The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  Timothy McVeigh was killed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 11 June 2001. Terry Nichols was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  The government then firmly closed the Oklahoma City bombing file. Others, though, have sought to keep it open, since disturbing questions about McVeigh’s conviction have never been satisfactorily answered. Even the presiding judge, Richard P. Matsch, thought so.

  In their investigation into the bombing of the Murrah building, the FBI rarely wavered from the track of McVeigh and Nichols. But were others involved? Eyewitnesses at the Murrah building on the morning of the blast spoke of McVeigh being accompanied by a dark-haired, possibly Middle Eastern man; the same man, John Doe 2, had been seen at the Kansas car rental office with him. Later the FBI stated that Nichols was John Doe 2, although Nichols looked nothing like the swarthy identikit picture they’d issued of that suspect. So who was he? According to deputy Kansas sheriff Jake Mauck, John Doe 2 was a local “Patriot”, a claim that has strengthened over the years as reporters uncovered links between McVeigh and the far-right Aryan Republican Army. In 2004 Associated Press reported that the same type of blasting caps used in the Oklahoma City bombing had been used by the Aryan Republican Army in bank robberies across the Midwest.

  More evidence that McVeigh and Nichols did not act alone is provided by explosive experts, who state that the duo could not, as the federal government claimed, have assembled a 4,800 lb (2,175kg) fertilizer bomb on the evening before the explosion. One prominent expert witness, Brigadier-General Benton Partin, claims the Murrah blast was caused by numerous bombs wired to the main supporting columns, not just the explosive device packed inside the Ryder truck. According to seismo-graphic records held by the University of Oklahoma’s Geological Survey, a second explosion occurred eight seconds after the first, although the Survey’s director was at pains to point out that the second shock wave was probably caused by the same explosion and had merely travelled through denser earth to reach their seismograph.

  For some, especially those on the American far right, the “evidence” of multiple explosions in the Murrah building leads us full-pelt to the conclusion that the federal government was involved in the bombing. Just as the Nazis, so the argument runs, set the Reichstag afire, so the Feds blew up the Murrah building in order to provide a pretext for a legal crackdown on the patriotic militias of America. After all, why was the BATF office in the Murrah building empty at the time of the explosion? Obviously, the staff had received an inside warning to stay away.

  The theory that the FBI committed the Oklahoma City bombing founders on a moment’s sanity. In order to secure a legal clampdown, the US establishment didn’t need an excuse; civil liberties were being curtailed anyway. Furthermore, BATF staff did die in the explosion.

  A more benevolent – and more likely – theory is that, yes, the FBI was indeed involved in a cover-up at Oklahoma City . . . but a cover-up designed to bolster its reputation as efficient lawmen. The FBI failed to track John Doe 2 because it wanted a quick, clean conviction of McVeigh and Nichols in order to reassure the US public that justice was being speedily done. Alas, by failing to investigate McVeigh’s links with the Militias and by “accidentally” holding back 3,000 pages of documents from his defence team, the FBI acted in exactly the dubious manner its critics complained of. Which provided more grist to the mill of ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists like . . . Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and their unknown co-bombers.

  FBI. The Federal Bureau of Incompetence.

  The FBI/BATF orchestrated the Oklahoma City bombing in order to create conditions necessary for crack-down on patriotic militias: ALERT LEVEL 3

  Further Reading

  Stephen Jones and Peter Israel, Others Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy, 1998

  Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 2002 www.okcbombing.org

  OMEGA AGENCY

  Forget the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations, even the Trilateral Commission; according to www.totse.com “The Omega Agency is the one running the show . . . the whole ball of wax.”

  AboveTopSecret.com and a host of other websites agree: the 10–12 members of the ruling council of the OA are the supreme secret force behind the New World Order. George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, Gerald Ford and Alexander C. Haig are among the present and past members of the OA council, which has its HQ at the FBI’s Langley complex.

  To instal the New World Order, the OA will use the troops of the United Nations who have practised large-scale manoeuvres under the pretence of fighting for freedom in Kuwait (the Gulf War), Bosnia and so on. However, sections of the existing ruling orders oppose the OA, being instead desirous of maintaining influence or having a different worldview; the CIA, for example, wants a “more Communistic-type government” than the OA, which will allow some individual freedom – except for those who are indolent and criminal. In the OA’s New World Order there will be an “end of living off of society and not contributing your fair share . . . Crimes against another or against society will be met with the death penalty, if such crime is of a severe nature such as murder, rape or robbery.”

  There will be a forced reduction in population: “Population control will be accomplished by mandatory birth control by all people, men as well as women. Abortion will be freely available. There will be zero tolerance for child-bearing out of wedlock . . . There will be a limit of 2 children per couple allowed.”

  The Omega Agency also relies on the aid of extraterrestrials, who live under Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico. “These ETs,” says AboveTopSecret.com, “are helping the US with its space program and are working toward devising a plan to restore the planet’s environment after the OA takes over”. The aliens, however, are mainly resident on Earth because they wish to engineer away the innate violence of humans which potentially threatens, via the expanding space programme, the militaristic colonization of their pacific planets. The aliens working with the OA are both Greys and Greens; the Greys are mainly vegetarian, though they apparently “have been known to enjoy a steak now and then”.

  Outside self-referring internet websites, there is no evidence that the Omega Agency exists. Believers consider this lack of evidence merely proof of how secret the OA really is!

  The Omega Agency, together with aliens, is preparing the New World Order dictatorship: ALERT LEVEL 0

  Further Reading

  www.AboveTopSecret.com

  www.totse.com

  OPUS DEI

  Opus Dei, meaning literally “God’s Work” in Latin, is a Roman Catholic prelature founded in 1928 by Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer y Albas. According to its supporters, who include British politician Ruth Kelly, Opus Dei is an innocuous organization whose members seek simply to live the word of God in their professional lives. Which is not exactly how Dan Brown paints it in The Da Vinci Code (2003).

  Balaguer created the order after seeing a vision of God in Madrid. Since then Opus Dei has garnered 85,000 members around the world. Pope John Paul II acknowledged the Order’s influence by granting it the status of “personal prelature” in 1982. Twenty years later Balaguer (who died in 1975) was canonized. His elevation to sainthood was controversial. Few men had achieved such status so quickly – and few were as unpopular or as divisive a figure. Former members of Opus Dei led the appeals against Balaguer’s canonization, citing his “arrogance and malevolent temper . . . his love of luxury and ostentation”. Moreover, his political views were incontrovertibly fascistic, as any reading of his The Way (1934) confirms. A native Spaniard, he actively supported Franco’s dictatorship and once claimed that Hitler would be the saving of Christianity from Communism. His views filtered right down through the Order: Opus Dei members in South America bankrolled the right-wing regime of Alberto Fujimori in Peru in the 1990s.

  Then there is the Order’s secretive, hierarchical nature. Membership is by invitation, although some members (priests) are more im
portant than others (the laity). The Way argues the need for a ruling elite who should be followed blindly; lower-order members are required to reveal their souls to their spiritual leaders in a “weekly chat”. Anti-Opus Dei websites, such as www.odan.org, list other cultish practices designed to keep membership tightly controlled, including the cutting off of family connections and self-flagellation. Lay members include “Numeraries”, who are celibate and live in single-sex quasi-monasteries and give over all their money to Opus Dei, and “Supernumeraries”, who can be married and who hand over only a percentage of their income – quite an earner when you have 85,000 members in the two categories. To see where $50 million of the money went, take a look at Opus Dei’s imposing 17-storey US headquarters on NY’s Lexington Avenue.

  Critics commonly label Opus Dei a “Catholic Freemasonry” (Balaguer, incidentally, thought the activities of the real Freemasons to be “the work of the Devil”), and it does operate as a secret, self-contained society by virtue of its status as a “personal prelature” in the Church. Like other covert groups, it seeks influence beyond its closed circle: “Have you ever bothered to think,” Balaguer once said, “how absurd it is to leave one’s Catholicism aside on entering a university or a professional association or a scholarly meeting or Congress, as if you were checking your hat at the door?” Accusations that Opus Dei seeks to infiltrate the mass media were heated up in 1979 by the leaking of an Opus Dei document which showed that 604 of its members worked in journalism and 52 in radio/TV.

  Opus Dei’s message, at least, is clear enough. Like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Balaguer’s The Way has the virtue of forthrightness. For Balaguer there is only the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic way and its end goal is a global theocracy.

  All of which begs the question: if Opus Dei’s only aims are charity and the “sanctifying of work”, why does it need its secretive independent status as a personal prelature?

  Opus Dei seeks to instal a right-wing Roman Catholic theocracy: ALERT LEVEL 8

  Further Reading

  John L. Allen Jr, Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church, 2005

  www.odan.org

  PEARL HARBOR

  Tora! Tora! Tora! As every good American boy and girl is brought up to believe, the Japanese made a sneaky unannounced attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941. After 350 Japanese fighter bombers unloaded their ordnance, 21 ships and 2,400 Americans lay dead in the water. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called 7 December 1941 “a date which will live in infamy” and promptly signed a declaration of war against Japan.

  Sunday 7 December was certainly a day of infamy. Despite all his protestations of surprise and anger, Roosevelt knew a Japanese assault was imminent. More, the evidence suggests he provoked Japan into an attack so the US could appear the innocent party. Unlike 90 per cent of his countrymen, Roosevelt wanted to get involved in the Second World War. Letting the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor was his way of sea-changing US opinion.

  Thanks to the US intelligence services, hundreds of Japanese “purple code” intercepts had been decrypted, showing Japan’s build-up to a strike in the Pacific. On 27 November, the US Navy and War Departments warned: “Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased . . . an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” On the evening of 6 December the US Navy deciphered a message sent from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington. The intercept revealed that Japan was ending diplomatic relations with the US. On reading the translated message, Roosevelt announced, “This means war.” The Australian and British intelligence services likewise informed Washington of Japan’s intention.

  According to Roosevelt’s apologists, the warnings of war never reached Pearl Harbor, due to cock-up and bad weather. So on the morning of Sunday 7 December 1941 Pearl Harbor slept in instead of being up and ready behind the guns. No fewer than eight high-level investigations have investigated the reasons for the failure of the 27 November and 6 December intelligence to reach Pearl Harbor, beginning with the Roberts Commission of December 1941. This blamed the Pearl Harbor debacle on the local commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, for not being sufficiently prepared. A 1944 Army Pearl Harbor Board blamed the disaster on the War Department for not sending out the 6 December communique. A 1945 Naval Court of Inquiry blamed the Navy Department head, Admiral Stark, for not forwarding the December communique. In other words, Pearl Harbor was everybody’s fault except FDR’s!

  Little significance can be attached to the various commissions’ findings. As one member of the Roberts Commission remarked, it was “crooked as a snake” and set up only to preserve FDR’s reputation. (That member was no wild-eyed loony subversive but Admiral of the US Navy William Standley.) Much the same can be said for the subsequent inquiries. Not until the 1946 Joint Congressional Committee on Pearl Harbor did FDR receive even mild censure, but by then he was dead and the war won.

  What of the charge that FDR intentionally provoked the war with Japan? The first such political shot came from a surprising source: Robert A. Theobald, the commander of destroyers at Pearl Harbor in 1941, in his 1954 book The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor. Another naval officer, Robert Stinnet, delivered a devastating broadside in Day of Deceit (2001), which quoted an eight-point plan drawn up for FDR in 1940 and much later found by Stinnet in the archives. The eight-point plan opened with the words “The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act [of war]” and suggested inciting Japan by trade embargoes.

  And, lo and behold, the US goaded Nippon throughout 1940–41 by restricting shipments of wheat, machinery and oil. On 26 November 1941 the US upped the ante by insisting Japan withdraw from Indochina and China and renounce its tripartite alliance with Germany and Italy. Tokyo cited this demand in its 6 December communique as the cause of the breakdown in diplomatic relations with the US.

  Roosevelt thus engineered the war with Japan, just as he knew an attack on American forces was likely on 7 December 1941. (In fairness, he probably did not know the exact location of the assault – although the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor must have topped any list of likely targets.) Just after 7 December 1941 General George C. Marshall, supreme commander of the US Army, informed the handful of top brass involved in the Pear Harbor cover-up: “Gentlemen, this goes to the grave with us.” The secret did; it has taken historians more than 50 years to recover the full story of the day of infamy.

  Few, however, are keen to criticize FDR for his Pearl Harbor cover-up, even truth seekers like Standley and Stinnet. Pearl Harbor, it seems, is a case where the end really did justify the means: pushing the Japanese into attacking a naked Pearl Harbor allowed the US to enter the Second World War and join Britain and Russia in successfully defeating the twin menaces of German Nazism and Japanese militarism.

  Usually, applications of Machiavelli’s maxim go badly wrong. The Bay of Tonkin, anybody? But at Pearl Harbor, for once, things went right.

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt conspired to cause attack on US Navy forces at Pearl Harbor: ALERT LEVEL 9

  Further Reading

  Robert Stinnet, Day of Deceit, 2001

  Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, 1954

  John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, 1982

  PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT

  On 13 January 1955 Morris K. Jessup, author of The Case for the UFO (1955), received a letter from a man identifying himself as Carlos Allende. This informed Jessup of a top-secret naval project from the Second World War: the Philadelphia Experiment. According to Allende, the US Navy had attempted to render warships invisible, finally achieving success on 28 October 1943 when the escort destroyer USS Eldridge disappeared from its berth at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and was teleported 600 miles (1,000km) away to Virginia. Allende had apparently witnessed the invisibility experiment from a nearby merchant ship, the SS Furuseth. So horrific had
been the effect on the Eldridge’s crew – some being lost for ever, some fused into bulkheads, some turned mad – that the Navy had hurriedly cancelled the project.

  Jessup asked for more information from Allende. None came, and so Jessup dismissed Allende’s claims as a hoax.

  Others were more convinced by the story, among them Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, who published the fullest account of the 1943 events as The Philadelphia Experiment: The True Story Behind Project Invisibility in 1978.

  According to Berlitz and Moore, the US Navy achieved the disappearance of the Eldridge by application of the Unified Field Theory, essentially bending light around the vessel to make it “invisible”. Berlitz and Moore noted that a major proponent and investigative theoretician of the theory, Albert Einstein, was a US Navy consultant at the time of the Philadelphia Experiment. It was also suspicious that Jessup had committed suicide (in 1959). Perhaps, rather, he had been killed by the US government because he knew too much? In a bizarre twist Al Bielek, who claimed to be a former seaman on the Eldridge, came forward to say he had fallen from the ship’s deck while it was in “hyperspace” between Philadelphia and Norfolk on 28 October 1943 and landed at the Air Force station Montauk Point, Long Island, in 1983, having undergone time travel as well as teleportation.