The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

spoil Maxwell’s yachting holiday. Or so the story goes.

Mossad are the bugaboos of the conspiracy world. If the Freemasons didn’t do it, Mossad did. They are effective, as ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann found to his cost when they kidnapped him from South America and put him on trial for war crimes, but those who accuse them of every other conspiracy going often trail the odour of anti-Semitism.

A more plausible killer of Robert Maxwell is Maxwell himself. His vast business empire was starting to unravel. He had defrauded his own company pension fund, a happenstance about to come to public light. (Maxwell’s sons were later convicted of the crime.) What simpler way to escape the tightening noose of scandal and justice than by slipping under the gentle waters of the Canaries?

A footnote: Maxwell’s family had a financial interest in agreeing with the Spanish verdict on Robert Maxwell’s death. He was insured for $35.8 million against accidental death. For suicide the payout would have been nil.

Tycoon and Soviet agent Robert Maxwell was assassinated by Mossad: ALERT LEVEL 5

Further Reading

Tom Bower, Maxwell: The Final Verdict, 1996

Men in Black

Men in Black (MIBs) are mysterious figures who seek to conceal UFO evidence. Generally, they appear at a witness’s home after a sighting or an abduction, remove any physical evidence, and threaten the witness into silence.

Early reports of MIBs suggested they were US government agents, but in 1952 Albert Bender, the Connecticut labourer who founded the grandiosely titled International Flying Saucer Bureau (an organization that consisted of little more than himself and a decrepit duplicating machine), was visited by some. “All of them were dressed in black clothes. They looked like clergymen, but wore hats similar to homburg style… Feelings of fear left me. The eyes of all three figures suddenly lit up like flashlight bulbs, and all these were focused on me… It was then I sensed that they were conveying a message to me by telepathy.”

Bender was convinced the MIBs were aliens; certainly he heeded their message, and closed down his organization, telling only a few trusted confidants about the visit. One confidant, Gray Barker, went on to write a definitive book on the MIB phenomenon, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956) as well as present an expanded version of Bender’s own account, Flying Saucers and the Three Men (1962). In the latter book, Barker reported that Bender had been taken by aliens to a secret UFO base in Antarctica and that the MIBs sought to extract a special element from Earth’s oceans. Many found Bender’s claims unbelievable, but still the reports of encounters with alien MIBs proliferated.

Typically, the MIBs travel in threes, often in a black Lincoln or Cadillac car, display little or no facial expressions, and speak with a mechanical tone. A male MIB who in 1976 visited Dr Herbert Hopkins, a Maine hypnotherapist investigating alien abductions, wore lipstick and was hairless. At the end of the visit, the MIB slurred, “My energy is running low… must go now,” and staggered to the door. Hopkins described himself as being in a trance-like state during the visit, as do others visited by MIBs, leading some observers to propose that MIBs are a figment of the imagination. Or that the visited have hysterically exaggerated an encounter with a real (human) government agent. According to UFOlogist William L. Moore, MIBs are, in the US at least, “really government people in disguise” and work for a branch of Air Intelligence known as Air Force Special Activities Center. In Britain MIBs have been traced to the Special Investigation Section of the RAF’s Provost and Security Services, after documents relating to a UFO sighting by a 16–year-old schoolgirl, Anne Henson, surfaced in the Public Records Office in Kew. The documents, prepared by Sergeant S. W. Scott of the Special Investigation Section, detail visits made by officers of that department to Henson in 1962.

Government agents interviewand intimidate UFO witnesses: ALERT LEVEL 9

Further Reading

Gray Barker, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers, 1956

Albert K. Bender and Gray Barker, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, 1962

Peter Brookesmith, UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, 1997

Nick Redfern and Andy Roberts, Strange Secrets: Real Government Files on the Unknown, 2003

MK-ULTRA

Long before the Beatles experimented with “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, an unlikely group of Americans got turned on to the possibilities of LSD: the CIA. Unlike the Beatles, Timothy Leary and the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, the CIA had no interest in using LSD to open up “the doors of perception”; the Agency wanted a “truth drug” for use in interrogations or, even better, a drug that enabled mind control.

Set up by CIA head Allen Dulles in 1953, the CIA’s mind-control and—alteration project was code-named MK-ULTRA, taking its name from the CIA’s spy work behind Nazi lines in the Second World War. However, there was little noble about the MK-namesake.

Led by Dr Sidney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA involved some 150 research programmes, many of them using unsuspecting or entrapped human subjects. The notorious “Operation Midnight Climax” recruited San Francisco prostitutes, who laced their unsuspecting clients’ drinks with acid so that CIA operatives could film the ensuing shenanigans from behind a two-way mirror. Some sixties hippies—as Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain record in Acid Dreams (1985)—believe the CIA supplied them with LSD so they would go “tripping” instead of overthrowing the state, a claim given some currency by the exposure of LSD manufacturer Ronald Stark as a CIA operative.

If anything, volunteer guinea-pigs fared worse in MK-ULTRA experiments than unknowing Joe Public; one group of volunteers was subjected to large doses of LSD for 77 consecutive days, causing many of them irreversible brain damage.

Despite an obsession with LSD, the imagination of the CIA was not limited to it. Electronic brain implants, mescaline, alcohol, psilocybin, radiation, implanted electrodes, barbiturates and amphetamines were also subjected to scrutiny as mind-control agents. Some unfortunate volunteers were strapped to a chair and drip-fed amphetamines in one arm, barbiturates in the other. Dr Gottlieb, who was said to have been the inspiration for the mad scientist in the movie Dr Strangelove, also locked volunteers in sensory deprivation chambers. Later Gottlieb was revealed to have the use of files generated by Nazi medical researchers at Dachau.

Undoubtedly the most grotesque of the MK-ULTRA experiments was that subcontracted to Montreal-based psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron. This involved the “breaking down of ongoing patterns of the patient’s behaviour by means of particularly insensitive electroshocks” while LSD was given simultaneously. Cameron called this process “psychic driving” and held that the mind could be repatterned after being erased. Some of Cameron’s subjects received electro-convulsive therapy at 30–40 times the normal rate, this followed by weeks of LSD-induced coma in which they were played an endless loop of noise or speech.

Mind control was the unholy grail of MK-ULTRA, which at one stage consumed 6 per cent of the CIA’s entire budget. The impetus behind the programme, and its forebear Project Artichoke, was the alleged success of the Communist countries in “brainwashing” US prisoners during the Korean War. Returned home, these soldiers exhibited strange behaviour and were unable to recall their movements through Manchuria. The phenomenon gave novelist Richard Condon the inspiration for his twice-filmed novel The Manchurian Candidate (1959), in which an American GI is, through hypnosis, programmed by Chinese and Korean Communists to assassinate a US presidential candidate.

Whether the CIA ever succeeded in programming its own Manchurian Candidate will probably never be