The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  All well and good . . . until it is considered that by this time, Dr. Issels was 44 years old. Certainly, his medical career did not begin in 1951. Why the unexplained gap in his bona-fidés? During WWII, it seems, Dr. Issels could be found plying his “research” skills in Poland, at the Auschwitz concentration camp, working aside Dr. Joseph Mengele, no less, according to several of the Wailers who have investigated the German “alternative” practitioner’s past. Bob Marley, the “dangerous” racial enemy of fascists everywhere, had placed his life in the hands of a Nazi doctor, Mengele’s protegé, an accomplice of the “Angel of Death” in horrific medical atrocities committed against racial “subhumans.”

  Lew-Lee recalls that Marley rejected conventional cancer treatments, “wanted to do anything but turn to Western medicine. This may have been a mistake, maybe not. Dr. Issels said that he could cure Bob. And they cut Bob’s dreadlocks off. And he was getting all of this crazy, crazy medical treatment in Bavaria. I know this because Ray von Evans, who played in Marley’s group, we were very close friends, [told me] Bob was receiving these medical treatments, and Ray would come by every two or three months, 1979–80, and told me: “Yeah, mon, they’re killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob.” I said, “What do you mean ‘they are killing Bob?’” “No, no, mon,” he said. “Dis Dr. Issels, he’s a Nazi!” We found out later that Dr. Issels was a Nazi doctor. And he had worked with Dr. Mengele.”30

  Dr. Issels would then be one of scores of Nazi practitioners to escape the attention of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Michael Kater, a professor of history at York University in Canada, found that physicians of the Hitler period were steeped in Nazi racial doctrines at medical school, and that many of them continued to practice undisturbed by war crime tribunals: “It was in a conventional medical culture infiltrated from one side by a science alienated from humanity and from another by charlantry that young physicians in the Third Reich were raised to learn and prepare for practice, with many predestined to practice after 1945.”31

  Dr. Joseph Issels first offered his alternative cancer therapies in a nazified atmosphere of ruthlessness and quackery. In the 1930s, chronic cancer patients consulted Dr. Issels and received his experimental “combination therapy,” a regimen of diet, homeopathic remedies, vitamins, exercise, and detoxification, among other holistic approaches. (Today his clinic offers training in cancer immunization vaccines, UV blood irradiation, oxygen and ozone therapy, “biological dentistry” [tooth extraction], immunity elicitation by mixed bacterial vaccine, blood heating, and so on. 32)

  The medical establishment, particularly in the UK, has long rallied against some of Issel’s therapies. Gordon Thomas, a former BBC producer, reported in a televised documentary that Dr. Issels was arrested in September, 1960. The police warrant alleged, “the accused claims to treat . . . cancer. . . . In fact [he] has neither reliable diagnostic methods nor a method to treat cancer successfully. It is contended [that] he is aware of the complete ineffectiveness of the so-called . . . tumor treatment.” The warrant noted that Issels was a flight risk, that “he had prepared for all contingencies by depositing huge amounts in foreign banks.”33

  Marley, unaware of his physician’s past, was placed on a regimen of exercise, vaccines (some illegal), ozone injections, vitamin and trace minerals, and other treatments. In time, Dr. Issels also introduced torture. Long needles were plunged through Marley’s stomach to the spine. The patient-victim was told that this was part of his “treatment.” The torture continued until Marley foundered on the threshold of death.34

  Cedella Booker, his mother, visited him three times in the course of these “treatments.” She found Dr. Issels to be an “arrogant wretch” with the “gruff manners of a bully,” who subjected her dying son to a bloodless brand of “hocus-pocus” medicine. Mrs. Booker: “I myself witnessed Issels’ rough treatment of Nesta [Marley]. One time I went with Nesta to the clinic, and we settled down in a treatment room. Issels came in and announced to Nesta, ‘I’m going to give you a needle.’” Dr. Issels “plunged the needle straight into Nesta’s navel right down to the syringe. [Marley] grunted and winced. He could only lie there helplessly, writhing on the table, trying his best to hide his pain. ‘Jesus Christ,’ I heard myself mumbling.” Issels ridiculed the patient for grimacing, yanked out the needle and strolled casually out of the room. Marley was left groaning with pain. “I went and stood at his side and held his hand.”35

  “With every visit,” she recalls, “I found him smaller, frailer, thinner. As the months of dying dragged past, the suffering was etched all over his face. He would fall into fits of shaking, when he would lose all control and shiver from head to toe like a coconut leaf in a breeze. His eyes would turn in his head, rolling in their sockets until even the white jelly was quivering.”36

  Marley’s torment was aggravated by forced starvation. “For a whole week sometimes,” Booker laments, her son “would be allowed no nourishment other than what he got intravenously. Constantly hungry, even starving, he wasted away to a skeleton. To watch my first-born shrivel up to skin and bone ripped at my mother’s heart.” Marley weighed 82 pounds on the day of his death.37 The starvation diet must have devastated his immune system and rushed his demise. It also caused him intense pain. “It would drag on so, for one long painful month after the other, and every day would be a knife that death stabbed and twisted anew in an already open, bleeding wound.” The agony “wrapped him up like a crushing snake.”38 Starvation left Marley with a knotted intestine, and Dr. Issels was forced to operate the clear the obstruction.

  Death finally claimed Marley on May 11, 1980. In Jamaica, the 20th was declared a national day of mourning, and Marley’s wake at the National Arena was attended by some 30,000 mourners.

  Peter Tosh was not put off his guns by the death of Bob Marley. “Message music,” he told interviewer Roger Steffans in 1980, “is the only music that have heartbeat.”39 After a disappointing collaboration with Mick Jagger, Tosh released Mama Africa in 1983, and “Not Gonna Give It Up,” an appeal for continued resistance to Africa’s apartheid policy. “Where You Gonna Run?” addressed the self-serving delusions of political indifference.

  Peter Tosh found the bloodshed and hypocrisy of death squad justice in the third world unbearable. He was so obsessed with hidden evil and the upswell of violence in Jamaica that they visited him in his sleep. He had “visions” of “destruction [and] millions of people inside of [a] pit going down. And I . . . say, ‘Blood Bath, where so much people come from?’ And looking in the pit, mon, it the biggest pit . . . but the way the people was crying, it was awful.”40

  By 1987, the year of Tosh’s murder, Jamaican musicians were censored by shell-casing politics. The island’s Daily Gleaner reported that Winston “Yellowman” Foster, stopped at a police roadblock and frisked for drugs, resisted detainment. One of the officers hissed, “You want to go like Tosh?”41

  And when Tosh went there was nothing random about it. Witnesses and friends insist that he was a political hit. They are convinced that Tosh was killed for his statements on human rights, black liberation and the legalization of marijuana.

  The knock came on the evening of September 19, 1987. Tosh was throwing a small party at his home, and Mike Robinson, a local radio personality, answered the door. Leppo Leppan, an ex-convict and old friend of Tosh’s from the Wailers’ Trench Town days, strolled in. Behind him two strangers—described by witnesses as “clean-cut,” “professional hit-men,” definitely “not local”—produced pistols and insisted on talking to Tosh. The intruders followed Robinson into the living room and ordered everyone to lie on the floor, face down. Leppo demanded money. Tosh explained he had little cash on hand. One of the men searched the house and found a macheté. He threatened to decapitate Tosh. Shots were fired. Peter Tosh and two others, Doc Brown and “Free I” Dixon, were dead.

  Shortly thereafter, the aftermath of Jimi Hendrix’s death was revisited—Tosh’s New York apartment was entered and burgled. The city of New York seiz
ed a number of 10-inch master tapes, and these were stashed away in a warehouse by NYC Public Administrator Ethel Griffin and remained there for years.42

  Tosh’s killers remain at large. Wayne Johnson, producer of the Red X Tapes, cites an unnamed official of the Jamaican government who divulged to him that one of the gunmen was a police officer. The Jamaican government conducted a cursory investigation, ignoring critical leads, and quickly declared the case closed with Leppan’s conviction. The hurried, token investigation led many Jamaicans to suspect that the government had concealed the factual underpinnings of the case.

  Tosh’s murder has been followed by the violent deaths of other black activist musicians in Jamaica and elsewhere, among them:

  1987

  Major Worries, musician, shot to death (Jamaica).

  1988

  Tenor Saw, musician, shot to death (US).

  1990

  Nitty Gritty, musician, shot to death (US).

  1992

  Pan Head, musician, shot to death (Jamaica).

  Dirksman, musician, shot to death (Jamaica).

  1994

  Garnett Silk, musician, died in an arson attack on his family home (Jamaica).

  1995

  Carl “Briggy C” Marsden, musician, shot dead in London.

  Ken Sarowiwa, musician, hanged by the Nigerian government.

  1996

  Jason Wharton, musician, shot dead outside London nightclub while sitting in a car (UK).

  2000

  Dani Spencer, vocalist, drowned off the Jamaican coast February 27.

  NOTES

  1. John Levy, “The Life of Saint Peter,” The Dread Library, April 22, 1998, http://debate.uvm.edu/dreadlibrary/jlevy.html.

  2. Eric Williams, “Who Killed Peter Tosh?” High Times, no. 221, January, 1994, p. 18.

  3. Timothy White, “In the Path of the Steppin’ Razor,” www.boomshaka.com/tosh/razor.html. Other biographical details garnered from Hank Holmes and Roger Steffens. “Reasoning With Tosh,” Reggae Times, 1980, and John Walker, “Tough Tosh,” Trouser Press, December, 1983.

  4. Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley, New York: Henry Holt, 1992.

  5. David P. Szatmary, Rockin’ in Time: A Social History of Rock and Roll, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1987, pp. 164–65.

  6. Maurice Bishop’s address to Grenada’s New Jewel Movement, March 13, 1979.

  7. White, p. 285.

  8. White, pp. 288–29.

  9. White, p. 337.

  10. Roger Steffans, interviewer, “The Night They Shot Bob Marley—The Untold Story,” The Raggae & African Beat, June, 1985, p. 20.

  11. White, p. 291.

  12. Author interview with Lee Lew-Lee, Los Angeles, October 30, 1997.

  13. Lew-Lee interview.

  14. On February 3, 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported: One of those witnesses offered new details about arguments between O.J. Simpson and his ex-wife. Catherine Boe testified that Nicole Simpson would not let her ex-husband into her house on one occasion. . . .

  Prosecutors had hoped to show that Simpson was stalking his wife during the early months of 1992, and asked Boe and her husband, Carl Colby, about an evening when they called police after spying [sic] a suspicious man outside. That man turned out to be Simpson. . . .

  During his testimony, Colby said he called police in part because he found it odd that a person of Simpson’s “description” was in the neighborhood at that hour. As he said that, a black alternate juror rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, and another alternate, also black, chuckled to herself.

  “What the prosecution described as O.J. stalking Nicole might be interpreted by some African-American jurors as a classic example of white middle class people overreacting to the presence of an unknown black man in their neighborhood at night,” said UCLA law professor Peter Arenella.

  15. White, pp. 3–4.

  16. Isaac Ferguson, “So Much Things to Say,” in Chris Potash, ed., Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub, New York: Schirmer, 1997, pp. 56–57.

  17. Ernest Volkman and John Cummings, “Murder as Usual,” Penthouse, December 1977, p. 114.

  18. Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap, “Massive Destabilization in Jamaica,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, no. 10, August-September 1980, pp. 13, 16.

  19. William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, London: Zed Books, 1986, p. 301.

  20. Jerry Meldon, “The CIA’s Dope-Smuggling ‘Freedom Fighters,’ VETERANS OF THE CIA’S DRUG WARS, Profile: Luis Posada Carriles,” High Times, December 18, 1998. The inevitable CIA-trained Cuban exiles beached in Jamaica, among them Luis Posada Cariles, an ex-secret police official under Cuban dictator Batista, currently a full-fledged agent of the CIA. Meldon, chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Tufts University in Medford, MA, writes of the drug-smuggling “freedom fighter” and his role in the Bay of Pigs:

  A top-secret element of the invasion plan was “Operation 40,” whose personnel included Posada Cariles, future Watergate burglar Felipe de Diego, and sundry Mafia hitmen. Its objective was to secure the island by eliminating both local politicians and members of the invasion force deemed insufficiently in favor of bringing back Batista as dictator.

  Operation 40 remained intact following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which 114 brigadistas died, and was deployed later on in sporadic raids on Cuba. An Operation 40 task force led in 1967 by Carriles’ CIA classmate Felix Rodriguez (later to find immortality as “Max Gomez,” running guns to the dope-trading Contras in Nicaragua and then testifying about it in 1987 before the Senate Iran-Contra investigators) supervised Bolivian police in the capture and murder of Che Guevara.

  Operation 40 had to be officially disbanded in 1970 after one of their planes crashed in southern California with kilos of heroin and cocaine aboard. But this did not interfere with business, even though later the same year federal narcs busted 150 suspects in “the largest roundup of major drug traffickers in the history of federal law enforcement.” President Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell, celebrated the destruction of “a nationwide ring of wholesalers handling about 30 percent of all heroin sales and 70 to 80 percent of all cocaine sales in the United States.” Mitchell did not mention all the Operation 70 heroes who had been netted in this grand operation.

  The Jamaica Daily News openly identified the intruders: “Knowing a coup is going to be tried, sighting all the signs and publishing them, pinpointing even the week and month—does not prevent it from being tried. Neither does knowing about CIA involvement head it off.” The meddling of the American government “is beyond doubt” considering “the plotters’ contact with the US embassy [and] the pattern of destabilization which only the CIA could coordinate.” It was the Chilé coup revisited. “There are obvious economic advantages [in] keeping cordial relations with the US. But not to tell a people when war has been launched against them. . . . It cannot be too early to begin to build a [national], indeed revolutionary unity.”

  21. Williams, p. 18.

  22. Williams, p. 19.

  23. Roger Steffens, Peter Tosh Biography, Honorary Citizen Box Set, Sony Music Entertainment, 1997.

  24. White, p. 301.

  25. Dave Marsh, ed.,“Number One with a Bullet,” Rock & Roll Confidential Report: Inside the Real World of Rock & Roll, New York: Pantheon, 1985, pp. 141–42. Radio Free Grenada was succeeded by the U.S.-sponsored Spice Island Radio, operated by the DoD’s Psychological Operations Section. A 12-man team of Navy journalists blew in from Norfolk, Virginia, recruited a few local announcers, and Spice Island Radio was born. Dave Marsh, veteran editor of Creem, Crawdaddy, Village Voice and Rolling Stone, reports: Their first broadcast called on Grenadians to lay down their arms. The head of the Navy team, Lt. Richard Ezzel, told Reuters, “We wanted to save lives,” (This plea might have been more effective if directed at American GIs). Ezzel went on to say, “When we first came down we were told to play nothing but reggae and calypso music; later we found out that people di
d not want to hear reggae but wanted to hear more rock and roll and country music.” Ezzel said his conclusions were based on extensive tours of the island by his announcers . . . While we find it hard to swallow Ezzel’s assertions about reggae (a reggae song called “Capitalism Gone Mad” was number one in Grenada at the time of the invasion), recent visitors to the island have told RRC that Spice Island’s mix of Quiet Riot, Hall and Oates, the Beatles, Asia, calypso and reggae is very popular. Unfortunately, there is little reason to believe that PsyOps is serious about their stated goal of bringing democracy to the Caribbean. The aforementioned Ms. Charles, who flew to Washington right after the invasion to mug for the cameras with Ronald Reagan, has been having opponents of her regime shot as she tried to pass legislation that would punish alleged anti-state conspirators with death by hanging. In Barbados, Prime Minister and US ally Tom Adams seeks to expel the respected journalist Ricky Singh for his opposition to the invasion. US cries of “Democracy for Grenada” ring hollow in light of continued support for brutal dictatorships in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. (“Remember 1965? The kids are all grown up now but the death squads are still alive.”) Lt. Ezzel says that his men will stay on long after any US pullout, “until the Grenadian government can take over the job.” When you consider that the US has occupied Puerto Rico since 1898, it looks like Spice Island Radio may be number one in its market for a long time to come.

  26. White, p. 309.

  27. Fergusson, p. 57.

  28. Cedella Booker and Anthony Winkler, Bob Marley: An Intimate Portrait by his Mother, New York: Viking, 1996, p. 191.

  29. “Josef M. Issels, MD,” Issels Foundation release, Future Medicine Publishing, Inc., November 7, 1997.

  30. Lew-Lee interview, October 30, 1997.