Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (54 page)

K
evin began this book and Jim can end it. Jim is a man I first met when we were both school governors in North London. He has an inquiring mind, an irascible look, and has never encountered a politician he doesn’t suspect of lying. And yet his is an interesting sort of skepticism, as demonstrated by our conversation over lunch one day. I was writing chapter 6 of this book and immersed in materials about the Templars and the bloodline of Christ. I told him briefly what I was doing, and he leaned forward and began to speak in what for Jim constituted a confiding tone. “You know,” he reminded me, “that I am a skeptic by nature. But I tell you, there’s something to all this
Da Vinci Code
business.”

The “something” was this. A year earlier, Jim and his wife had visited the Louvre in Paris and had gone to the room where the Poussin painting of the shepherds in Arcadia—the one mentioned in
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—
was supposed to hang. But it wasn’t there. Intrigued, Jim sought out an attendant and asked where exactly the picture had gone. The inquiry, for some reason, became an altercation, and as a result of the argument, Jim was asked to leave the Louvre. “I obviously hit a nerve,” said Jim, adding reasonably, “You don’t get thrown out of a museum just for asking a question!” The conclusion he drew was that the curators had had some kind of secret to hide, and what could that be other than some link to the controversy about the bloodline of Jesus?

I didn’t tell Jim that an alternative explanation might well center around a Louvre attendant, whose mood we don’t know, finding himself aroused from torpor by an irate Englishman bellowing at him in questionable French about a picture that had already been the subject of several dozen inquires that day, and simply deciding that he’d had enough. In early 2007, six months after our conversation, staff at the Louvre went on strike in protest against the stress brought on by dealing with what they called “aggressive” or even “dangerous” visitors. But this rather less sinister and slightly more comic possibility wasn’t likely to appeal to Jim, who seemed happy with his accidental role in discovering the Greatest Conspiracy in History.

RFK Must Die

Such is the pleasure of those who find themselves in on a secret that even the producers of reputable news programs get drawn in. The BBC’s TV news flagship,
Newsnight
, is regarded by many of its audience as a model of impartiality and journalistic probity, yet in late November 2006 the program screened a twelve-minute taster documentary made by an Irish filmmaker, Shane O’Sullivan, about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

The killing of John Kennedy’s younger brother at a crucial moment in the 1968 presidential race was always going to be a fodder for conspiracy theories. Conspiracists have been largely thwarted, however, by the open-and-shut nature of the case. The assassin, a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was seen firing his gun by dozens of people in the Ambassador Hotel that night, before he was overpowered. His gun matched the bullets taken from Kennedy and wounded bystanders, and a search revealed notebooks written before the shooting, in which Sirhan had written over and over again, “RFK must die.” Attempts to construct a conspiracy theory from the killing centered, rather desperately, either on the idea that Sirhan was “programmed” by some unknown force to commit the murder or on supposed discrepancies between the number of bullet holes in the pantry area where the shooting took place and the number of shots fired by Sirhan. Doubts were also raised about whether Sirhan ever got close enough to Kennedy to cause the most serious wound (as several eyewitnesses say he certainly did), and about the sighting of a woman in a polka-dot dress who supposedly said, “We killed him.”

So far, so (by November 2006) old hat. But O’Sullivan now added something extra to the mix, and it was this novel element that persuaded the editor and senior producers at
Newsnight
to run with his film. As O’Sullivan put it in a newspaper article that appeared on the same day as his program, in the course of researching a fictional screenplay based on the brainwashing theory, he had “uncovered new video and photographic evidence suggesting that three senior CIA operatives were behind the killing.”
²
The video was a sequence of high-lit characters, once anonymous but now prominent, moving around the Amabassador Hotel in the moments before and after the shooting, spliced together with a sequence of contemporary interviewees identifying them. It was like something out of a cold-case TV show.

First, O’Sullivan thought he had pictures of a secret-service operative, David Morales: “Fifteen minutes in, there he was, standing at the back of the ballroom, in the moments between the end of Kennedy’s speech and the shooting. Thirty minutes later, there he was again, casually floating around the darkened ballroom while an associate with a pencil mustache took notes.” But who was the balding man with Morales? Various men who claimed either to have been involved with the CIA or to have been present at the hotel said that it was a Gordon Campbell, who had worked for the CIA in Miami. And if that was so, then who was the third chap talking to Campbell? O’Sullivan thought he knew.

He looked Greek, and I suspected he might be George Joannides, chief of psychological warfare operations at JM-Wave. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the death of John F. Kennedy . . . Ed Lopez, now a respected lawyer at Cornell University, came into close contact with Joannides when he was a young law student working for the committee. We visit him and show him the photograph and he is 99 percent sure it is Joannides. When I tell him where it was taken, he is not surprised: “If these guys decided you were bad, they acted on it.”
³

O’Sullivan finished his article in the same vein as he finished his film, with this peroration:

Given the positive identifications we have gathered on these three, the CIA and the Los Angeles Police Department need to explain what they were doing there . . . Today would have been Robert Kennedy’s 81st birthday. The world is crying out for a compassionate leader like him. If dark forces were behind his elimination, it needs to be investigated.
⁴

After the broadcast of his mini-documentary, O’Sullivan went on to complete a five-hundred-page book on the killing of RFK, and to put the finishing touches to a two-and-a-quarter-hour documentary,
RFK Must Die
. But as he headed back to the cutting room, his entire thesis was beginning to collapse.

Three other researchers, two American and one British, who had also been looking at the RFK assassination, began to chase down O’Sullivan’s supposed trio of CIA men. Jefferson Morley and David Talbot—ironically, pursuing their own conspiracy theory about the Dallas murder—soon discovered that Gordon Campbell, far from being in Los Angeles that night in 1968, had died rather publicly of a heart attack in 1962. The two Americans communicated this to Shane O’Sullivan, whose response was to suggest “that the man caught on camera might have expropriated the dead man’s name as an alias, since taking false names was a common practice among CIA covert operatives.”
⁵

It got worse. Several people who had known Morales, including his family, were adamant that the man picked out in O’Sullivan’s film was not him. O’Sullivan, as he himself recounts in his documentary, now took his identifications to the LAPD. The files showed “Campbell” and the Greek-looking “Joannides” to be Michael Roman and Frank Owens, respectively, both sales managers with the Bulova watch company, which happened to be holding a convention at the Ambassador on that day.

So the “positive identifications” were erroneous, and it seems a fair guess that had
Newsnight
known that there were not three supposedly identifiable CIA agents wandering unaccountably around the Ambassador but two watch salesmen and A. N. Other, they would never have given air-time to O’Sullivan’s original movie. This being so, the way the Irishman dealt with this disappointment must be considered a classic of insouciance in adversity.

First, he suggested it didn’t really matter. As he told one British conspiracist website (whose members were, at this point, unaware of the collapse of the original theory), “The heart of the film is a thorough reexamination of the other controversies in the case . . . There’s rare archive footage from the hotel that night, with more clips of ‘Morales’ and ‘Campbell.’ ”
⁶
Second, he implied that the watch convention might have been suspicious. The Bulova company, he told his viewers, had been chaired by former U.S. Army general and Johnson adviser Omar Bradley, and did a significant proportion of its business with the Department of Defense. An anonymous source had told O’Sullivan that Bulova was a “well-known CIA cover.” The notion that the CIA sent watch salesmen to superintend its most sensitive assassinations was such a breathtaking example of making the best of a bad job that it led British author Mel Ayton to speculate wryly that perhaps O’Sullivan had made this connection because Bulova used to advertise its Accutron watch in the 1960s spy drama series
The Man From U.N.C.L.E
.
⁷

Watching
RFK Must Die
at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Pall Mall in London, I marveled at O’Sullivan’s resilience. When the identifications in his first film collapsed, everything else collapsed, since O’Sullivan had relied on the identifiers for much of his material. But what they said they were so sure of, they were, in fact, utterly mistaken about. Why had this happened? Who knows? Glory, money, stupidity . . .

The True Skeptic

Shane O’Sullivan and my friend Jim are both intelligent, both educated men, and both were holding fast to the idea of their own skepticism while simultaneously creating arguments to suggest that something singularly incredible might actually be true. But far from being skeptics, they were being willfully credulous. True, like many other believers in conspiracy theories, they were selective in their credulity, choosing to dismiss certain theories while endorsing other similarly implausible ones. It is a pattern one notices when reading books with lists of conspiracy theories from which the authors seem to feel obliged, almost arbitrarily, to accept one or two as being true, as though needing some kind of respite from the pure effort of exercising genuine skepticism.

Real skepticism is indeed tiring and in many ways unattractive. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamed of in our philosophy,” Hamlet reminds his friend in words that almost every doubter has had quoted to them at some point in their adult lives. Such an admonition may have been uttered during a discussion of religion, spirituality, New Age philosophy, or alternative therapies, in which the doubter (or real skeptic) has tried to invoke common sense. It always means the same thing: it is the skeptic who has a closed mind, and the believer whose being is open to the world. So the believer in a conspiracy theory or theories becomes, in his own mind, the one in proper communion with the underlying universe, the one who understands the true ordering of things. There are plenty of other ways of enjoying that feeling of transcendence, however, such as embracing esoteric religion or Eastern philosophies. But at certain times and under certain circumstances in the modern, developed, and industrialized world, a large number of people find the story of a conspiracy, no matter how shallowly rooted in fact, almost impossibly seductive. Why?

We should admit here that there is an objection to this entire line of inquiry. After an article I had authored in
The Times,
criticizing 9/11 conspiracists, a British psychoanalyst wrote to me in very civil terms, questioning my own psychological motives. “There is perhaps,” he suggested, “an even deeper anxiety that can lead us to dismiss possibilities that imply betrayal by those whom we expect to protect and care for us.” And, as an abstract proposition, one can see how this might be true. There are many examples of family members not being able to believe—denying—that a loved father or a respected grandfather was capable of sexual abuse. The reaction of Communists to the Moscow trials was to comfort themselves with the thought that, somehow, the party leadership in Russia must have known what they were doing.

It is when we get down to practicalities that my critic’s analysis begins to fray. The evidence that I might be suffering from such a denial lay in my specific rejection of the writings of David Ray Griffin, whose role in the 9/11 Truth movement is discussed in chapter 7 of this book. Griffin’s work was, argued the analyst, “carefully and scholarly presented . . . [and] a highly disciplined philosophical analysis of some of the questions that have arisen in relation to official accounts of 9/11.”
⁸
The problem, of course, as we have seen, is that Griffin’s account was no such thing, even if it maintained the outward limbs and flourishes of scholarship. Its evasions, half-truths, and bad science suggested a pathology of a kind not displayed by those who pointed out where Griffin parted from scholarship.

So we return to the attractions of conspiracism with the observation that there are some obviously gratifying aspects to creating or consuming theories using its components and techniques. Who, for example, wouldn’t want to be on the side of the gifted and insightful? What is less explicable is the drive behind the determination—the need, if you prefer—that something so unlikely as, say, permitting an enemy government to blow up all your battleships should nevertheless be proved to be true. What creates the desire of large numbers of intelligent people to go along with such an idea?