911 has made this kind of alternative history positively
respectable: nowadays, it's not just crazed loners who spend too much time on the
internet discussing why George Bush carried on reading a children's story after
being told the first plane had hit the World Trade Centre, or scanning the business
pages to find out whether the 'War on Terror' is really the war for more oil.
Often enough, yesterday's conspiracy theory is today's accepted history. If you'd said at
the time that Hitler started the Reichstag Fire himself to smear his Communist
opposition you'd have be called paranoid. Now it's an accepted fact. And how many
people today really believe that JFK was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald acting all
alone? And are we wrong to see conspiracies in the links between, say, the US
government and Halliburton or Enron? Or naïve not to?
Of course, not all conspiracy theories have a basis in fact. Some are outlandish, such
as the theory that that the world is hollow and inhabited at the centre; others, such as the
notion that the government is hushing up alien visitations here, there and everywhere,
seem like the stuff of X files episodes. Yet all of them, even the most bizarre, address
facts that cannot easily be explained, or point to our psychological need to find a reason
for everything that takes place in our world.
Then there are those conspiracy theories that hover entertainingly on the edge of
possibility: for example, the idea that the moon landings were faked up in a film studio.
And, of course, there's not a celebrity death without its attendant conspiracy theory. Was
Princess Diana murdered? Is Elvis still alive? Was the FBI really behind John Lennon's
murder? To some, these theories simply demonstrate our human tendency to deny death
and loss, to let our idols go; to others, they reveal the sinister currents of money and
power that run below the public life of any celebrated figure in our culture today.
This book gathers together more than forty of the most compelling conspiracies:
ranging from the genuinely credible to the frankly implausible, from paedophile
conspiracies to crop circles, from Watergate to the Holy Grail. Was Pearl Harbor a set-
up? Was Marilyn Monroe murdered? We may not have the answers, but we've got some
pretty good theories!
WHAT IS A CONSPIRACY THEORY?
The words conspiracy comes form the Latin conspirare. Literally it means 'to breathe
together'. In practice it refers to two or more people making a plan of action.
Theoretically that plan could be either good or bad, but over the centuries it has gained
a distinctly negative sense. You can see this clearly from the way in which the word is
used in the legal sphere: 'conspiracy' in a legal sense always refers to wrongdoing.
Conspiracies are not by definition secret but as the word has attached itself to
criminal behaviour that's almost inevitably a part of the package. So, over the years,
secrecy has become a part of our conventional sense of what a conspiracy is. And it's a
crucial part when it comes to the development of conspiracy theories. Essentially,
conspiracy theories are alternative explanations of history or of the world about us.
Conspiracy theories suggest that dramatic events happen not by accident or for apparent
reasons, but because of plans made in secrecy.
There's no doubt that conspiracy theories have been with us for thousands of years.
After all conspiracies certainly have. Whether it's the ancient Greeks conspiring to take
over Troy or the Caesar's rivals conspiring to assassinate him, history is full of dramatic
conspiracies. And there have always been people with a suspicious cast of mind who've
come up with conspiracy theories to explain such events.
However, it's only in the past hundred years or so that conspiracy theories have really
come to the fore. Perhaps that has something to do with the decline of religion. In the
past people tended to see inexplicable events as the work of the Almighty. In our more
secular times, however, people tend to look for the nefarious hand of man.
The late nineteenth century saw the birth of some enduring conspiracy theories. As
the world was changing fast through industrialisation, and the old certainties of life
were being shattered, many people started to suspect that there was some powerful
organisation controlling all this, some group who were effectively setting themselves up
as rivals to God. The prime candidates for this role, in a Europe in which anti-Semitism
had long been rife, were the Jewish communities. The idea of an international Jewish
conspiracy began to gain credence, especially in Russia in the turbulent years leading
up to the first world war. Other candidates for the role of secret rulers of the world
included the Freemasons, the Communists, and the semi-mythical group known as the
Illuminati.
Such visions of a world controlled by a small and sinister cabal are still a popular
element in conspiracy theoriestoday. In fact they lie behind almost every conspiracy
theory there is. So perhaps the answer to the question 'what is a conspiracy theory?'
should be 'it's a theory which suggests that the great world events are not what they
seem; rather, they are the manifestations of a world controlled by a secret elite.'
CONSPIRACY THEORIES TODAY
There has been an explosion of interest in conspiracy theories in recent years. There are
many possible reasons for this – loss of faith in religion, as mentioned above, loss of
faith in politicians, a sensationalist mass media that likes to broadcast sensational
theories, the influence of films and novels espousing conspiracies, and so on. One major
factor is undoubtedly the growth of the internet. The internet is the perfect medium for
spreading conspiracy theories. Where once a rumour would be passed around a chosen
few insiders and spread slowly through the metropolitan grapevine – for example, the
rumour about the identity of the masked man at the London sex parties at the heart of
the Profumo affair, or the one about the identity of the Watergate source known as
'Deep Throat' – these days, it will be on the internet in minutes and instantly transmitted
around the world.
Thus today, when a major event occurs – take 9/11 for example – conspiracy theories
immediately start to circulate on the internet. Evidence that the authorities would prefer
to have kept quiet is now available to be discussed and interpreted from America to
Australia. The trouble is, of course, that so too are lies, fabrications and delusions. The
internet is at once a marvellous tool for avoiding censorship and allowing the voice of
truth to emerge, and also a forum in which every lunatic and partisan commentator can
have their say. Today, when so many conspiracy theories appear on the internet, it is
sometimes a difficult business to determine which ones are worthy of serious
consideration and which are simply hearsay.
This dilemma has never been clearer than when dealing with the events of 9/1l and
the subsequent war on terror. The extraordinary success of Michael Moore's
documentary film Fahrenheit 911 has seen conspiracy theories go mainstream. The film
takes seriously a number of conspiracy theories that might previously have been
thought outlandish. As a result, audiences have been polarised. Some see the film as
irresponsible, others see it as uttering the truths that the regular news media was scared
to utter. Ultimately their responses tended to depend on what side of the political fence
the viewer happened to be sitting on. This is hardly surprising: conspiracy theories
always tend to appeal to those whose political views are in opposition to those in power.
POLITICAL CONSPIRACIES
This book will attempt to offer an unbiased investigation into several aspects of the war
on terror and leave the reader to make up their own mind. We'll explore the various
conspiracy theories relating to the events of 9/11 itself. We'll try to make sense of the
mysterious last moments of Flight 93, the plane brought down by its passengers. We'll
look into the accusation that the war on Afghanistan was a war on oil and we'll
investigate the tangled links between the Bush family and the Bin Ladens.
Political conspiracy theories are nothing new, of course. So we'll also look into some
the classic political mysteries of yesteryear. We'll investigate the sinking of the
Lusitania asking who really sank the ocean liner – the event that persuaded the USA to
join in World War One. And what about Pearl Harbor ? Did Roosevelt really let it
happen in order to persuade Americans to join in World War Two? We'll look into one
of the most long-running and pernicious of all conspiracy theories as we explore just
why people want to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. And on a slightly lighter
note, we'll look into whether Adolf Hitler could really have escaped the bunker by a
secret tunnel and fled to Antarctica with Eva Braun.
Coming closer to the present, we'll examine at the string of suspicious deaths and
assassinations that occurred during the 1960s. The most celebrated of these, the murder
of JFK, is perhaps the ultimate conspiracy theory, with endless books, films ant TV
programmes devoted to it. The murder of radical black American leader Malcolm X,
and even the death of film star Marilyn Monroe, have also attracted their fair share of
speculation, and we'll also discuss these cases.
Many conspiracy theories relate to the existence of Secret Societies, and we'll be
looking into several of these. We'll investigate The Bilderberg Group and attempt to
establish whether this shadowy group is really running out world. And – if you're one of
those who noticed that, in the last American Presidential election, both candidates
belonged to the same secret society – well, we'll be looking into the weird world of
Skull and Bones, the Yale-based organisation whose members include both Presidents
Bush. Could it really be the American branch of the Illuminati? And who, or what, is
the Illuminati? Formed in 1776, have its members, 'the illuminated ones', really been
the secret power behind the throne throughout modern history?
Religion has always attracted its share of conspiracy theories, too, so we'll take a tour
around the strange stories that surround the Holy Grail. Could Mary Magdalen have
smuggled Christianity's most precious relic out of the Holy Land and into Western
Europe, where it remains hidden to this day? Closer to the present, there is the bizarre
death of Roberto Calvi, nicknamed 'God's banker'. Could the Pope's business chiefs
really have been hand in glove with the Mafia?
CONSPIRACIES AND THE CULT OF CELEBRITY
The cult of celebrity is one of the hallmarks of the twentieth and twenty-first century, so
it is not surprising that, in recent year, many conspiracy theorists have turned their
attention away from politics and religion towards the lives and deaths of the famous.
We'll look into the allegations that certain celebrities, like Elvis and Tupac Shakur, still
remain alive, and ask whether there is any possible evidence to support these notions.
And we'll also investigate the even stranger theory that Beatle Paul McCartney is
actually dead.
And here we move onto the theories that read like the stuff of science fiction. One of
the most enduring conspiracy theories of this type maintains that the moon landings