The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

found.

3. It is understood that the Department of State is also preparing suggested courses of action to develop justification for US military intervention in Cuba.

THE PALADIN GROUP

In more ways than one, Otto Skorzeny was a big figure in the post-War conspiracy world. The scar-faced former SS commando was a hulking six feet seven inches tall; he was also a main player in, inter alia, the Werwolf stay-behind Nazi guerrilla movement, the ODESSA network, the Spider ratline, Reinhard Gehlen’s the Org, and the International Fascista terrorist-organization , a sub-contractor for both CIA and the Org in the war against Communism.

Skorzeny was also the founder in 1970 of the Paladin Group, “an international directorship of strategic assault personnel [that would] straddle the watershed between paramilitary operations carried out by troops in uniform and the political warfare which is conducted by civilian agents”. Put more plainly, Paladin claimed to train guerrillas for anybody who would pay, from the South African Bureau of State Security to Gaddafi’s Libya. What Paladin advertised less widely, was that it operated a contract-killing facility on behalf of the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE. During the Franco-era, Paladin operated out of the offices of Skorzeny’s Madrid-based import-export firm MC Inc., which just happened to share an address with a front for SCOE, plus a local branch of the CIA. Paladin’s mercenary killers were former members of the French OAS, Portugal’s PIDE as well as the SS, and carried out abductions and executions of Basque ETA members in the mid seventies. Paladin was also rumoured to be the organization that carried out the “false-flag” bombing of Rome’s Fiumicino airport (thirty-two people died) for which Italian Communists were blamed. After Skorzeny’s death in 1975, Dr Gerhard von Schubert took over the reins of Paladin. Von Schubert’s CV included a stint in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.

PEAK OIL

It’s the oil, stupid.

While black gold may not have been the only reason for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it would be a fool who maintained that securing the oil locked in the ground there was not at least a fleeting thought in the mind of President Bush—who was, after all, a former oil man himself, the director of Harken Energy Corporation. (And let’s not forget that Vice-President Dick Cheney was ex-chief executive of Halliburton Energy, and Condolezza Rice sat on the board of Chevron.) There was an awful lot of oil in Iraq; it had proven reserves of 112 billion barrels. Before the Iraq War, most Iraqi oil contracts were done with the French and Russians… after the war, Uncle Sam was the partner of choice.

“Peak oil” refers to the time when worldwide oil production reaches its maximum level, after which the supply of oil—a finite natural resource made a million years ago—enters a downward curve until the global tank is empty. The peak oil theory is based on the findings of geoscientist M. King Hubbert who in 1956 suggested that America’s oil would begin to run out in the 1970s. US society is particularly exposed to oil consumption; with about 6 per cent of the world’s population, it guzzles 25 per cent of the world’s oil supply, 19.4 million barrels of oil a day.

Or is peak oil a myth, a scare story fabricated by an elite group of politicians and oilmen to create a state of artificial scarcity? And thus keep the price of a barrel of crude nice and high. Those who allege the falsity of peak oil invariably agree with Russian geologist Nikolai Kudryavtsev that petroleum does not come from dead dinosaurs and Pleistoscene plants but has abiotic origins and is in constant production in the bowels of the planet. Since how else can the curious history of production at Eugene Island 330 oilfield in the Gulf of Mexico be explained?

In 1973, the Eugene Island rigs yielded 15,000 barrels a day, before slowing to 4,000 barrels a day in 1989. A few years later, oil gushed at 13,000 barrels a day. An analysis of the oil field with seismic imaging seemed to show the pool being replenished by a migration of upwards oil of a different geological age. Mobil, Chevron, Texaco and others are all accused of controlling the supply of oil to inflate prices. A Chevron memo purportedly warned of the effect on profits of high levels of extraction. Oil-friendly governments are also implicated in the suppression of alternative technologies.

The verdict: it would be amazing if oil producers did not collaborate to push up the price of crude. In fact, that collaboration is a cartel called OPEC. As British entrepreneur Richard Branson once remarked, “OPEC is effectively an illegal cartel that can meet happily, nobody takes them to court. They collude to keep prices high.”

While hard scientific evidence for abiotic production of oil is scarce, the steady discovery of major oil fields around the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to Uganda to Iran, suggests that peak oil is not the truth, the whole truth, so help us petrolheads dear God. At the very least, according to the International Energy Agency, the world has until 2030 before demand overwhelms supply.

Further Reading

Colin J. Campbell, The Coming Oil Crisis, 1997

David Goodstein, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, 2005

Kenneth D. Worth, Peak Oil and the Second Great Depression, 2010

PLUM ISLAND

In 1896, H. G. Wells penned a nightmare sci-fi novel in which mad-but-brilliant scientist Doctor Moreau conducted hideous experiments on animals.

Plum Island is The Island of Doctor Moreau come to real life.

An elongated blob of land in the dark waters of Long Island Sound off the coast of Connecticut, Plum Island hosts a US Government scientific facility studying animal-borne diseases. For decades after the facility’s foundation at the end of WWII, the White House blithely informed all that asked that everything at Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) was above board and in no way connected with biowarfare.

So why was an early director at Plum Island Erich Traub? Traub was a Third Reich researcher on cancer—in the Hitler era a code for biowarfare—who was spirited out of the defeated Deutschland to the US under Project Paperclip. As files held in the National Archives reveal, Traub’s research on Plum Island in the 1950s concerned the use of ticks as “vectors” to carry pathogens which could destroy Russia’s livestock/grain harvest.

In 1971, a mysterious disease, marked by lassitude, psychosis and organ degeneration, broke out in the town of Old Lyme, Connecticut. The syndrome was given the name Lyme disease. Medical researchers determined that Lyme disease had one carrier: deer ticks. A decade later, an Austrian scientist isolated and identified the responsible bacteria carried by the deer ticks, which was named Borellia burgdorferi after him. When gene researchers later cracked the code of Borellia burgdorferi they received a mighty surprise: it was the most complex bacterium ever put under a microscope.

What has all this to do with Herr Traub? It seemed unlikely that Lyme disease would arise spontaneously in the sticks of Connecticut. Looking slightly further afield, some researchers believe they found antique traces of Borellia in preserved fauna samples taken from Shelter Island and Long Island. The samples were from the 1940s, when Herr Traub was busy at nearby Plum Island. The latter has numerous birds that frequent it, so the disease may have been borne away from there. Michael Carroll, an attorney and no wild- eyed conspirator, also posits in Lab 257 that mainland US outbreaks of West Nile disease and Dutch duck plague can be trailed back to Plum Island. The Cuban Government directly accused the PIADC of