The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  Marley held on to the Wailer name after Tosh’s departure, took on new members and wove his lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger “vampires” descending upon the island. In June 1976, Jamaican Governor-General Florizel Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to quell pre-election violence, which had reached such a pitch that strafing at two Kingston theaters completely perforated the movie screens and they were replaced by whitewashed concrete walls.7 The People’s National Party (PNP) asked the Wailers to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December. Despite the rising political mayhem, he agreed to perform.

  In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates at Marley’s Hope Road home. As Marley biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9 PM, “The torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer noise that was not quite like a firecracker.” Marley was in the kitchen at the rear of the house eating a grapefruit when he heard bursts of automatic gunfire. Don Taylor, Marley’s manager, had been talking to the musician when the bullets cut through the back of his legs. Taylor fell but remained conscious with four bullets in his legs and one buried at the base of his spine. Timothy White’s account of the seige on Marley, his wife Rita and their entourage:

  The gunmen were peppering the house with a barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and splintering plaster and woodwork on the first floor. Four of the gunmen surrounded the house, while two others guarded the front yard.

  Rita was shot by one of the two men in the front yard as she ran out of the house with the five Marley children and a reporter from the Jamaica Daily News. The bullet caught her in the head, lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between the scalp and skull.

  Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door off the kitchen pantry, pushing past a fleeing Seeco Patterson to aim beyond Don Taylor at Bob Marley. . . . The gunman got off eight shots. One bullet hit a counter, another buried itself in the sagging ceiling, and five tore into Don Taylor. The last creased Marley’s breast below his heart and drilled deep inside his arm.8

  Neville Garrick, a student of Angela Davis and a graduate of the UCLA College of Fine Arts and art director of the Jamaica Daily News, took photos of Kingston, Nassau and the Hope Road enclave before and after the shooting. Garrick had film of “suspicious characters” lurking near the house before the assassination attempt. The day of the shooting, he had snapped some photos of Marley standing beside a Volkswagen in mango shade. The strangers had made Marley nervous. He told Garrick that they appeared to be “scouting” the property. In the prints, however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out. After the concert, he took all of the photographs and prints to Nassau, and when the Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London, Garrick discovered that all of the film had been stolen.9

  “The firepower these guys apparently brought with them was immense,” Wailer publicist Jeff Walker recalls. “There were bullet holes everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, doorways and outside.”10

  Marley would sing:

  Ambush in the night, all guns aiming at me

  Ambush in the night, they opened fire on me

  Ambush in the night, protected by His Majesty . . .

  The survival of the raggae singer and his entourage appeared to be the work of the Rastafarian god, but on December 5, the Wailers went on despite their wounds to perform one long, defiant anthem at the Smile Jamaica fest, “War.”

  Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes

  That now hold our brothers—

  In Angola, in Mozambique, South Africa

  In subhuman bondage—

  Have been toppled,

  Utterly destroyed,

  Everywhere is war . . .

  Rita Marley had been shot at near point-blank range. She survived and was released from the hospital that afternoon. Rita was still wearing a hospital gown, and had wrapped a scarf around her bandaged head. Roberta Flack flew in for the concert. Flack visited Marley in convalescence before the performance at an armed camp tucked away in the peaks of the Blue Mountains, near Kingston. Only a handful of Marley’s most trusted comrades knew of his whereabouts before the festival, but a member of the film crew, or so he claimed—he didn’t have a camera—managed to talk his way past macheté-bearing Rastas to enter the encampment: Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby.11 And he came bearing a gift, according to a witness at the enclave, a new pair of boots for Bob Marley.12

  Former Black Panther and cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee (his camera work can be seen in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Panama Deception) was close friends with members of the Wailers, and he believes that Marley’s cancer can be traced to the boots Colby gave him before the Smile Jamaica festival: “He put his foot in and said, ‘Ow!’ A friend got in there—you know how Jamaicans are—he said, ‘let’s get in here, in the boot, and he pulled a length of copper wire out—it was embedded in the boot.”13 Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marley’s compound was certainly provocative, and so was his subsequent part in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. Simpson. (At Simpson’s preliminary hearing in 1995, Colby—who happened to live next door to Nicole Simpson when she lived on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood, a mile from her residence on Bundy—and his wife both took the stand to testify for the prosecution that Nicole’s ex-husband had badgered and threatened her. Colby’s testimony was instrumental in the formal charge of murder filed against Simpson and the nationally-televised fiasco known as the “Trial of the Century.”14)

  Ten years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir, Marley & Me, in which he alleges that a “senior CIA agent” had been planted among the crew as part of a plan to “assassinate” Marley.

  Lew-Lee recalls: “I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve always had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the bone wouldn’t mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he could fight this thing.” The soccer game took place in Paris. Five months after the boot incident, Marley took to the field with one of the leading teams in the country to break the monotony of the Wailers’ Exodus tour. His right toe was injured in a tackle. The toenail was detached. It wasn’t considered a serious wound at first.

  But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a physician, who was shocked by the toe’s appearance. It was so eaten away that doctors in London advised it be amputated. But Marley’s religion forbade it: “Rasta no abide amputation,” he insisted. Marley told the physician, “de living God, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah . . . He will heal me wit’ de meditations of me ganja chalice.” No scalpel, he swore, “will crease me flesh. . . . C’yant kill Rasta. Rastamon live out.”15 He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the lesion.

  But the disease lingered undiagnosed. The cancer spread throughout his body.

  Isaac Ferguson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob Marley first-hand. In the five years separating the soccer injury from cancer diagnosis, Marley remained immersed in music, “ignoring the advice of doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination.” He refused to give up recording and touring long enough to consult a doctor. “He would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into the studio to record, he did enough for two albums. Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and determination, he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak.”16 Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed after Marley’s death: “What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do on this earth.” Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying and set out to compress a lifetime of
music into the few years remaining.

  Invisible Vampires

  I AM NOT A POLITICIAN BUT I SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES. PETER TOSH

  In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a diplomatic junket to the island, assured Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley in a private meeting that there was “no attempt now underway involving covert actions against the Jamaican government.”17 But in the real world something of a Caribbean pogrom was underway, overseen by the CIA.18 At the time Kissinger croaked his denials to Manley, a destabilization push was already underway. The emphasis at this stage was on psychological operations, but in the election year of 1976 a series of covert interventions, employing arson, bombing, and assassination as required, completely disrupted Manley’s democratic socialist rule.19

  An arsenal of automatic weapons somehow found their way to Jamaica. The CIA’s thugs, directed by a growing coven of pin-striped officers reporting to the American embassy in Kingston, quietly organized secret police cadrés to stoke political violence. Huge consignments of guns and advanced communications gear were smuggled onto the island. One such shipment was intercepted by Manley’s security patrols—a caché of 500 man-eating submachine guns.20

  The firearms were shipped to the island from Miami by the Jamaica Freedom League, a right-wing paramilitary faction with roots in the CIA, financed largely by drugs. Peter Whittington, the group’s second in command, was convicted of drug trafficking in Dade County. The funds were laundered by the League at Miami’s Bank of Perrine, the key American subsidiary of Castle Bank, then the CIA’s financial base in Latin America. The bank was owned and operated by Paul Helliwell, bagman for the Bay of Pigs invasion, accused even by the conservative Wall Street Journal of involvement in the global narcotics trade.

  A paramilitary force was mustered to quell the Rastafarian backlash.

  Tosh’s “duppies” (ghosts) quelled dissent by borrowing the chemical warfare tactics of the 1960s. In a year’s time, Marley saw the Rastafarian resistance disintegrate because a ruthless, highly-organized cocaine-heroin syndicate arose, apparently, from the Jamaican sand. The sudden abundance of hard narcotics in Jamaica wounded the Rastafarian movement with the burning spear of addiction.

  Tosh and Marley both promoted ganja as an alternative, a Rastafarian sacrament, a statement of independence and cohesion against the brutal strategems of colonial rule. This was the path of political resistance joyously followed by herbman Tosh, who ran through two pounds of reefer a week.21 He not only smoked Guiness Record-breaking volumes of marijuana—Tosh rhapsodized about his spliffs, demanded the “shit-stem” legalize it.

  Like his old partner Marley, Tosh’s chosen weapon in the Rasta revolution was free expression, and they were crucified for it. For the first time in Jamaican politics, public figures openly denounced the governing elite. Peter Tosh, in particular, split from his peers in the local music scene by serving up impassioned political “livalogues” at his public performances. While Bob Marley saw the wisdom in softening his political statements (“The War is Over”), and Bunny Wailer slipped into a snug harbor of seclusiveness, Tosh pushed on alone, the cursing, joint-smoking, speechifying black militant until his death six years after the passing of Marley. Tosh “don’ wan’ peace,” he shouted to Jamaican concert-goers in September, 1978, and he wasn’t given any. The Rastafarian told interviewer Steven Davis, coauthor of Reggae International (Rogner & Bernhard GMBH, 1982), about one of his scrapes with Jamaican police:

  I was waiting for a rehearsal outside Aquarius Studio on Half Way Tree [a main Kingston thoroughfare], waiting for two of my musicians, and I had a little piece of roach in my hand. A guy come up to me in plain clothes and grab the roach out of my hand. So I say him, wha’ happen? He didn’t say nothing, so I grab the roach back from him and he start to punch me up. I say again, wha’ happen, and he say I must go dung so [“downtown” in police jargon]. I say, dung so? Which way you call dung so? That’s when I realized this was a police attitude, so I opened the roach and blew out the contents. Well, him didn’t like that and start to grab at me aggressively now—my waist, my shoulder, grabbing me and tearing off my clothes and things. Then other police come and put their guns in my face and try brute force on me. . . . Now eight-to-ten guys gang my head with batons and weapons of destruction. They close the door, chase away the people and gang my head with batons for an hour and a half until my hand break trying to fend off the blows. I run to the window and they beat me back with blows. I run to the door and they beat me back with blows. Later I found out these guys’ intentions was to kill me, right? What I had to do was play dead by just lying low. Passive resistance.

  In the Red X Tapes, Tosh elaborated on the night he spent at the local police station house. Ten police officers bludgeoned him for two hours with their batons. He received serious head wounds and was scarred for life by the beating.22

  It was one of many beatings endured by Tosh, but they resulted in the opposite of the intended effect. The beatings made him stronger. This was no child of Moses, but Malcolm X with roped hair and a spliff dangling from his defiant lip. Tosh’s music smoldered with vengeful ferocity. He stepped up the anti-government pronouncements. Tosh had a guitar custom-built in the shape of an M-16 rifle and explained to his minions, “this guitar is firing shots at all them devil disciples.” Music was his own spear in the struggle “against apartheid, nuclear war and those ‘gang-jah’ criminals.”23

  Jamaican secret police and the CIA tailed Peter Tosh through it all. He chose to call his autobiographical boxed set The Red X Tapes, because, he said, government documents about him always had a red “X” marked on them.

  The suppression of Rastafarian protest escalated in the late 1970s and grotesque human rights abuses were commonplace. Some nine months after the near-death experience of Peter Tosh, three leaders of the Jamaican Labor Party were murdered execution-style. The taxi they’d flagged down was stopped in Denham Town. The officers ordered the three out of the car, searched it and them. The suspects stood with their hands up. Without provocation, the commanding officer ordered the police to “KILL!” After the murders, a police motorcade circled the Ministry of Security with horns blaring. The din was nearly loud enough to drown out the derisive laughter of the police.24

  The political climate in the Caribbean sweltered with the escalation of American covert operations well into the next decade. Radio Free Grenada’s final broadcast (American bombers took out the station) was Bob Marley’s “War.” Eugenia Charles, the ultra-conservative prime minister of Dominica, admitted that the strategists behind the Grenada invasion “weren’t worried about military intervention coming out of Grenada—we were worried about the spread of its ideas.”25

  In September 1980, Bob Marley suffered a stroke while jogging in Central Park. He was released by a physician the following day and recuperated in his room at New York’s Essex Hotel. Rita Marley flew in from Pittsburgh and choked when she saw him. Her fears rose into uncontrollable sobs, “Wha’ has happened to you?”

  “Doctor say brain tumor black me out,” Marley told her.26

  Isaac Fergusson caught the dying rebel’s performance at Madison Square Garden a few days before, and realized then that something was terribly wrong, even as Marley gripped his guitar “like a machine gun” and “threw his ropelike hair about,” a “whirlwind around his small black face. The crack of a drum exploded into bass, into organ.” Midway into the set, the Wailers stood back and Marley performed solo, “These songs of freedom is all I ever had . . .” Why, Fergusson wondered, was he singing this alone? Why the past tense?

  “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery . . .”

  Fergusson noticed that Marley “was always rubbing his forehead and grimacing while performing.” A Rastafarian devotee of Marley’s offered this explanation: Hidden lasers fixed to spotlights above the stage “burned out his brain.” The following weekend, Fergusson stopped to visit Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. He asked about Bob’s condition. “We don’t know
for sure,” Rita told him, “the doctors say he has a tumor in his brain.” In a silent moment, Fergusson realized that Marley was dying.27

  A Holistic Nazi

  The singer was convinced at last to seek medical treatment. He was admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Tests revealed that the cancer had spread to Marley’s brain, lungs, and liver. He received a few radiation treatments but checked out when the New York papers bruited that he was seriously ill. Marley consulted physicians in Miami, briefly returned to Sloan-Kettering, then Jamaica where he met with Dr. Carl “Pee Wee” Fraser, recommended to him by fellow Rastafarians. Dr. Fraser advised that Marley talk to Dr. Josef Issels, a “holistic comprehensive immunotherapist” then practicing at the Ringberg Clinic in Rottach-Egern, a small Bavarian village located at the southern end of Tegernsee Lake. Marley traveled to Bavaria and checked into the clinic.

  Dr. Issels met him, looked him over and allowed, without naming sources, “I hear that you’re one of the most dangerous black men in the world.”28

  The portrait offered by publicity releases from the Issels Foundation is imposing enough: Dr. Issels, born in 1907, founded the first hospital (financed by the estate of Karl Gischler, a Dutch shipping magnate29) in Europe for comprehensive immunotherapy of cancer in 1951. “He was the Medical Director and Director of Research.”