The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

Pope John Paul I

Even in Italy, land of the conspiracy, no plot comes more entangled than the death of Pope John Paul I.

When white smoke puffed above the Vatican on 26 August 1978 to signal the election of Albino Luciani to the papacy no one was more surprised than Luciani himself. A Vatican low-profiler, Luciani was a deeply modest man, who refused the papal tiara at his coronation and endeared himself to many, not just Catholics, by his smiling kindness.

Just 33 days later, he was dead. According to the Vatican, John Paul I’s death was natural. But then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Suggestions that the new pontiff’s demise was anything but natural circulated immediately, fuelled by the easily disprovable lies and oddities emanating from Vatican itself:

At first it was announced that John Paul had been found dead in his bed, with a copy of Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ propped before him, by his secretaries Magee and Lorenzi; in fact, the body was discovered by a nun, Sister Vincenza.

The Vatican blamed John Paul’s untimely death—he was 66—on his heavy smoking. But he didn’t smoke.

A false time of death was issued.

Most controversially of all, a post mortem was not conducted because, insisted the Vatican, post mortems on pontiffs are prohibited by Vatican law. Yet a post mortem had been conducted on the remains of Pope Pius VIII in 1830.

Within 24 hours of his death John Paul I was embalmed.

John Paul I had enemies as well as friends. David Yallop, in In God’s Name (1984), identifies Vatican reactionaries, Freemasons, and Mafiosi as an unholy alliance which loathed the new Pope— loathed him enough to murder him by the administration of digitalis to initiate a heart attack. According to Yallop, the liberal John Paul I was intending to soften the Catholic position on contraception, thus raising the ire of Vatican conservatives. The Freemasons of Propaganda Due (P2), meanwhile, feared a papal expose of their secret caucus inside the Vatican. More worried still were the Mafiosi, who believed that the new pontiff was intending to clean up the Vatican Bank.

Something had long been rotten in the state of the Vatican’s banking system. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Vatican bank officials had laundered money filched by the Nazis, as well as setting up “rat lines” for Nazi war criminals to escape to South America. When the Nazi Gold dried up, the Vatican banks, especially the Istituto per le Opere Religiose (IOR), became money-launderers for the Mafia. The key figures in the IOR’s money-laundering for the Mob were Roberto “God’s Banker” Calvi, director of the IOR’s Milan-based outlet Banco Ambrosiano, and, allegedly, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus. Michele “The Shark” Sindona, a Sicilian financier, was, in Yallop’s scenario, the linkman between the bank and the Mafia.

If the Vatican Bank’s corrupt officials were dismissed, the Mafia would lose a favoured means of disposing of its ill-gotten gains. The Pope had to go.

In Yallop’s scenario, the murder of John Paul I worked out nearly perfectly, since he was replaced by John Paul II, who was socially conservative (thus opposed to contraception) and who, far from cleaning up the Vatican Bank, gave Archbishop Marcinkus immunity from prosecution.

Yallop’s case, though strong, is circumstantial. The Vatican Bank was corrupt to the core, and one of the major players, Roberto Calvi, met a retirement not usually associated with the banking profession. But did John Paul I himself meet an unnatural death? A persuasive counter-blast to Yallop’s book came in 1989 with A Thief in the Night by John Cornwell, an English journalist who, after conducting his own investigation, concluded that John Paul I died of a pulmonary embolism. Indeed, John Paul I had manifested the classic symptom of the condition: swollen feet.

Of course, it might be objected that John Cornwell would say that, wouldn’t he? He was asked to write A Thief in the Night by… the Vatican.

Pope John Paul I was victim of homicidal reactionary and criminal element in Vatican: ALERT LEVEL 6

Further Reading

John Cornwell, A Thief in the Night, 1989

David Yallop, In God’s Name, 1984

Jonestown

Rumours of brainwashing, torture and murder had long attended the People’s Temple, an American hippie cult living in Guyana, when Democratic US Congressman Leo Ryan decided to investigate first-hand. Arriving on 17 November 1978 at “Jonestown”, the cult’s jungle encampment, Ryan was accompanied by Richard Dwyer (a US embassy official in Guyana), media representatives and members of “Concerned Relatives of People’s Temple Members”. After touring around, making notes and gathering together a small group of People’s Temple members who wished to return to the US, Ryan and his entourage made for the airstrip at nearby Port Kaituma. There the Ryan group was ambushed by People’s Temple loyalists of the “Red Brigade”. Ryan, among others, was shot dead.

Back in Jonestown, the cult’s messianic leader and founder, the “Reverend” Jim Jones, called for a “white night”, one of the practice mass suicides the cult periodically held. This time, however, it was for real: mixed in to the Kool Aid they drank was potassium cyanide and valium. Nearly 920 of Jones’s followers, including 276 children, ingested the poison and died. Photographs taken afterwards show close, orderly rows of bodies, neatly dressed, often with their arms around each other.

A year later, the House Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress issued a 782-page report in which it concluded that the Jonestown massacre was a mass suicide brought on by Jones’s “extreme paranoia”. Many disagreed. Initial reports by such heavyweight newspapers as the New York Times suggested that 400 People’s Temple followers had committed suicide, but more had escaped into the jungle; a week later the death toll had risen to 900. So how did the extra 500 die? A Guyanese pathologist, Dr Lesie Mootoo, discounted cyanide as the sole cause of death; many of the Jonestown corpses were free of the eerie rictus that is the hallmark of the agonizing death that comes with cyanide poisoning. Some corpses had strange needle marks on them, and some of the People’s Temple dead had been shot. In fact, Mootoo thought that all but three of the People’s Temple dead had been murdered. Guyanese newpapers reported that Guyanese troops, US green berets and UK Black Watch troops were on exercises near Jonestown at the time of the massacre. Why did they not intervene? Or were they responsible for the deaths of the 500?

Speculation that the CIA might be involved in the Jonestown massacre started up in 1980 when reporter Jack Anderson published a syndicated article called “CIA Involved in Jonestown Massacre”. According to Anderson, Jim Jones himself was tied to the CIA, and certainly there were oddities in his political background; Jones’s father was a Klansman and Jones Jr had been a virulent anti-Communist before his damascene conversion to utopianism in the mid-1960s. Was the conversion fake and Jones a CIA mole in the counterculture? Anderson also suggested that Richard Dwyer, who accompanied Ryan to Jonestown, was a CIA operative. On the audio tape made by Jones of the Ryan visit, the cult leader can be clearly heard during a fractious moment saying, “Get Dwyer out of here before something happens to him!”

By one conspiracy theory, the CIA used the Ryan visit to Jamestown to assassinate Leo Ryan, who was a vocal critic of the CIA, having co-authored the Hughes—Ryan amendment bill which, if passed, would have required the CIA to disclose its planned covert missions to Congress for approval. The Jonestown congregation was murdered, in this scenario, in an attempt to cover up Leo Ryan’s assassination. Another CIA-guilty scenario is