Among the Truthers

by Jonathan Kay

  These people, I learned, aren’t the loners of X-Files stereotype. Just the opposite: Like other dot-com-era conspiracists, Truthers have collaborated on the Internet to produce a dense mythology with a professional, even scholarly, gloss. And they know how to stay on message: Scrolling down through my incoming correspondence, I was struck by how faithfully Truthers hewed to the movement’s main talking points:

  9/11 was a secret plot led by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz as an excuse to launch imperial wars of conquest and seize the world’s dwindling oil and natural gas supplies;

  Osama bin Laden is a patsy of the U.S. government, and al-Qaeda is a wholly controlled subsidiary of the CIA;

  Ill-trained al-Qaeda pilots could never have executed the maneuvers required to fly commercial jetliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon;

  NORAD was intentionally made to “stand down” on 9/11 so that the hijacked planes could reach their destinations;

  Preplanted bombs brought down the World Trade Center buildings after they’d been hit by aircraft;

  Liquid metal observed flowing from the World Trade Center was molten steel—the result of an exotic high-temperature, government-manufactured pyrotechnic explosive called thermite;

  The puffs of air and dust emitted from the lower floors of the Twin Towers as they fell, plus the neat free-fall collapse of the buildings into their own ground-level footprint, demonstrate the use of a planned demolition sequence;

  World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein publicly admitted that one of the WTC buildings had been “pulled down” by internal demolition;

  Stock-trading data show that multimillion-dollar bets were made on airline companies in advance of Sept. 11, 2001, suggesting investor foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

  I’d long assumed that abnormal theories came from abnormal minds. But these people couldn’t be dismissed as freaks. Outwardly, in fact, they looked and sounded a lot like me. And when I look back at the genesis of this book, I think that was the crucial fact that drew me to them, and made me curious about what made them tick. Like many of the Truthers who emailed me, I, too, have a weakness for narrow, geeky pursuits—tabletop war games, chess problems, sports statistics, Internet flame wars. During a previous phase of my life, when I was pursuing my master’s degree in metallurgical engineering, I would often spend sixteen hours a day in front of a computer, writing a mathematical simulation that perhaps two dozen other people in the world would find useful.

  In other words, I know what it is like to become enmeshed in all-consuming intellectual exercises that the people around you simply cannot understand—and perhaps even disdain. But for me, it was always a hobby or an academic pursuit—never a worldview or a political philosophy. This is the line these people had crossed. And I wanted to find out why.

  At first, I didn’t take Lubo Zizakovic seriously.

  In his lengthy email to me, the man claimed to be all sorts of things—a successful investment banker, a software entrepreneur, an award-winning business scholar who’d once shared a podium with George Bush Sr., a walk-on member of the University of Maryland basketball team, and, most memorably, a former defensive end with the New York Giants. When I reluctantly took Zizakovic up on his offer to meet for lunch at a sushi restaurant near my office, I expected to meet a confused man inhabiting a world of fantasy.

  As soon as I walked into the restaurant, I knew otherwise. Lubo Zizakovic is six foot eight, trim as my wife’s yoga instructor, with hands as large as small desk fans. No surprise that such a specimen would be able to make a career on the gridiron.

  Despite his intimidating appearance, Zizakovic is no goon. During our meal of raw fish, he put me at ease, describing his experiences in professional football, the state of the global economy, his volunteer work for the Special Olympics, and the joys of raising a family on his large rural estate. The accomplishments he described to me are real, as is his career as an investment banker. And by all appearances, he’s good at what he does.

  But every once in a while, as he became animated about one point or another, I would see flashes of the 280-pound defensive end who drove opposing quarterbacks into the turf during the 1990s. Underneath his genteel, well-dressed investment banker exterior, Lubo Zizakovic harbors a lot of anger—anger that’s been his constant companion since the defining historical event of our time.

  “I was at [an investment banking] training session at Bricket Wood just outside London [on 9/11],” he told me. “When a trainer came in to inform us of the first plane hitting [World Trade Center] 1, we all immediately reacted as if this were a curve ball being thrown at us as part of the training session. It was that outrageous.

  “Once I realized that the attacks were for real, my first reaction was, ‘My God! How could a group pull this off with such efficiency? Three out of four direct hits? Four of four hijacked planes? Where was NORAD? Where were the air defense systems?’ I did my undergraduate work at the University of Maryland, so I spent a lot of time in the D.C. area, and I drove past the Pentagon often. I couldn’t imagine how someone could pull this off.”

  In the days following 9/11, the Bush administration blamed al-Qaeda for the attacks, and even identified the nineteen hijackers who’d been on the four doomed airliners. But for Zizakovic—a man of Serbian ancestry whose distrust of the U.S. government became a fixation when NATO took sides against Slobodan Milosevic during the Balkan wars of the 1990s—the official explanation didn’t hold up. In fact, it only heightened his suspicions.

  “The U.S. government apparently had it all figured out immediately,” he told me. “That was the first time I smelled a rat. [And] when the United States turned the entire world’s sympathy to extreme hatred in such a short time, I knew something was wrong. When they attacked Iraq under false pretenses and found no WMD, I knew in my heart that a bunch of guys living in caves in Afghanistan didn’t do 9/11.

  “The clincher was listening to Bush say that Bin Laden might never be found. The U.S. military, with all of its modern satellite equipment and military might can find a needle in a haystack—but not a guy isolated in a single region? Common sense pointed to a cover-up early on, and I just had to spend some time finding concrete evidence . . . I [now] know beyond a shadow of a doubt that 9/11 was a criminal act executed by elements of the U.S. government—let’s call it the shadow government—against its own citizens.”

  Michael Keefer epitomizes what most of us imagine when we hear someone described as “an academic.” Tall, thin, bearded, gray-haired, and mild-mannered, Keefer shares a large century-old brick house in Toronto’s West End with his wife, an acclaimed novelist. Bookshelves line the rooms, each crammed with classic texts accumulated over a four-decade career as a professor of English literature.

  Bookish as he is, Keefer hails from a long line of fighters. His father—an elder in the Presbyterian Church—landed at Normandy. His grandfather was nearly killed at Gallipoli, and went on to serve in the Burma Corps during the Second World War. Keefer himself took a degree at Canada’s Royal Military College in the late 1960s. As we talk in his living room, he directs my gaze to a portrait of an especially fierce-looking Keefer over the mantelpiece. “That’s my double-great grandfather,” he says. “His father and uncle and grandmother were booted out of New Jersey after the American Revolution. The family eventually moved to the Niagara Peninsula.”

  After graduation from RMC, Keefer became an officer in Canada’s naval reserve, and then earned a doctorate at Sussex University in England. His thesis, researched during five years spent poring over Renaissance texts in Latin and German, was about the ideological origins of the Faustus myth. In time, he became an authority on both William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, and published an exhaustive article on the philosophy of René Descartes.

  And yes, he is a Truther.

  Something about Keefer’s personality had always lent itself to activism: Early in his career at Guelph University, he engaged in an unsuccessful four-ye
ar campaign to save a local heritage bridge from demolition. His awakening to more global causes began in the 1990s, when he organized fellow faculty members at Guelph in opposition to Canada’s participation in the first Gulf War and the sanctions regime that followed. “It seems clear to me that what [the allies] had done in 1991 [were] war crimes,” he told me. “Two UN guys resigned in protest over sanctions in Iraq—both denounced them as criminal. I was collecting information about stuff like that.”

  “Starting in about 2002,” he tells me, “I’d begun noticing that computer security people were raising red flags over U.S. voting systems. On election night in 2004, I was carefully collecting exit-polling information from CNN. The next morning, I noticed that all of the key exit poll numbers had been changed overnight from what they’d been at midnight. They’d been changed to correspond to the final vote tally. I proved that the numbers had been fiddled, and published [my analysis] on the Internet. The piece had fourteen thousand hits within a week. My article basically argued that the 2004 election was stolen.”

  As he continued to research the 2004 election, Keefer found more dots to connect—including what he describes as evidence that the crucial Ohio results were sent to the office of Michael Connell, a Karl Rove confidante, before being certified by Ohio’s Secretary of State. “Connell died in a plane crash in December [2008],” Keefer notes dryly. “It quite possibly was linked to the election shenanigans.”

  Based on these investigations, Keefer became more convinced that nothing announced by the U.S. government was as it seemed—including the “official” account of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

  In the years following 9/11, Keefer—who’d formerly stuck to the world of academic journals and faculty meetings—began to surf the web, forging contacts with other left-wing authors and theorists. He became particularly influenced by the work of Michel Chossudovsky, a radical critic of the United States and globalization.

  Keefer’s theory of 9/11? “I concluded that a highly placed group within the U.S. government wanted to energize the U.S. public into support for a radical program of redrawing the map in the Middle East and Central Asia. And I think they felt the only way they could get support for this geopolitical program was through some kind of mighty shock to the U.S. psyche. These people—whoever they were—both organized the absence of the American air defenses and the destruction of the Word Trade Center towers.”

  As our lengthy interview unfolded, Keefer began to detail his theory—as if supplying footnotes in one of his carefully researched academic papers on Renaissance-era philosophy: the timing of NORAD military training, suspicious plumes of smoke emanating from the North Tower, the behavioral oddities of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta (“purported hijacker” is how Keefer describes him). All of this he recites calmly, methodically, authoritatively—as if what he was saying were not even controversial, let alone radical.

  Then, suddenly, the conversation turned, and we found ourselves once more discussing Faustus, Descartes, and the frustrations of university politics. Within a few minutes, I’d half-forgotten that the brilliant scholar on the other side of my coffee cup imagined the U.S. government to be guilty of mass-murdering three thousand innocent people on a sunny morning in 2001.

  When we parted ways, it was with a friendly handshake and a smile: Like most Truthers I’d met, he didn’t begrudge the fact that I rejected his views. He was pleased that I’d taken the time to listen to him, and hoped that I’d eventually come around to the capital-T Truth.

  Keefer and Zizakovic are just two of many conspiracy theorists I’ve met. I’ve chosen to include them in the first chapter because they exemplify the penetration of conspiracism into the well-educated middle class. Zizakovic is a respected and successful banker responsible for multimillion-dollar investment decisions. Keefer is an eminent author and university professor who is entrusted with the education of hundreds of young minds. Neither fit the stereotype of the antisocial conspiracy theorist scribbling out his obscure theses in a dingy student apartment.

  They are alike in another way, too: For Keefer and Zizakovic, as for most Truthers, 9/11 is just the tip of the iceberg—a symptom of a far larger metaconspiracy organized by the world’s secret elites.

  In interview after interview, a conversation about 9/11 would inevitably come back to the same group of apparently disconnected individuals and corporations—Henry Kissinger, the Carlyle Group, David Rockefeller, the Rothschilds, George Soros (who seems to be considered, by Glenn Beck and others, a sort of honorary Rothschild in modern conspiracist lore), Unocal, Halliburton, the Bilderberg Group, the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Monetary Fund, Dick Cheney, the CIA, the Mossad, Pakistan’s ISI, Adnan Khashoggi, E. Howard Hunt, Zbigniew Brzezinski—along with theories linking them in complex and tantalizing ways. In the mind of the committed conspiracist, such theories multiply until they encompass literally every aspect of human life, from the water we drink (filled with fluoride, a “deadly neurotoxin” developed by the Nazis to “pacify concentration camp prisoners”), to the air we breathe (polluted by government-engineered “chemtrails” emitted by jet engines as they pass overhead), to the blood pumping through our veins (poisoned by government-mandated vaccines).

  Keefer, for instance, suspects that 9/11 is but one chapter in a continuing saga of “false flag” operations hatched by elements within, or allied to, the United States government—including the bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980. He also believes there is evidence that “the occupation of Afghanistan is linked to U.S. government participation in the global drug trade”—an echo of 1980s-era charges that the CIA was trafficking cocaine in Central America as part of its campaign against Nicaragua’s Sandinista regime.

  When you talk to a conspiracy theorist, you can never be sure where your conversation will end up. One of the very first Truthers I met—a charming, New York–based former newspaper columnist named Dallas Hansen, who’d lost his job as a result of his controversial views about the World Trade Center attacks—connected September 11 to a range of particularly jaw-dropping theories, spanning the assassination of JFK to the likely target of the next false-flag terrorist attack.

  “My great-grandfather owned a bus line in Holland and hid Jews in his country home,” he tells me. “My grandfather was a teenager who participated in ambushes of Nazi supply trucks . . . I’m not the first person to compare 9/11 to the Reichstag Fire, nor to notice a sort of fascism-lite has emerged. The news abounds with tales of police-state tyranny, from [people] being Tasered to death . . . to police forcibly withdrawing blood from ‘drunk driving suspects.’ ”

  Most memorably, he speculated that George W. Bush would retire to Paraguay so that he could enjoy the protection and fraternity of former Nazis. “Why in the world would he do that?” I asked. He responded that the fortunes of the Bush family have long been intertwined with those of the Nazis—and then described financial links between George Bush’s ancestors and Hitler’s regime.

  (To my shock, I later found that Hansen’s story had a germ of truth: A 2004 article in Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported that “George Bush’s grandfather, the late U.S. senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.” It was a classic example of an isolated historical factoid being used to justify an outlandish conspiracy theory—a pattern I would see repeated many times.)

  As explained in more detail in Chapter 2, several common threads run through these theories, and they spooled over one another repeatedly during the course of my interviews. These include the belief that the path of history is controlled in secret by a small group of influential, fantastically wealthy people; that this power structure is murderous and morally corrupt; and that the political world we inhabit is fundamentally illusory, like the constructed reality in the 1999 film The Matrix.

  “The world is ruled by an elite who make world events occur for their ow
n benefit,” declared Zizakovic when I asked him to describe how 9/11 figured in the sweep of modern history. “Read The True Story of the Bilderberg Group by Daniel Estulin [an influential conspiracist book summarized in the next chaper]. In 1954, the ruling elite started coordinating their efforts. They are a global shadow government with influence and control of just about every major government in the world . . . Their objective, which can be argued might already be achieved, is a one government world with one currency where the masses have no real wealth and all of the resources are in [the elite’s] hands.”

  When a conspiracy theorist held forth in this way, I would usually just put down my pen and listen as we dove together down the rabbit hole. There’s nothing else to be done: These metanarratives are so elaborate and ambitious that they essentially describe alternate moral universes—unrecognizable realms in which a Western government smashing airplanes into its own cities makes perfect sense.

  Truthers’ arcane, detailed theories about internal demolition, NORAD complicity, and CIA–al-Qaeda complicity aren’t just paranoid fairy tales—they are foundational narratives in the construction of this alternate reality, told and retold at Truther gatherings in the same ritualized manner that psalms or Torah portions are read out at religious services. Like other radicalized political movements of our time, the Truth movement transcends activism: For many adherents, it has become the dominant spiritual force in their lives, a pattern described in detail in Chapter 6.

  Certainly, the 9/11 Truth phenomenon cannot be explained as a merely political phenomenon. While I once supposed Truthers to be simply radical specimens of the anti-American, Bush-hating Left, many of the Truthers I’ve met actually turned out to be self-described conservatives who see 9/11 as part of a plot to strip Americans of their liberty, and transfer Washington’s sovereign powers to the United Nations. With the liberal Barack Obama in power, this imagined day of reckoning only grows nearer.