The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  By one conspiracy theory, the CIA used the Ryan visit to Jamestown to assassinate Leo Ryan, who was a vocal critic of the CIA, having co-authored the Hughes–Ryan amendment bill which, if passed, would have required the CIA to disclose its planned covert missions to Congress for approval. The Jonestown congregation was murdered, in this scenario, in an attempt to cover up Leo Ryan’s assassination. Another CIA-guilty scenario is advanced by John Judge in “The Black Hole of Guyana” (in Secret and Suppressed, 1993). Here it is suggested that the People’s Temple, from its very origin, was a CIA exercise in mind control. Judge points out that many of the drugs found at Jonestown matched those used in the CIA’s MK-ULTRA programme and that Larry Layton, Jones’s right-hand man, was the son of the chief of the US Army’s Chemical–Biological Warfare Division. Surviving People’s Temple official Joyce Shaw speculated that Jonestown was “some kind of horrible government experiment . . . a plan like that of the Germans to exterminate blacks”. (The majority of the People’s Temple congregation were black women.) Since Jones was showing signs of mental instability, so the story goes, the CIA decided to kill – literally – the People’s Temple project rather than risk its exposure.

  In Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? (1989) Michael Meiers posits that Congressman Ryan was about to make such an exposure, hence his assassination. Meiers adds another twist, suggesting that Jonestown was the site of the CIA’s HIV/AIDS experiments. Then there is the suggestion by S. F. Alinin, B. G. Antonov and A. N. Itskov that the CIA massacred the People’s Temple because it was a socialist, not a religious, organization, and was about to embarrass the US by defecting en masse to the USSR. It’s a matter of record that Jones had meetings with Soviet and Cuban officials, and almost his last order was that luggage containing money and documents was to be taken to Guyana’s Soviet embassy.

  Possible CIA involvement in the Jonestown massacre was investigated by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded in 1980 that the agency had no links with Jones or any part in the massacre. A lawsuit by Ryan’s children alleging that the CIA ran Jonestown as part of MK-ULTRA was thrown out.

  Amid the flurry of Jonestown theories, the obvious explanation still holds up: it was the work of a messianic guru who exercised an almost hypnotic hold over his psychologically needy followers. Jones was, if you like, a little Hitler. Affidavits by People’s Temple survivors detail all too clearly Jones’s long-held plans for a mass suicide should his little Reich be jeopardized. The People’s Temple former financial director, Deborah Layton Blakey, who escaped the cult, issued a public affidavit six months before the massacre warning that Jones was intent on a mass suicide. Most convincing of all is the audio-tape retrieved from Jonestown, widely believed to be genuine, in which Jones can be heard discussing the deteriorating situation:

  Jones: It’s all over. The congressman has been murdered. (Music and singing.) Well, it’s all over, all over. What a legacy, what a legacy. What the Red Brigade doin’ that once ever made any sense anyway? They invaded our privacy. They came into our home. They followed us six thousand miles away. Red Brigade showed them justice. The congressman’s dead. (Music only.)

  Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s simple. There’s no convulsions with it. It’s just simple. Just, please get it. Before it’s too late. The GDF [Guyanese Defense Force] will be here, I tell you. Get movin’, get movin’, get movin’.

  Woman 6: Now. Do it now!

  Jones: Don’t be afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people land out here. They’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this. Are you going to separate yourself from whoever shot the congressman? I don’t know who shot him.

  Voices: No. No. No.

  Jones: Please, can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medication? You don’t know what you’ve done. I tried. (Applause, music, singing.) They saw it happen and ran into the bush and dropped the machine guns. I never in my life. But not any more. But we’ve got to move. Are you gonna get that medication here? You’ve got to move. Marceline, about forty minutes.

  [. . .]

  Jones: Please. For God’s sake, let’s get on with it. We’ve lived – we’ve lived as no other people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with it. Let’s be done with the agony of it. (Applause.) It’s far, far harder to have to walk through every day, die slowly – and from the time you’re a child ’til the time you get grey, you’re dying. Dishonest, and I’m sure that they’ll – they’ll pay for it. They’ll pay for it. This is a revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide. So they’ll pay for this. They brought this upon us. And they’ll pay for that. I leave that destiny to them. (Voices.) Who wants to go with their child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s humane. I want to go – I want to see you go, though. They can take me and do what they want – whatever they want to do. I want to see you go. I don’t want to see you go through this hell no more. No more. No more. No more. We’re trying. If everybody will relax. The best thing you do to relax, and you will have no problem. You’ll have no problem with this thing if you just relax.

  [. . .]

  Jones: Where’s the vat, the vat, the vat? Where’s the vat with the Green C on it? The vat with the Green C in. Bring it so the adults can begin.

  Jonestown: a mass suicide called by a delusional, mind-games-playing tyrant. So why, then, do 5,000 pages of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA) 1979 hearing remain classified?

  The Jonestown massacre was carried out by CIA to disguise mind-control experiments: ALERT LEVEL 5

  Further Reading

  John Judge, “The Black Hole of Guyana”, Secret and Suppressed, ed. Jim Keith, 1993

  Deborah Layton, Seductive Poison: A Survivor of Jonestown Shares Her Story, 1999

  Michael Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment?: A Review of the Evidence, 1989

  KAL007

  On 1 September 1983 a Korean Air Lines 747 set off from Alaska for Seoul. Instead of following the prescribed route, the civilian flight went 365 miles (590km) off-course and into Soviet airspace. There it was engaged by Soviet fighters, which launched two air-to-air missiles at the airliner, sending KAL007 down into the Sea of Japan with the loss of 269 passengers and crew aboard.

  These were the bad old days of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, Yuri Andropov in the Kremlin. On the face of it, the shooting down of KAL007 was cold-blooded, unprovoked murder by the Soviets and was condemned as such by the White House. But was it? According to R. W. Johnson in Shootdown (1986), KAL007 was on a CIA/US military mission to fly into Soviet airspace and thereby trigger the Reds’ defence systems – which could then be monitored by NATO and Japanese surveillance systems. One of the monitoring stations, Johnson hypothesizes, was the space-shuttle Challenger, which flew over the Sea of Japan four times during KAL007’s flight. To lend weight to his argument he details a history of “mistaken” Korean Air Lines infringements of Soviet airspace, including the 1978 gunning-down of a strayed Korean airliner. According to lawyer Melvin Belli, who represented some of the passengers’ families, the KAL007 pilot said to his wife before departure: “This is the last trip. It’s too dangerous.”

  KAL had an incentive to tag along with a CIA spying scheme. The company was in a poor financial state and required US government dispensations to survive.

  Johnson concluded that the US government bet the Soviets wouldn’t open fire on a civilian airliner, but got it disastrously wrong. His case has to be weighed against the investigations of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which determined that the 747 went off-course because the inattentive pilot failed to engage the Inertial Navigation System, relying instead on the magnetic compass to guide the plane. He would have to have been very drowsy indeed, and likewise the remainder of the flight crew. The plane’s ground mapping radar would have informed them that they w
ere flying over land and not sea as indicated on the flight plan.

  No one, incidentally, could call R. W. Johnson the usual conspiracy theory suspect. He’s an Oxford professor and heavyweight political historian.

  Civilian flight KAL007 was undertaking a clandestine US mission over Russia when it was shot down: ALERT LEVEL 8

  Further Reading

  R. W. Johnson, Shootdown, 1986

  DR DAVID KELLY

  Those implicated in the 2003 demise of Dr David Kelly include the Iraqi secret service, the French secret service, and not least, Kelly himself. Whatever the truth about his death, he was as much a victim of the war in Iraq as any soldier or civilian killed on the battlefield.

  The confusion, briefings and counter-briefings that surrounded the days running up to the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 created a nervousness and state of tension which caused all parties involved to act in unpredictable ways. During this time the UK government released two dossiers which set out evidence for its belief that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a real threat to world security: the September 2002 document which stated that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that, crucially, these weapons could be deployed within 45 minutes; and a second, in February 2003, which detailed secret arms networks. A month later the UK had deployed troops in Iraq to secure Hussein’s downfall in spite of vocal protests from the government’s own MPs and many other groups.

  On 20 May 2003, BBC Radio’s flagship current affairs programme Today featured a report from its defence correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, in which he revealed that a senior source at the Ministry of Defence accused a member of the Downing Street press office (later identified as Alastair Campbell) of having “sexed up” the September dossier by inserting the information about the 45-minute deployment. The BBC’s Newsnight correspondent Susan Watts also reported that a “senior official” believed the intelligence services came under heavy political pressure to include the 45-minute claim in its dossier.

  The government, enraged by the leak, demanded that Gilligan reveal his source, and weeks of accusation and counter-accusation began, with the BBC defending Gilligan and the anonymity of his source and the government’s press machine attempting to discredit the story. Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s director of news, described the attacks as “an unprecedented level of pressure from Downing Street”. Both Gilligan and Campbell were asked to appear before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FAC) to explain their actions.

  The media frenzy must have worried Dr Kelly, who wrote to his line manager at the ministry admitting he had met Gilligan on May 22 and could have been one of the sources for his story. After another ten days of increasing pressure to reveal the identity of the source, the MoD then identified Kelly indirectly by pointedly refusing to deny he was involved when a list of possible sources was read out at a press conference, although Kelly himself was not informed his name was being released to the press.

  On 15 and 16 July Dr Kelly sat in front of the FAC facing allegations that it was he who had been the source of the Gilligan story. He appeared deeply uncomfortable at being the centre of so much public attention, and spoke so softly that air-conditioning fans had to be turned off so the committee members could hear what he was saying. Despite much probing, Kelly maintained that, although he had spoken to Gilligan, he had not been his primary source. Kelly said the controversial point about the 45-minute deployment claim being added by Alastair Campbell could not have come from him as he had no part in the actual compilation of the dossier, but had merely presented information for possible inclusion, and thus had not been not party to the decisions by the Joint Intelligence Committee, who had produced the document.

  At the end of the two days the FAC had concluded that Kelly was “most unlikely” to be the source of the “sexed-up” claim. Kelly, too, had relaxed, and was laughing and joking with the committee members.

  The following day, 17 July, he left his home at 3 p.m., telling his wife he was going for his usual afternoon walk. He did not return. At 11.45 p.m. his family contacted the police and reported him missing. He was found at 9.20 the next morning by two search volunteers in woods on Harrowdown Hill, about a mile and a half (2.5km) from his home. The police did not confirm the body as his until 19 July, and then stated that they believed he had committed suicide by taking the powerful painkiller co-proxamol and then cutting his left wrist. A day later, after talking to his family, the BBC issued a statement naming Dr Kelly as the source of both Gilligan’s and Watts’s reports.

  In the light of the previous train of events and unusual vigour with which the government had pursued Andrew Gilligan and his source, it seems understandable that an independent inquiry into the whole affair was announced as the best way of uncovering the truth surrounding Kelly’s death and the lingering accusation that Downing Street had tampered with intelligence reports. Lord Hutton was appointed to head the inquiry, and his inquiry heard several months’ worth of evidence from experts, Kelly’s friends and family, and members of the Cabinet, including Tony Blair. Five months later, after much hype and speculation, Hutton concluded that the government had behaved properly, that the BBC should be heavily criticized for its actions, and that Kelly’s death had been by his own hand.

  There, it was presumably hoped, is where the whole unfortunate episode would end, but there were some who pointed to inconsistencies in the official version of events. Many people who had been close to Kelly, professionally and personally, did not believe the suicide story, and others believed his death bore all the hallmarks of a planned assassination.

  The first to speak publicly of their misgivings were the two paramedics who had attended the scene of Dr Kelly’s death, Paul Bartlett and Vanessa Hunt. Interviewed by Anthony Barnett in the Observer in December 2004, they said they found little or no evidence of the major bleeding that would have taken place if the severed wrist artery had been the cause of death, as stated by the pathologist. “When somebody cuts an artery, whether accidentally or intentionally, the blood pumps everywhere. I just think it is incredibly unlikely that he died from the wrist wound we saw,” said Hunt.

  The paramedics’ views were soon supported by a group of doctors who wrote to the Guardian newspaper, saying they too were deeply unhappy with the official cause of death. The severed ulnar artery, they argued, was too thin to have allowed a major haemorrhage, especially as, out in the open, the blood vessel would have been closed off by surrounding muscle long before Kelly bled to death. David Halpin, a trauma surgeon and one of the authors of the letter, maintains that even the deepest cut in the region of the ulnar artery would not have caused death: “. . . a completely transacted artery retracts immediately and thus stops bleeding, even at a relatively high blood pressure”. The artery itself lies deep in the wrist on the little finger side of the hand, under other nerves and tendons, and cannot be accidentally slashed like the more superficial radial artery. Following the suicide theory would mean believing Kelly had managed to cut down deep into his own wrist to locate and cut the ulnar artery . . . with a blunt pruning knife.

  The physicians also questioned the toxicology results, pointing out that the concentration of the drug co-proxamol in Kelly’s blood was not high enough to have killed him, being only a third of a fatal dose. Kelly’s stomach was virtually empty on examination, containing the equivalent of a fifth of one tablet, suggesting that, if he did swallow the cited 29 tablets, he had regurgitated most of them before the drug could be absorbed.

  As suicides go, this was a pretty amateur affair, considering Kelly must have had an intimate knowledge of human biology in his work as a microbiologist and authority on biological weapons. He was the only person to die using these methods in the whole of 2003. Co-proxamol is often used in suicide attempts but most commonly in conjunction with alcohol. Severing the ulnar artery does not automatically lead to a fatal loss of blood. Kelly is known to have had an aversion to swallowing tablets. If his suicide was premeditated, why bring a small blunt
concave-edged knife to do a tricky slicing job, along with the tablets? And if it was a spontaneous act, why did he bring 30 painkilling tablets with him on his daily constitutional?

  As if there were not enough mystery surrounding the suicide, it became apparent during the Hutton Inquiry that there were other major discrepancies. The volunteers who found Dr Kelly’s body said he was sitting or slumped against a tree when they discovered him, but in his evidence DC Coe of the Thames Valley Police stated Kelly was flat on his back and away from the tree. The volunteers swore that the knife, an opened bottle of Evian and a watch were not present when they were there, but these items had appeared next to the body by the time DC Coe left the scene.

  As any viewer of TV crime will know, most solved cases are so because of the work of the forensics people, but in this case there was surprisingly little forensic evidence forthcoming. For instance, whose fingerprints were on the knife? Was any foreign DNA detected in the blood samples? Was the watch found beside Dr Kelly broken or intact, and, if broken, what time did it show? What were the last calls made to him on his mobile phone? None of these questions was asked during the inquiry, and no answers were volunteered.

  In March 2005, Lib Dem MP Norman Baker resigned his front bench job expressly to investigate the circumstances surrounding Kelly’s death. A year later he published his findings on his own website and contributed to a BBC TV programme, Conspiracy Files, which focused on Kelly. Baker voiced his serious doubts over the conclusion of the inquiry, not only on the basis of the medical evidence and the suicide verdict but also concerning the “irregularities in the actions of the coroner”, the choice of pathologist, the actions of the police at the beginning of the investigation, and why Lord Hutton, in particular, was picked to head the inquiry.