The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (66 page)

Old, murderous habits, it seems, died hard. In January 1992, Mozambican government forces were purportedly attacked with CBWs by the South African apartheid regime; several hundred soldiers claimed to have been exposed to a substance released from a plane flying above them. Four of them later died. It was widely suspected that the Coast front company Protechnik was the likely source of the lethal agent; the UK and US afterwards heavily pressured South Africa to terminate Project Coast, partly for humanitarian reasons, partly because it was feared that Coast’s know-how would fall into terrorist hands.

Basson was given a one-year contract to dissolve Project Coast, after which he became an independent CBW consultant, but his subsequent globe-trotting occasioned the US and Britain to make démarches expressing their concern that the good doctor was selling his knowledge of CBWs to pariah states such as Libya. To keep Basson under control, the South African Government hired him as the head of an uncontroversial official department in 1995. As a method of keeping the dog on the chain, this was not entirely successful; two years later, after a tip-off from the CIA that Basson was about to flee the country, Basson was caught with a thousand Ecstasy pills and four trunks full of secret documents related to Project Coast. The Es were almost certainly from stock manufactured by Coast for non-lethal crowd control. After some heavy persuasion, Basson testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1998; he was the TRC’s last witness and gave limited, evasive testimony, with his lawyers making frequent interjections. Enough was heard, however, for Dr Wouter Basson to be tried on sixty-seven charges, ranging from fraud to murder whilst working on Coast. Basson denied all charges, and the judge, one Mr Hartzenberg, dismissed many of them, ruling that because they had occurred in Namibia and other foreign terrains, Basson could not be tried on them. Then, after thirty months of trial, Hartzenberg grandly rejected the testimony of all of the prosecution’s 153 witnesses (which included Coast scientists and operatives) and granted “Dr Death”, as the media had nicknamed Basson, amnesty

To date, there remain concerns over whether or not Basson actually destroyed the CBW agents or merely relocated them. Hundreds of kilos of chemicals and agents were unaccounted for when inventory was later taken by the Government.

South Africa continues to have a CBW programme but says it is strictly defensive. The country is now a member of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Further Reading

Stephen Burges and Helen Purkitt,
The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program
, 2001

Chandré Gould, Peter I. Folb et al
, Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme,
2003

PROJECT MONTAUK

Or, fast forward to the future without a Delorean car.

Conspiracy wonks believe that a series of top-secret experiments conducted in a vast cavernous underground laboratory built beneath the Montauk Air Force Station on the eastern tip of Long Island enabled teleportation and time travel.

Whispers about strange happenings at Montauk began circulating in the early 1980s when one Preston Nichols claimed to have recovered suppressed memories of his involvement with the lab. Around the same time, a man called Al Bielek began lecturing on his own recovered memories which linked Montauk to the Philadelphia experiment, the US Navy’s supposed invisibility experiment in the forties. Bielek maintained that the USS
Eldridge,
on which he had served as matelot, had been teleported forty years hence to Montauk, where the lab’s supremo was none other that Nikola Tesla, inventor of
Free Electricity
. (A busy boy was Al; he was confusingly also Ed Cameron, who worked on the Manhattan atomic bomb project, or so he says.) The lab’s time tunnel allowed travel forwards and backwards and to alien planets. The website of Al Bielek – www.bielek.com – contains a timeline of his travels: he got to to 2,749.

The secrets of Montauk contain some other conspiracy favourites. Genetic engineering? Tick. PSI ops experiments? Tick. The giant Surface Air Ground Environment (SAGE) radar on the site was reportedly used for mind-control tests on abducted teenagers.

Alas, there is no documented evidence that Montauk is, or ever has been, a lab for a real-life version of TV’s
Time Tunnel
show. Bielek’s website is a classic case of the self-referential “proofs” offered by the weird wing of conspiracy. Al says Preston Nichols worked at Montauk; Preston says Al worked at Montauk; Stewart Swerdlow says Al and Preston toiled at the Montauk base; Al and Preston say Stewart worked there … Bielek’s website states that he “paid a big price for the privilege” of travelling in time and meeting little green creatures.

You’ll also pay a high price if you want to know more about his adventures. His PC-DVD costs $39.99. Visa and Mastercard both accepted.

The Montauk base closed down several years back. The site is now home to Camp Hero State Park.

Further Reading

www.bielek.com

PROJECT PAPERCLIP

As US forces advanced through the Wagnerian ruins of the Third Reich in May 1945, they stumbled upon research facility after facility that indicated that the Germans had technologies far beyond their own.

This was especially the case in aeronautics and rocket science – which in itself led to the conspiracy theory that the Nazis of the
Thule Society
had hitched up with aliens – and so the US deemed it advantageous to “relocate” leading German scientists and technicians across the Atlantic, where their expertise could be put to work on behalf of Uncle Sam. Or, as Major-General Hugh Knerr, deputy commander of the US Air Force in Europe put it:

Occupation of German scientific and industrial establishments has revealed the fact that we have been alarmingly backward in many fields of research. If we do not take the opportunity to seize the apparatus and the brains that developed it and put the combination back to work promptly, we will remain several years behind while we attempt to cover a field already exploited.

Importing the German boffins Stateside also denied their use to the perfidious Russians, who were quickly going from being friends to foes. (Actually, America also wanted to deny the technology to the British, who remained so-called “friends”.) There was a little local difficulty, however, in that some of the German scientists were full-blown members of the SS, even war criminals – and Truman had expressly ordered that anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism” would be excluded from a welcome in the Land of the Free. To circumvent this tiresome legal and moral objection, in 1946 the US War Department began Project Paperclip, named after the technique of identifying useful German personnel by putting a paperclip on their file; sought-after German scientists had their records cleansed of mentions of war crimes/SS and Nazi membership or were given wholly false records to enable their entry into the US. During Paperclip more than 1,600 German technicians and scientists were hired in, many of them beginning their new lives at the military research facility of Fort Bliss, Texas.

Werner von Braun, the V-2 rocket man, was one of the most prominent SS members whitewashed and recycled by the Truman government. He ended up playing a leading role in NASA, masterminding many of the moonshots. A number of those processed through Paperclip had partaken in medical “experiments” in Dachau and other Nazi concentration/death camps; Hubertus Strughold, later called “the father of space medicine” and designer of Nasa’s on-board life-support system, had headed a team at Dachau and Auschwitz which had frozen inmates and put them in low-pressure chambers to study the effects. Paperclip hireling Arthur Rudolph was hardly higher on the moral scale; another die-hard Nazi, he was chief operations director at Nordhausen, where 20,000 slave labourers died producing V-2 missiles.

So dense was the Paperclip paper trail cover-up that many of the SS/Nazi hirelings were never properly identified thereafter.

Project Paperclip. Or how the US establishment learned to stop worrying about morals and love the bomb.

Further Reading

Clarence G. Lasby,
Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War
, 1975

PROPAGANDA DUE (P2)

During a raid on the Arezzo villa of Italian businessman Licio Gelli in March 1981 for evidence of his possible link to the Vatican Bank’s laundering of Mafia money police turned up something far more sinister about Signor Gelli than dealings with dodgy money. He was the leader of the banned Masonic Lodge Propaganda Due (Propagation Two). And Propaganda Due (P2) was scheming to take over Italy.

A list of 962 P2 conspirators found in Gelli’s safe included three cabinet ministers, forty MPs, the heads of the Army and Navy, police chiefs, intelligence officers, fourteen judges, numerous industrialists (among them one Silvio Berlusconi) and Victor Emmanuel, Prince of Naples. Shortly afterwards, police found under the false bottom in Gelli’s daughter’s briefcase a copy of a document entitled
Piana di Rinascita Democratica
(“A Plan for the Rebirth of Democracy”). The title was a misnomer: the document set out a plan for a fascist coup in which unions would be banned and the media put under state control. The fallout from the discovery of the P2 list and
Piana di Rinascita Democratica
was enough to bring down the Italian Government
.
Later a court indictment charged that P2’s infiltration of the Italian state had “the incredible capacity to control a state’s institutions to the point of virtually becoming a state-within-a-state”.

The origins of P2 date back to 1877 when a Masonic Lodge was chartered by the Grand Orient of Italy as Propaganda Due; a century later the Lodge had become so infiltrated by the
Mafios
i that the Master of Grand Orient shut it down and expelled its Worshipful Master, Licio Gelli. The response of Gelli? To pick up the Lodge’s membership list and set up his own, essentially private Lodge, P2.

Born in 1919, Gelli was a Mussolini-era fascist who had fought with the SS on the Eastern Front before fleeing to South America, where he was a financial backer of Argentinian dictator Juan Peron. Returning to Italy, he became a Mason in 1963 before taking over P2 in 1966. Under his tutelage P2 expanded nearly a hundredfold to 1,000 members, including branches – all funded by Mafia lira – in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Raul Lastiri, Argentina’s president during part of the “Dirty War” in the seventies was a P2 member, So was Jose Lopez Rega, the Social Welfare minister under Peron.

The Mafia wasn’t P2’s only financial provider. According to P2 supergrass Mino Pecorelli, the Lodge was funded by the CIA, and Gelli himself was a CIA officer. (Pecorelli was later found shot dead.) A 1990 article in the London
Observer
cited declassified US secret papers which linked Gelli to the CIA’s Rome station and the continuance of the notorious Operation Gladio, the CIA-funded and (armed) anti-Communist network set up in Italy in the wake of the Second World War. There have been frequent accusations of P2 complicity in the 1978 assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro and the 1980 Bologna railway bombing, events which were part of the “
strate-gia della tensione
” intended to create the conditions for a P2 coup.