The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  Surely doctors, those most trusted of people, could not be participants in a mass conspiracy to deny cancer sufferers life-saving treatments? As the late cancer victim Michael Higgins wrote on the MyCancerFacts website: “I have been living with cancer for 3 years and during that time been treated by approximately half a dozen medical professionals . . . They are the people I am being asked to believe are conspiring to keep the truth hidden from me in order to keep their jobs.” Higgins’s point is telling: it is unlikely that tens of thousands of oncologists could be persuaded by pharmaceutical companies and powerful research institutes to knowingly deny the Hippocratic oath. (Error is possible, however: Thalidomide, Rotavirus vaccine and Vioxx are just three miracle cures that your doctor sincerely swore were safe – before they were withdrawn.)

  On the balance of probability, the conspicuous failure to find a cure for cancer is to be explained by a mundane reason, not a sinister one. There isn’t a cure. Cancers come in various different forms, and may have differing causes. It follows that different treatments may be necessary. Whether the medical profession can embrace divergent thinking is another question. The only thing that can safely be said in the cancer debate is that prevention is easier than cure. Most cancers seem possibly to be the result of the polluted, chemical-laden, fast-food, alcohol – and tobacco-fuelled 21st-century lifestyle. Change that for the better and cancer rates will dwindle to those of the days of yore.

  Cancer cure is suppressed by pharmaceutical companies and medical establishment: ALERT LEVEL 6

  Further Reading

  Dr Alan C. Cantwell, The Cancer Microbe, 1990

  Barry Lynes, The Cancer Cure That Worked, 1987

  Barry Lynes, Healing of Cancer, the Cures, the Cover-ups and the Solution Now! , 1990

  LE CERCLE (The Circle)

  Like the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove, Le Cercle is a transnational cabal of statesmen, corporate titans, intelligence officers and military top brass. Unlike the other two, the ultra-secretive, conservative Le Cercle wars against its enemies more than it jaws about them.

  Founded in the 1950s by the sometime French prime minister Antoine Pinay (hence the organization’s original name of “The Pinay Circle”) together with the French Nazi collaborator Jean Violet, Le Cercle sought the creation of a unified Europe. To this end it drew together the luminaries of the two most mutually antagonistic states, France and Germany, including German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and French prime minister Robert Schuman. Jean Monnet, the architect of European integration in the shape of the EEC, was also an early member.

  Le Cercle was funded by the CIA. (See diaries of attendee Alan Clark MP. Even without CIA finance, Le Cercle was unlikely to be short of money: members over the years have included the financiers Sir James Goldsmith, Carlo II Pesenti and the ubiquitous David Rockefeller.) The attraction of Le Cercle for the CIA was not its pan-Europeanism but its other face: militant anti-leftism. Le Cercle chairman Brian Crozier used his private National Association of Freedom to support the MI5 “dirty tricks” campaign against Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who eventually resigned from office in 1975. Across the Channel, Le Cercle members in the Service for External Documentation and Espionage spread disinformation against Socialist presidential candidate François Mitterrand. (Mitterrand took his revenge post-election by closing SEDE down.) More controversially, critics claim Le Cercle arranged the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme by agents of the Swedish intelligence service, SAPO. Le Cercle is even claimed to have been the instigator of the death of Princess Diana, her “crime” being her anti-landmine campaign that would have deprived defence industrialists of millions.

  Further past and present members/attendees of Le Cercle include: Jonathan Aitken MP, Julian Amery MP, Lord Norman Lamont, Dr Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William Colby, Otto von Hapsburg and Giulio Andreotti.

  Le Cercle is the one ring that controls global affairs: ALERT LEVEL 5

  Further Reading

  http://home.planet.nl-Project for the Exposure of Hidden Institutions-Le Cercle

  CHAPPAQUIDDICK

  Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?

  Senator Edward Kennedy, 1973

  The Kennedy brothers have an arm-lock on the conspiracies of the 1960s. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were allegedly assassinated as a result of conspiracies. Edward Kennedy, as is the way of the baby of the family, decided to be altogether different: he decided to perpetrate a conspiracy. Allegedly.

  On the evening of 18 July 1969, Senator Edward – “Teddy” to family and friends – Kennedy organized a house party on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard. The party was to reward the “Boiler Room Girls”, six secretaries and researchers who had worked in the office of Teddy Kennedy’s recently assassinated brother, Robert. The Boiler Room Girls were Mary Jo Kopechne, Susan Tannenbaum, Rosemary Keough, Ann Lyons, Maryellen Lyons and Esther Newburgh. Also in attendance were six men, all married: Senator Kennedy himself, Joe Gargan (Kennedy’s cousin), Charles Tretter, Raymond La Rosa, John Crimmins and Attorney General Paul Markham. Crimmins supplied the booze: two bottles of rum, three half-gallons of vodka, four fifths of whisky and two cases of beer.

  According to his own account, Kennedy left the party to drive 28-year-old Kopechne to the ferry.

  “On 18 July 1969, at approximately 11.15 p.m. in Chappaquiddick, Martha’s Vinyard, Massachusetts, I was driving my car on Main Street on my way to get the ferry back to Edgartown. I was unfamiliar with the road and turned right onto Dike Road, instead of bearing hard left on Main Street. After proceeding for approximately one-half mile on Dike Road I descended a hill and came upon a narrow bridge. The car went off the side of the bridge. There was one passenger with me, one Miss Mary [Kennedy was not sure of the spelling of the dead girl’s surname, and gave a phonetic approximation], a former secretary of my brother Sen. Robert Kennedy. The car turned over and sank into the water and landed with the roof resting on the bottom. I attempted to open the door and the window of the car but have no recollection of how I got out of the car. I came to the surface and then repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still in the car. I was unsuccessful in the attempt. I was exhausted and in a state of shock. I recall walking back to where my friends were eating. There was a car parked in front of the cottage and I climbed into the back seat. I then asked for someone to bring me back to Edgartown. I remember walking around for a period of time and then going back to my hotel room. When I fully realized what had happened this morning, I immediately contacted the police.”

  Kennedy’s version was accepted by the police and courts. He was given a two-month suspended sentence for failing to remain at the scene of an accident and failing to report it (a crime that bore a mandatory jail sentence). But there are a number of anomalies and concerns in his account:

  Deputy Sheriff Christopher Look remembered seeing, at 12.30 p.m., a car on the island which he believed to be Kennedy’s Oldsmobile. When he approached this car it reversed fast down the lane towards Dike Bridge, where Kopechne died. If the car was Kennedy’s he cannot have been driving Kopechne to the ferry because the last boat had long since gone. Many suspect that Kennedy and Kopechne deliberately drove on to the unlit dirt track to have sex, either in the car or on the beach at the end of the track.

  Kennedy claimed in his statement that he was unfamiliar with the dirt Dike Road. At the inquest, however, Judge Boyle concluded that “Earlier on 18 July, he [Kennedy] had been driven over Chappaquiddick Road three times, and over Dike Road and Dike Bridge twice. Kopechne had been driven over Chappaquiddick Road five times and over Dike Road and Dike Bridge twice.”

  According to Gargan’s later testimony, when Kennedy returned to the cottage after the accident his main worry was to cover up the accident. He (Kennedy) proposed saying that Kopechne had been driving the car alone.
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  According to Gargan and Markham, Kennedy only reported the accident the following morning at their insistence. Before going to the police he conferred with his family by telephone.

  Kennedy denied drinking at the alcohol-plentiful party, although this is disputed by others. By the time he presented himself to the police it was conveniently too late to test his word. While Kennedy reported to the police on the morning of 19 July, Gargan organized a clean-up of the cottage so that no traces of revelry remained.

  For someone shocked and confused, Kennedy was remarkably able to navigate his way to the ferry, swim a 500-foot (150m) channel and find his hotel.

  If Kennedy really wanted to save Kopechne’s life why did he not call for help from the cottages near the bridge, instead of going all the way back to the party? It is difficult not to believe that Senator Kennedy put his career before Kopechne’s life.

  The conspiracy kicks in thereafter:

  There are speculations that the Kennedy clan put subtle pressure on the police to avoid scrutinizing the Kopechne accident too closely.

  On 19 July, when Registry Inspector George Kennedy (no relation) requested a copy of Edward M. Kennedy’s driving licence from the Boston Registry, it was confirmed that it had expired; the next day it had been miraculously fixed and updated.

  Kennedy possessed a litany of driving offences, but the court did not learn about them because his driving record miraculously disappeared from the system.

  No autopsy was performed on Kopechne. This caused a public outcry, leading to a motion to have her body exhumed. The request was successfully challenged by the Kopechnes’ lawyer Joseph Flanagan. Flanagan was hired and paid for by Teddy Kennedy.

  If an autopsy had been carried out it might have come to a chilling conclusion. Diver John Farrar, on entering the sunken car, found Kopechne’s corpse in a posture that suggested she’d been trapped in an air pocket – she’d died, therefore, not of drowning but of suffocation. It has been estimated the air in the pocket could have supported her for over two hours – plenty of time, then, for her to have been rescued had Teddy Kennedy acted more expeditiously.

  The Kennedy family protected Teddy Kennedy from proper criminal proceedings following death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick: ALERT LEVEL 9

  Further Reading

  Jack Olsen, The Bridge at Chappaquiddick, 1970 http://www.ytedk.com

  CHECHEN BOMBINGS

  The bombings started on 4 September 1999, when an explosion destroyed a block of military flats in the southern Russian city of Buinaksk, killing 62 people. Two civilian apartment blocks in Moscow were blown up on 9 and 13 September that same year, with 212 fatalities. Then, on 16 September, 17 people died in a truck-bomb blast in Volgodonsk.

  The Russian secret service, the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (FSB), quickly identified one of the perpetrators as Achimez Gochiyaev, a foot soldier for the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. Since 1994 the Chechens, led by Basayev, had been fighting fanatically for independence from Russia. Case closed: the bombings were committed by Chechen militants as part of their terrorist campaign for a free Chechnya. In response, the acting prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, ordered a mass counter-terrorism campaign in Chechnya, a piece of hardman politicking that so endeared him to a fearful Russian electorate that they voted the former FSB director their President in 2000.

  Conspiracy theorists pounced. And not just conspiracy theorists, but respected politicians like British Conservative MP Julian Lewis, and respected journalists, like the Financial Times’s. Moscow correspondent David Satter. What sense did it make for the Chechens to commit outrages likely to cause an invasion of Chechnya? Not much. What tangible evidence did the Russian authorities offer to prove Chechen involvement in the bombings? None. Strangest of all was the bomb that failed to explode in the city of Ryazan, where an apartment resident noted two men acting suspiciously and reported the matter to the city police. On investigating the apartment block’s basement the police found sacks of hexogen (also known as RDX, the explosive ingredient used in the four bombings) and timers. Swiftly the FSB confiscated the sacks, before announcing that they contained sugar and had been used as a prop in a counter-terrorist exercise.

  Evidence that the bombings were a “false flag” operation undertaken by the FSB to provide a casus belli for a Russian incursion into Chechnya mounted. In December 1999 Lieutenant Alexei Galkin, a Russian spy captured by the Chechens in the siege of Grozny, testified to Western journalists that the Russian secret services had planted at least some of the “Chechen” bombs. The transcript of his interview included:

  Journalist/Interpreter: Can you introduce yourself please.

  Galkin: Assistant head of sector senior lieutenant Alexei Viktorovich Galkin, employee of the Central Intelligence Office [GRU] of the Russian Federation.

  [. . .]

  Journalist: Did you take part in the bombing of buildings in Moscow and Dagestan?

  Galkin: I personally did not take part in the bombing of the buildings in Moscow and Dagestan, but I know who blew them up, who is behind the bombing of buildings in Moscow and who blew up the buildings in Buinaksk.

  Journalist: Can you tell us who?

  Galkin: Russian special forces, the FSB together with GRU [Central Intelligence Office] are responsible for blowing up the buildings in Moscow and in Volgodonsk. The bombing of the buildings in Buinaksk was the work of some members of our group, which at the time was on a mission in Dagestan.

  Journalist: And as far as I know, here you have been recorded on tape, you confessed to all this, apparently you were filmed with a video camera. And when . . . when you, during the filming were you acting on your own wishes?

  Voice off camera of the head of the Chechen Security Service Abu Movsaev: That . . . Don’t answer that question.

  Journalist: How have you been treated here?

  Galkin: I’ve been treated well here. As a prisoner of war I have not been beaten here, they have fed me three times a day and when necessary given me medical assistance.

  Journalist: Here is the statement given by you. Do you confirm that you made it voluntarily without any pressure on the part of anyone?

  Galkin: This statement is printed from my words. I wrote this statement by hand [holds the piece of paper in front of his face], with my personal signature.

  Journalist: Now, at this moment, as you are speaking with us, are you afraid of anything?

  Galkin: No, it is simply that this is the first time I have faced journalists . . . journalists from western television companies, so I am a bit nervous.

  Abu Movsaev’s voice off camera: The special forces are not allowed to appear on . . .

  Galkin: It is quite simply that due to the nature of our work we have to . . .we are not supposed to show ourselves in front of television cameras. [Smiles tensely.]

  [. . .]

  Journalist: Do you personally and does your unit have anything to do with the explosions in Moscow?

  Galkin: Personally our unit has nothing to do with the explosions in Moscow, since at that time we were in Dagestan. The members of our unit, the members of our unit of twelve men, who were in Dagestan at that time, carried out the bombing of the house in Buinaksk.

  After Galkin, it was the turn of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko to accuse his ex-colleagues of orchestrating the apartment block bombings in his book Blowing Up Russia, which was underwritten by the exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky. More than 5,000 copies of the book were confiscated by Russian authorities in 2003. Boris Berezovsky also financed a documentary film, FSB Blows Up Russia, which again accused Russian special services of organizing the explosions in Volgodonsk and Moscow. Meanwhile, sometime KGB colonel Konstantin Pre-obrazhensky asserted that the Chechen rebels lacked the materiel to organize the bombings “without the help of high-ranking Moscow officials” and the Los Angeles Times claimed to have identified FSB operative Vladimir Romanovich as the person who rented the basement where one of the bombs was detonated.


  The FSB denied everything. Meanwhile, Berezovsky was compromised by his overt hostility to the Russian regime, which had accused him of financial wrongdoings. Yet suspicions that the FSB had something to hide over the apartment bombings refused to go away. Indeed, they were only increased by the strange circumstances which surrounded other “Chechen” terrorist acts in Russia, notably the October 2004 siege of Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre which ended when security forces pumped in a mysterious gas to overcome the hostage-takers. Why, if the hostage-takers were incapacitated, were they summarily executed with bullets? Then there was the atrocity at Beslan elementary school, where “Chechen” terrorists held a thousand parents and children hostage before the siege ended in an inferno of explosions and gunfire, killing over 300. The Chechen authorities blamed pro-Putin forces in Russia as the instigators of the siege, a claim that was given credence by the Russian defence department’s forced admission that none of the hostage-takers at Beslan were actually Chechens. Beslan residents themselves organized protests against Russian complicity in the siege.