The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

tweed-jacketed scholars and archaeologists, but all that changed with the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 1982 by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Whereas orthodox scholarship determined that the Knights Templar had been dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1312, Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln proposed that the Templars were a front organization for a mysterious clique, the Priory of Sion, which survives to the present. Further, the three authors gave an answer to a puzzle which had long tantalized academic historians: how did the Knights Templar become so rich so quickly? The Templars had discovered the Holy Grail, said Baigent et al. It was, as many noted, the stuff of which thrillers were made… and years later Dan Brown duly obliged with The Da Vinci Code.

To begin at the beginning. In 1118, nine French crusaders asked Baldwin II of Jerusalem for permission to remain in the ruins of Solomon’s Temple in order, they said, to protect passing pilgrims. Officially named by the Holy See “The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon”, the Knights Templar eventually grew to over 20,000 strong, and they enjoyed extensive wealth.

To their detractors, the Templars became too numerous, too rich. On unlucky Friday 13 October 1307, all the Templars in France were arrested by King Philip IV “Le Bel” for crimes of heresy. Within a handful of years Pope Clement had banned the Knights Templar, and their Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burning at the stake in Paris. Allegedly the dying de Molay prophesied that Philip and Clement would die within the year. They did.

The Templars were an easy mark for a cash-strapped monarch like Philip IV. As one of the few organizations allowed to lend money, the Templars figured in most medieval minds in the same slot as the Jews. There were also widespread rumours—many coming from the mouth of a disgruntled former Templar, de Flexian—that in their long sojourn in the Middle East the Knights Templar had become corrupted by Mohammedanism and esoteric local faiths. The Knights Templar were believed to worship a talking head called “Baphomet” and undertake an initiation ceremony in which the Cross was spat on, and buttocks and penises were kissed. Sodomy, indeed, was said to be near mandatory within the Order. A “secret knowledge” guaranteed loyalty to the Order and silence over its heretical practices.

With the Pope’s bull of 1313 banning the Knights Templar, the Order ceased to exist. Allegedly. According to the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem, one of the numerous modern claimants to the Templar title, a “Charter of Transmission” traces their organization directly back in time to de Molay. Other “alternative” theories have the Templars fleeing to Scotland, where they founded the Freemasons, or transmuting into the Illuminati.

Then there is the claim of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, repeated in Brown’s Da Vinci Code, that the clique behind the Templars, the Priory of Sion, carried on regardless after the Pope’s ban. The Priory of Sion were the custodians of the Holy Grail—the knowledge that Jesus had a child with Mary Magdalene, and that the Holy bloodline moved to France, where their descendants still reside.

The Templars/Priory of Sion are said to have discovered the Grail during their excavations of the Temple. It was this knowledge of the Grail which was the true cause of the Templars’ fall to ruin. If Jesus’s bloodline were still extant, the Papacy was illegitimate. To protect itself, the Papacy and its monarchical supporters ordered the extermination of those who knew the truth of the Grail—the Knights Templar.

The notion of still extant Knights Templar and documents proving the rewriting of Christianity by the Catholic Church is wildly popular—proof being the millions of copies of The Da Vinci Code which have been sold. Evidence to tie modern Templar claimants to the Knights Templar of yore is nonexistent, however. If the Templars live on it is in placenames such as Temple Meads, in their round churches like Garway, and in their ruined castles like Crak des Chevaliers.

One mystery does survive the Templars. The Holy Grail as Christ’s bloodline is, to quote historian Marina Warner, “hooey”, but what were the Templars looking for in their nine years of excavations in the Temple of Jerusalem?

And did they find it?

The Knights Templar survived the cull of the 14th century and live on today as guardians of the Holy Grail: ALERT LEVEL 3

Further Reading

Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 1982

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, 2003 [novel]

Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelations, 1998

Piers Paul Read, The Templars, 1999

John Lennon

Everyone knows who shot former Beatle John Lennon outside the Dakota Building, New York, at 10.50 p.m. on 8 December 1980. Mark David Chapman, far from fleeing the scene of the crime, walked up and down on the sidewalk and started to read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “I just shot John Lennon,” Chapman informed bewildered witnesses. He said the same to the judge months later at his court case, and was awarded 20 years to life in Attica State Prison as a result.

So that’s that, then. Chapman was the classic deranged fan, a psycho loser who felt the need for some attention. His defence psychiatrist defined Chapman’s condition as “paranoid schizophrenia”.

For some observers, however, too much about the Chapman/ Lennon case did not stand up. For a start Chapman, as a confirmed mental case, should not have been deemed fit to stand trial and certainly not sent to a standard prison to serve his time. On top of that, police detectives on the Chapman case noted that Chapman seemed “programmed” and, far from desiring attention, avoided it. In his one press interview Chapman said: “He [John Lennon] walked past me and then I heard in my head, ‘do it, do it’… I don’t remember aiming.” But aim he did—using a classic “combat stance”, according to eyewitnesses—and fired his Charter Arms.38 pistol five times. And, for someone who had spent years working as a children’s counsellor in refugee camps for World Vision, then bumming around and imbibing drugs, Chapman had an awful lot of cash and credit cards to his name.

For the veteran Californian conspiracy theorist Mae Brussell, Chapman’s strange mental state was clear evidence that he was a “Manchurian Candidate”, an assassin programmed to kill. Brussell thought Chapman’s masters were the Nazis, and that Lennon was killed as part of a long purge of rock stars from the US cultural scene. According to Brussell, only anodyne popsters like “Sonny and Cher, the Osmonds, John Denver, and Captain & Tennille make it”, and hippie Lennon was a must-kill.

Fenton Bresler proposes a more sophisticated take on the Manchurian Candidate thesis in Who Killed John Lennon? where he notes that World Vision, the religious charity for which Chapman worked, was purportedly a CIA front outfit linked to the sect which overdosed at Jonestown. Chapman, says Bresler, was hypnotized under the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project to kill Lennon. Bresler hardly needs to look far for a motive. Lennon was a prominent critic of US foreign and domestic policy. His couplet “All we are saying is/Give peace a chance” seemed, from Vietnam to Central America, to be about the last thing on the minds of successive White House regimes. Lennon had also played a small part in the Watergate expose, when he financed the publication of Mae Brussell’s prescient, insider-informed notes on the scandal (researched independently of Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post) in the underground magazine The Realist.

John Lennon was assassinated by a CIA-sponsored ‘Manchurian Candidate’: ALERT LEVEL 3

Further Reading

Fenton Bresler, Who Killed John Lennon? 1989

Alexander Litvinenko