Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History
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It goes on and on. A sniffer dog did not behave as Norman Baker feels it should have done. “Oddly, although the dog was trained to take his handler toward what he has found, on this occasion he did not do so.”43 Is this odd? Or does it happen quite frequently? And what does it matter? Baker is also unhappy with the policeman who, once the body was found, was left to guard the scene of the crime, and who testified that he applied standard procedure and went no closer than seven or eight feet. “It is difficult to accept that he went no nearer than this. Surely the natural human reaction would have been to approach the body, without touching it, to observe the situation more closely.”44 Once again, Baker is master of the human condition, able to assert that a constable would be far more likely to break procedure than not.
With the scientist missing, a police communications mast was placed in the garden of the Kelly house. An anonymous chief constable subsequently told Baker that such a mast would usually only be fifteen feet tall, but this one was considerably higher. Aha! Clear evidence of a plot here. And yet the Oxfordshire police explained to Baker that the mast needed to be tall because the garden was in a “communications blackspot.” Baker didn’t accept this explanation. “What was the purpose of this very high mast? It seems clear that normal police communications would not require such a structure.” Then he adds this suggestion: “It might, however, have been required if it were thought necessary to contact an aircraft in the sky a very long way away, such as the one at the time carrying the Prime Minister to Washington.”45 There is much to admire in this argument. Having dismissed a perfectly testable explanation for no given reason, Baker reaches instead for a rationalization based on no evidence whatsoever.
Finally, we come to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Inevitably, Blair gets the insinuation treatment in spades, with Baker pointing out how convenient politically it was for the PM “that Dr. Kelly’s body should have been found less than a day after Parliament broke up for its long summer holiday and a time when Blair himself was out of the country far away.”46 A reader might imagine that a parliamentarian like Baker would be in a good position to judge exactly how convenient it was for the prime minister. In fact, Baker’s assertion was inane. Blair was informed of Kelly’s death on a plane over the Pacific full of lobby journalists all looking for a story. There was nowhere to hide, no question of not immediately facing the press. Reports unanimously agree that Blair looked shaken and pale. On landing in Tokyo, Blair was famously asked on camera, “Have you got blood on your hands, Prime Minister? Are you going to resign over this?” The timing was about as inconvenient politically as it could possibly have been.
Liberty and Truth
We shall see in a moment who exactly Norman Baker thinks murdered Dr. Kelly, but before we do, let’s look at how he justifies his belief in such a plot. In case one should dismiss his hypothesis as a mere conspiracy theory, Baker devotes considerable time in his preface to previous examples of government deceit. “Does such a concept deserve to be dismissed out of hand?” he asks. “History teaches us otherwise.” And he points to events through history that corroborate his view. One is the setting on fire of the Reichstag in Berlin at the end of January 1933, after which several Communists were put on trial for arson. “In fact the Nazis themselves were responsible for the fire,” writes Baker, “precisely in order to achieve the double objectives of discrediting the Communists and benefiting themselves.”47
There is no footnote to provide support for Baker’s confident assertion. It is certainly true that such a version of events is widely believed, and has been for seventy years. The problem is that there isn’t much evidence to support it. As books like the anti-Nazi Fritz Tobias’s Der Reichstagbrands show, the firm belief of the Berlin detectives who were the first investigators of the fire was that the man they caught red-handed, Dutch revolutionary Marinus van der Lubbe, was solely responsible for the crime. The Nazis, of course, were determined to prove that the fire had been a Communist conspiracy, and the Communists were equally intent on proving that it was a Nazi plot. The former were now in power in Germany and commanded a powerful propaganda machine. The Communists, under the direction of their brilliant clandestine publicist Willi Münzenberg, for their part issued the famous Brown Books, in which the argument against the Nazis was put forward. However, throughout the pretrial, the trial itself, and right up to his execution, one man insisted that Marinus van der Lubbe had committed the deed unaided. That man was Marinus van der Lubbe.
Another of Baker’s examples is asserted at slightly greater length, although, once again, it is unsourced. “In 1967,” he writes, “during the Six Day War, the CIA intelligence ship, Liberty, was bombed by unmarked Israeli planes in an apparent case of mistaken identity. It is now widely accepted that the attack was ordered by President Lyndon Johnson himself. Other U.S. ships in the area were prevented from assisting the Liberty. The bombing of the Liberty, with the loss of 34 crew members and the wounding of 171 others, was designed to look like an Egyptian attack, thus giving the U.S. a pretext to enter the war. This was only averted and the episode ended when a Soviet spy ship appeared on the scene.”48
No one, apart from Mr. Baker, as far I am aware, has claimed that the Liberty was a CIA ship. It wasn’t; it was a U.S. Navy ship. But once again, though a series of official investigations in both the United States and Israel found that the attack was essentially a friendly-fire incident, there are many people who, from a mixture of motives, argue that it was no mistake. Foremost among these are a group of survivors of the incident, whose insistence that the Israelis knew that they were firing on a U.S. ship has acted as the springboard for many books and TV documentaries.
Quite apart from some of the factual objections to the no-mistake theory (and there are many),49 the obvious problem has always been one of motive. Why would the embattled Israelis choose to try to sink a ship belonging to the friendlier of the two superpowers? It doesn’t make much sense. So the theories of the no-mistakers have taken on a complex, almost baroque quality. Some have argued, for example, that the Israelis wanted it to be believed that the attack was undertaken by Egyptian planes, and thus bring America into the war more directly. Possibly the most far-fetched of the theories, however, is that expounded by the journalist Peter Hounam in his 2003 book Operation Cyanide: Why the Bombing of the USS Liberty Nearly Caused World War III. As a Sunday Times writer, Hounam played a major part in revealing Israel’s nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, a substantial journalistic achievement, but by the early 2000s he was to be discovered writing books suggesting that Princess Diana might have been the victim of a conspiracy.50
Unusually, given the BBC’s attention to being seen as impartial, Operation Cyanide was given a preface by John Simpson, the corporation’s rather grandly titled world affairs editor. A flavor of the body of the book can be gained from his endorsement. “Suppose,” wrote Simpson, “in an attempt to shore up his critically damaged presidency, Lyndon Johnson deliberately engineered an event in which American lives were sacrificed and the United States was brought disturbingly close to an all-out nuclear war with Russia?” He added, “It sounds, I know, like one of those depressing conspiracy theories which cluster round every big controversial event, from the death of Princess Diana to the attack on the World Trade Center . . . yet this book is based on careful, rigorous investigation by a well-known and respected journalist . . . As with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy four years earlier, the official version is even more unlikely than some of the conspiracy theories.”51
At the most basic level of believability—given the history of friendly-fire and mistaken-identity incidents (including, for example, the attack twenty-six years earlier by British torpedo bombers on the cruiser HMS Sheffield under the impression that it was the Bismarck)—it isn’t difficult to accept that the whole thing was a tragic error.
But the inherent extreme improbability, despite Simpson’s words, of a president already enmired in Vietnam and pushing through one
of the most ambitious domestic programs of the postwar period deliberately courting the possibility of a nuclear exchange in a region as volatile as the Middle East puts Hounam’s theory on the outer edge of conspiracism. Most other conspiracy theorists do not go so far.
But whatever one’s conclusions, what is obvious here is that once again Baker is asserting as fact something that is far more tenuous, to say the very least. It is most certainly not the case that it is “widely accepted that the attack [on the Liberty] was ordered by President Lyndon Johnson himself.” Subjected to scrutiny by anyone familiar with the examples he is using, Baker’s normalization simply evaporates.
Crockford’s and the Borgias
Rather delightfully, Baker’s list of examples from the history of conspiracy ends with one that has a specific application to the Kelly case, even if it means a decline from grand geopolitics to Trollopian parochial scandal. Baker had noticed, or it had been drawn to his attention, that the Oxfordshire coroner, Nicholas Gardiner, had—fifteen years earlier—presided over another cause célèbre involving suicide.
The end of 1987 saw the publication of the 1988 edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory, an annually updated list with brief biographies of all the Anglican clergy in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The appearance of Crockford’s was much anticipated by the polite prelates of the Church of England largely for its preface, which was rewritten each year by an anonymous contributor and was, by tradition, rather amusing and acerbic. Now, 1987 was a time of considerable anxiety in the Church. The radical Conservatism of Margaret Thatcher was dominant politically, and there was pressure on the liberals in the Church of England, who were perceived as presiding over its decline. As a result, there was more than the usual lay-media interest in the 1988 preface, particularly since it took the form of a distinctly personal attack on the tolerance shown by the Archbishop of Canterbury to the unsuccessful and cliquish liberal elite leading the Church to destruction. All were agog to know who the author was.
On December 7, four days after publication, Canon Gareth Bennett was found dead in his car in his garage in Oxford. A hose attached to the car’s exhaust led in through a window. It was then disclosed that Bennett, a conservative and gay Anglo-Catholic, had been—as suspected by many in the Church—the author of the preface. His diary apparently recorded his growing dismay at being involved in such a large media story. The coroner at Canon Bennett’s inquest in Oxford, at which a verdict of suicide was recorded, was Nicholas Gardiner.
Baker’s deployment of the Bennett case suggests that Gardiner had not done his job properly, and that the whole business was suspicious. “Like David Kelly, his [Bennett’s] anonymous actions would infuriate some in positions of power,” writes Baker—presumably including in this notional group the then Archbishop of Canterbury, the mild-mannered Robert Runcie. Baker casts doubt on the verdict, citing Bennett’s probable moral objections to self-slaughter: “Like Dr. Kelly, he was under some pressure, but those who knew him say suicide was simply not in his make-up, not least for strong religious reasons.”52 Again, there is no source for this assertion, and it conjures up the most extraordinary image, reminiscent of the Borgias, of a middle-aged canon being murdered on the instructions of Church of England liberals. Possibly in on the plot were the Oxfordshire constabulary, as suggested by the case of the cat that did not meow in the night. “Most curious of all is that when the police arrived his cat was found to be dead in the sitting-room.” A cat whose food, Baker complains, was not taken away for forensic analysis.53 In Norman Baker’s world, it would be natural to carry out a test to see if anyone might have poisoned a cat before staging a carbon-monoxide suicide. Perhaps it was an attack cat.
If Gardiner was a potential villain, Baker gives a hint that higher officialdom might be capable of much worse. In a prolonged aside, Baker mentions former Labour Cabinet minister and prominent critic of the Iraq War, Robin Cook, and quotes extensively from a Guardian article written by Mr. Cook, which was highly critical of the information given to the British public in the run-up to the war. Without giving a date for the article, Baker concludes this section, gratuitously, with: “Mr. Cook died suddenly shortly afterward, on Saturday 6 August 2005, while out walking in the Scottish highlands.”54 “Shortly afterward” was, in fact, nearly a year, the article having appeared in July 2004. But the impression had been given—for those who might wish to be so impressed—that there was perhaps something suspicious about Cook’s death—which was diagnosed as a heart attack, and which happened in front of his wife.
Cui Bono?
So, if Kelly didn’t kill himself, and if he hadn’t died in the way specified at the Hutton Inquiry, how had he been murdered, and why? How many cases, one wonders, are there of people cutting someone else’s ulnar artery? And if it was generally known that cutting this artery was rarely fatal, then why—with an infinity of choice in front of you—would you pick that one? Baker doesn’t answer this. Instead, he focuses on the vomit. He is interested in the direction of its flow. Maybe it explains why the body was flat on the ground (though, in fact, it wasn’t). “If the body had indeed been propped against a tree, it would have been interesting to have had the horizontal direction of the vomit stains explained. No such explanation would, of course, have been necessary if the body were flat on the ground.”55 In other words, killers who were stupid enough not to know that you can’t die of a blunt knife across the ulnar artery, and were also sufficiently dim not to press Kelly’s fingerprints onto the knife handle, were still sufficiently prescient to consider the exact direction of a vomit trail.
And what about the timing of the police operation, code-named “Mason”? The official start time of this action was given as two-thirty p.m. on the day of Kelly’s disappearance. This, of course, preceded the missing-person call by more than nine hours. The police explained to Baker that it was their practice to time the start of an operation to the moment when their interest began, so in this case to round about the time that Kelly left home for the last time. Norman Baker is not satisfied with this. In his mind, there is a more sinister explanation, which “leaves us with the possibility that at least an element within Thames Valley Police had foreknowledge, to at least some degree, of that afternoon’s tragic events. If that were the case, then it would of course clearly point to the involvement of another party in Dr. Kelly’s death.”56 It is hardly necessary to point out that such an error would mean that this dastardly “element” was among the most stupid groups of plotters in recent history.
Just in case the reader is inclined to think Baker far-fetched, the author dismisses those of his informants who think that the code name “Mason” is itself suspicious. “Wild rumors of a freemasonry angle to the case are almost certainly without foundation,”57 he opines, thus placing his own theories on the middle of a scale running between the official version and the notions of certifiable paranoids. Baker’s by contrast well-founded theory about responsibility is arrived at—as is often the case—courtesy of an anonymous deus ex machina. But first the usual suspects have to be dismissed. “I have spoken to a number of individuals in the United States, well connected with the CIA . . . Each separately has come back to me to say that the inside track does indeed report Dr. Kelly as having been murdered, but that the United States was not part of it.”58 It is unfortunate that Baker can’t attach even a rough figure to the number of such well-connected informants, let alone a single detail about the nature of any of their connections, just as he can’t use even one unattributable quote or let drop even a single name. This is a world in which the plausible fantasist has it all his own way. We may recall that in 1984 “two reliable sources” had given Tam Dalyell MP the entirely false information that Hilda Murrell had been killed during a botched secret-service operation.
But the unnumbered and unnamed CIA-connected folk are none of them so remarkable as the Mr. X who met Baker in London, and who provided the MP with the answer to the mystery. This man told Baker “of a meeting where members
of a UK-based Iraqi circle had boasted of people who claimed involvement in Dr. Kelly’s death.” The motive for the murder, revealed Mr. X, was their anger at what they believed Dr. Kelly had said to Andrew Gilligan—for it was they who had supplied the false information used by the British government in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Kelly had “besmirched” them. The source then “told me that the police or security services had got wind of a possible plan to assassinate Dr. Kelly and Operation Mason was originally set up to deal with this threat. But the police were too late.”59 The authorities now had the task of covering the murder up.
Who was this crucial Mr. X? Well, obviously Baker couldn’t say. What was his connection with the Iraqis, whose meetings he was familiar with, or with the police, whose motives he was privy to? Presumably, the number of people in this situation was fairly small. Baker wasn’t in a position to divulge. However, there was even greater detail available, probably from the same source. “According to information I have been given, the murder itself was carried out by a couple of not very well-paid hired hands. I was told, in fact, that the Iraqi-backed team had given Dr. Kelly an injection in his backside, which perhaps points to succinylcholine or something similar.”60
Once again, Baker’s language is redolent of that of his parliamentary predecessor Tam Dalyell. But the mention of succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, in the context of disguising a murder suggests either familiarity with the arguments of a certain Michael Shrimpton or the sharing of sources. In February 2004, a few weeks after the first Guardian letter signed by the group of doubting doctors, British barrister and self-professed security expert Michael Shrimpton appeared on a U.S. conspiracist radio show. He told its host, Alex Jones, that “based on conversations with sources and with medical experts . . . he [Kelly] was probably murdered by a combination of an injection, not through tablets, but an intravenous injection of dextropropoxyphene and paracetamol, the constituents of co-proxamol, and a muscle relaxant called succinylcholine. Now succinylcholine is a favorite method of assassinating people, it’s used by intelligence agencies, particularly the French DGSE.”61