The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

as if you were checking your hat at the door?” Accusations that Opus Dei seeks to infiltrate the mass media were heated up in 1979 by the leaking of an Opus Dei document which showed that 604 of its members worked in journalism and 52 in radio/TV.

Opus Dei’s message, at least, is clear enough. Like Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Balaguer’s The Way has the virtue of forthrightness. For Balaguer there is only the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic way and its end goal is a global theocracy.

All of which begs the question: if Opus Dei’s only aims are charity and the “sanctifying of work”, why does it need its secretive independent status as a personal prelature?

Opus Dei seeks to instal a right-wing Roman Catholic theocracy: ALERT LEVEL 8

Further Reading

John L. Allen Jr, Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church, 2005

www.odan.org

Pearl Harbor

Tora! Tora! Tora! As every good American boy and girl is brought up to believe, the Japanese made a sneaky unannounced attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on 7 December 1941. After 350 Japanese fighter bombers unloaded their ordnance, 21 ships and 2,400 Americans lay dead in the water. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called 7 December 1941 “a date which will live in infamy” and promptly signed a declaration of war against Japan.

Sunday 7 December was certainly a day of infamy. Despite all his protestations of surprise and anger, Roosevelt knew a Japanese assault was imminent. More, the evidence suggests he provoked Japan into an attack so the US could appear the innocent party. Unlike 90 per cent of his countrymen, Roosevelt wanted to get involved in the Second World War. Letting the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor was his way of sea-changing US opinion.

Thanks to the US intelligence services, hundreds of Japanese “purple code” intercepts had been decrypted, showing Japan’s build-up to a strike in the Pacific. On 27 November, the US Navy and War Departments warned: “Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased… an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” On the evening of 6 December the US Navy deciphered a message sent from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington. The intercept revealed that Japan was ending diplomatic relations with the US. On reading the translated message, Roosevelt announced, “This means war.” The Australian and British intelligence services likewise informed Washington of Japan’s intention.

According to Roosevelt’s apologists, the warnings of war never reached Pearl Harbor, due to cock-up and bad weather. So on the morning of Sunday 7 December 1941 Pearl Harbor slept in instead of being up and ready behind the guns. No fewer than eight high-level investigations have investigated the reasons for the failure of the 27 November and 6 December intelligence to reach Pearl Harbor, beginning with the Roberts Commission of December 1941. This blamed the Pearl Harbor debacle on the local commanders, Admiral Kimmel and General Short, for not being sufficiently prepared. A 1944 Army Pearl Harbor Board blamed the disaster on the War Department for not sending out the 6 December communique. A 1945 Naval Court of Inquiry blamed the Navy Department head, Admiral Stark, for not forwarding the December communique. In other words, Pearl Harbor was everybody’s fault except FDR’s!

Little significance can be attached to the various commissions’ findings. As one member of the Roberts Commission remarked, it was “crooked as a snake” and set up only to preserve FDR’s reputation. (That member was no wild-eyed loony subversive but Admiral of the US Navy William Standley.) Much the same can be said for the subsequent inquiries. Not until the 1946 Joint Congressional Committee on Pearl Harbor did FDR receive even mild censure, but by then he was dead and the war won.

What of the charge that FDR intentionally provoked the war with Japan? The first such political shot came from a surprising source: Robert A. Theobald, the commander of destroyers at Pearl Harbor in 1941, in his 1954 book The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor. Another naval officer, Robert Stinnet, delivered a devastating broadside in Day of Deceit (2001), which quoted an eight-point plan drawn up for FDR in 1940 and much later found by Stinnet in the archives. The eight-point plan opened with the words “The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act [of war]” and suggested inciting Japan by trade embargoes.

And, lo and behold, the US goaded Nippon throughout 1940–41 by restricting shipments of wheat, machinery and oil. On 26 November 1941 the US upped the ante by insisting Japan withdraw from Indochina and China and renounce its tripartite alliance with Germany and Italy. Tokyo cited this demand in its 6 December communique as the cause of the breakdown in diplomatic relations with the US.

Roosevelt thus engineered the war with Japan, just as he knew an attack on American forces was likely on 7 December 1941. (In fairness, he probably did not know the exact location of the assault—although the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor must have topped any list of likely targets.) Just after 7 December 1941 General George C. Marshall, supreme commander of the US Army, informed the handful of top brass involved in the Pear Harbor cover-up: “Gentlemen, this goes to the grave with us.” The secret did; it has taken historians more than 50 years to recover the full story of the day of infamy.

Few, however, are keen to criticize FDR for his Pearl Harbor cover-up, even truth seekers like Standley and Stinnet. Pearl Harbor, it seems, is a case where the end really did justify the means: pushing the Japanese into attacking a naked Pearl Harbor allowed the US to enter the Second World War and join Britain and Russia in successfully defeating the twin menaces of German Nazism and Japanese militarism.

Usually, applications of Machiavelli’s maxim go badly wrong. The Bay of Tonkin, anybody? But at Pearl Harbor, for once, things went right.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt conspired to cause attack on US Navy forces at Pearl Harbor: ALERT LEVEL 9

Further Reading

Robert Stinnet, Day of Deceit, 2001

Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor, 1954

John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath, 1982

Philadelphia Experiment

On 13 January 1955 Morris K. Jessup, author of The Case for the UFO (1955), received a letter from a man identifying himself as Carlos Allende. This informed Jessup of a top-secret naval project from the Second World War: the Philadelphia Experiment. According to Allende, the US Navy had attempted to render warships invisible, finally achieving success on 28 October 1943 when the escort destroyer USS Eldridge disappeared from its berth at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and was teleported 600 miles (1,000km) away to Virginia. Allende had apparently witnessed the invisibility experiment from a nearby merchant ship, the SS Furuseth. So horrific had been the effect on the Eldridge’s crew—some being lost for ever, some fused into bulkheads, some turned mad—that the Navy had hurriedly cancelled the project.

Jessup asked for more information from Allende. None came, and so Jessup dismissed Allende’s claims as a hoax.

Others were more convinced by the story, among them Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore, who published the fullest account of the 1943 events as The Philadelphia Experiment: The True Story Behind Project Invisibility in 1978.

According to Berlitz and Moore, the US Navy achieved the disappearance of the Eldridge by application of the Unified Field Theory, essentially bending light around the