The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

being the manufacturer of bioweapons which destroyed Cuban pigs and sugar cane in the 1970s. Under the weight of evidence, the White House admitted in 1992 that, surprise surprise, biowarfare research had been, and was being, conducted at Plum Island.

Thereafter the White House went largely schtum on the strange happenings around Plum Island. Some of which were very strange indeed.

On a summer’s day in 2008 a holidaymaker on Montauk, Long Island, noticed the washed-up body of a large animal on the beach. On closer investigation, the animal had patches of uneven hair and an elongated skull. Its fingers were matchstick thin.

Plum Island is ten miles from Montauk. No official gave an explanation, and Plum Island—now under the aegis of Homeland Security—issued a denial of responsibility. In spring of 2009, a second hideous corpse came ashore at Montauk. This one was almost identical—same elongated skull, same weird clawlike fingers. The carcass was quickly spirited away and, to anyone’s knowledge, was never examined by an independent zoologist. Meanwhile, back on the island itself, the body of a white male with, according to the police record, oddly elongated fingers was discovered on the foreshore.

The Montauk and Plum Island “monsters” might be fakes, misidentifications, the products of hysterical imaginations. What is beyond doubt is that the historical safety record of PIADC’s seventy buildings—full of deadly diseases—is atrocious. According to one maintenance worker on the island, James McCoy, lab staff at the island’s super-secret Building 257 once resorted to sticking duct tape around doors to keep their test microbes in. McCoy got fired for his whistle-blowing.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced in 2008 that Plum Island is to be closed, and the germ labs and research facilities moved to Kansas State University.

Unlucky Kansas.

Further Reading

Michael C. Carroll, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, 2004

John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, 1982

POPE JOHN PAUL II

On Wednesday, 13 May 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot as his popemobile entered St Peter’s Square in the Vatican City. The shootist, who used a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol, was grabbed by the Vatican security chief and promptly identified as one Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish national. The Pope, despite being wounded by four bullets, survived. A miracle claimed the faithful.

Altogether less miraculous were cogent explanations for Agca’s attempted whacking of His Holiness.

Agca was a member of the Grey Wolves, a vitriolic neo-fascist Turkish group. He had form for murder (of a liberal journalist) and had previously sent letters threatening Pope John Paul’s life. So, the classic right-wing “lone nut”? Unfortunately for any straightforward explanation of why he peppered the pontiff with 9 mm slugs, Agca suddenly remembered after a year in his prison cell that it was a trio of Bulgarians living in Rome who had put him up to the job. With the Cold War still a going concern, Agca’s “confession” was manna from heaven for anti- Communists such as veteran Yankee hackette Claire Sterling who stuck her sharpened pen into Bulgarian intelligence and the KGB. Sterling’s The Time of the Assassins, co-authored with CIA-veteran and Cold War warrior Paul Henze, lucidly implicated the KGB as the directors of Bulgarian spookery, who in turn manipulated wires that made Agca move. The KGB’s motive for offing the Polish pope? He supported the free trade union Solidarity in Communist Poland. As to why the Bulgarians/KGB needed a Turkish nazi to do their dirty work, that was easily accounted for: it allowed the KGB “deniability”.

The Bulgarian connection looked oh, oh so promising when Bulgarian airline worker Sergei Antonov was arrested on Agca’s say-so, as being his controller. However, a fair trial of Antonov in Italy failed to find him guilty of so much as stealing sweets. (It did reveal Agca to be mad, or a liar, or both. He claimed to be Christ.) As several pundits wisely noted, Agca did not mention the Bulgarian connection until visited in jail by agents of the Italian intelligence bureau, the SISMI, whose incompetence was only matched by their corruption. Fancying a spot of Redbaiting, the SISMI had already tried to implicate the USSR in the papal misfortune with a “document” that proved that Agca had been trained in Moscow. It was later proved to be a forgery.

Just when the Bulgarian connection looked like the Bulgarian concoction, the Italian Mitrokhin Commission came to the conclusion that Bulgarian intelligence was implicated in the plot to kill the pope, and that “leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt”. After a moment’s reflection the sane recalled that the impressive sounding Mitrokhin Commission had been set up by the perma-tanned Silvio Berlusconi, was fronted by one of his favourite right-wing Forza stooges and was the same bunch of buffoons who had slanderously accused Romano Prodi, sometime Italian PM (and frequent Berlusconi opponent), of being the KGB’s man in Italy.

So much SISMI/CIA effort went into pinning the blame for the attempted offing of the pope that it looked suspicious in itself. Indeed, the Bulgarian secret services argued that Agca’s “Bulgarian connection” story was an anti-Commie plant placed by SISMI, the CIA and the Grey Wolves. They would say that, wouldn’t they? Yes, but an intriguing piece of support on behalf of the secret service boys from Bulgaria came from no less than Abdullah Catli, a Grey Wolves leader (top dog?), who told a Rome judge that German intelligence asked him to implicate the Bulgarians/Soviets in return for a nice lump of money.

Ah yes, the Grey Wolves. One John Paul II conspiracy has the Grey Wolves down as the bedfellows of neo- Italian fascists in their “strategy of tension” by which they terrorized Italy (e.g. the bombing of Bologna rail station), put the blame on the Reds and theoretically built popular support for themselves. In this scenario, the quasi- Masonic P2 lodge and Ordine Nuova, also got under the black sheets. Far-fetched? Actually, no. One P2 big cheese, Francesco Pazienza (who also happened to be an ex-SISMI agent), informed US authorities of a meeting held in Miami a month before the attack on the pope attended by the Grey Wolves and Italy’s most wanted fascist terrorist, Stefano della Chiaie.

It’s worth pointing out for the record that during a May 2002 visit to Bulgaria, Pope John Paul II told Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov that he never believed allegations that there was a Bulgarian connection. The pope also credited the Madonna of Fatima with saving his life, and in 2000 the Vatican disclosed that the long suppressed Third Secret of Fatima had been an assassination attempt on a pope.

Further Reading

Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, 1986

Claire Sterling and Paul Henze, The Time of the Assassins, 1984

PRINCESS DIANA

It was news that shocked the world. In the early hours (GMT) of Sunday 31 August 1997, reports started coming from Paris that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been injured in a car accident. Then came updates reporting she was dead. Also killed in the car crash in the tunnel beneath Pont de l’Alma were Diana’s lover, Dodi Al-Fayed, and the driver, Henri Paul. Dodi’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured.

The cause of the crash seemed clear. Chased by paparazzi on motorcycles, Paul had driven too fast—75 mph (120 kph) according to one French police estimate—into the tunnel, clipped a white Fiat Uno and, in overcorrecting, had swerved the Mercedes S280 into the thirteenth pillar. There were also reports that he had been drinking. None of the occupants had been wearing seat belts.

Autumn seemed to come early to Britain that year, as a stunned nation shed tears for “the Queen of