Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
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This is for all the whistleblowers, leakers and freedom of information activists who have helped demystify the world around us.
This book’s ability to find new perspectives on so many old stories is a tribute to the awesome power of technologies like the internet and DNA profiling. It is also a tribute to the genuine efforts of people, courts and some governments to let light into dark corners.
Specifically, I would like to thank all those awkward individuals whose freedom of information requests have unearthed so much new evidence, the anonymous footsoldiers of the WikiLeaks revolution and the enlightened organisations, like America’s independent National Security Archive, that have made thousands of declassified documents available to all online.
— CONTENTS —
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 David Kelly
2 Google and the CIA
3 Operation Northwoods
4 Robert F Kennedy
5 Polish Air Crash
6 Jim Morrison
7 Aung San
8 7/7 Bombings
9 Second Yorkshire Ripper
10 Half a Million Coffins
11 The Illuminati
12 Marilyn Monroe
13 First Gulf War
14 Porton Down
15 Pope John Paul I
16 Roberto Calvi
17 World War II
18 Bob Woolmer
19 HAARP
20 Shape-shifting Lizards and the Duke of Edinburgh
21 Claudy Bombing
22 Dag Hammarskjöld
23 JFK
24 Moon landings
25 Watergate
26 Michael Jackson
27 The Prince, the Nazis and KLM
28 TWA Flight 800
29 Iceland’s Ash Cloud
30 Karen Silkwood
31 Chemtrails
32 The Philadelphia Experiment
33 MKULTRA
34 John Lennon
35 Pont-Saint-Esprit
36 Alexander Litvinenko
37 Glenn Miller
38 9/11
39 Harold Wilson
40 Martin Luther King
41 Bob Marley
42 New Coke
43 Pearl Harbor
44 Princess Diana
45 Roswell
46 Morgan Tsvangirai
47 Windscale Fire
48 Clinton Body Count
49 Lech Walesa
50 Elvis Presley
Footnotes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
YESTERDAY’S SECRETS MAKE TODAY’S NEWS
Once you know about Operation Northwoods, you’ll never be quite sure whether the Kennedy assassinations were the tip of the iceberg.
Once you’ve seen what WikiLeaks has revealed about the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, you won’t be so sure about the British secret services.
Once you’ve weighed the evidence yourself, you may well decide that there was a second Yorkshire Ripper, that cricketing hero Bob Woolmer was murdered and that rock icon Jim Morrison’s death in Paris was anything but straightforward.
Suddenly, leaked cables and declassified papers are rewriting history. Did Lech Walesa spy for the Polish version of the KGB? Did British scientists spray chemical and biological warfare agents from aircraft over Swindon, Norwich and Southampton? And was a Conservative government minister conspiring with the police and the Primate of All Ireland to hide a Catholic priest’s involvement in one of the worst bombings of Ireland’s troubles?
WHOSE SIDE ARE THEY ON?
Conspiracies – real and imagined – have shaped the world we live in. MI5, MI6, the hyperactive CIA and the coolly efficient Mossad, the bloodstained KGB and its orphan child, the FSB, have all pushed and pulled the destinies of rulers and nations. So have fakers and manipulators, business moguls, politicians and gangsters.
Millions of people honestly believe that 9/11 was a ‘false flag’ operation, a cruel, staged attack on Americans by the American government, aimed at justifying George Bush’s War on Terror. Many in Britain think the loose ends and inconsistencies around the London 7/7 bombings are signs that they were not what they seemed.
Such brutal cynicism ought to be unthinkable. But when you know that America’s top generals, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed off a plan to stage bomb blasts and shootings on the streets of Washington and Miami as an excuse for attacking Cuba, the unthinkable cannot be ruled out. That plan was Operation Northwoods and it went right to the top before JFK and his defence secretary vetoed it.
Would a UK government agency drip sarin nerve poison on to the skin of young volunteers after telling them it was researching a cure for the common cold? It would. It did. And it killed at least one of them in less than an hour, though it took 50 years to admit it.
Were the deaths of the Polish president and 95 other VIPs in the Smolensk air disaster in 2010 just the result of pilot error? Did weapons expert David Kelly really commit suicide after leaking information about the build-up to the Iraq War? Is there something more than posturing behind rap music’s deadly obsession with Illuminati symbols and messages? Who was responsible for the crash that killed Princess Diana? And why do pilots still shudder at the thought of TWA Flight 800, the jumbo jet that exploded off Long Island with 230 people on board?
SOME NEW ANSWERS, MANY MORE QUESTIONS
Just glancing through the first ten conspiracy cases examined in this book, you can see many of the key themes emerging. Ghastly crimes, sneaky cover-ups and botched investigations provide most of the 50 chapters, with a lot of political manipulation and secret service skulduggery in the background.
But this is not meant to be a dull reference book, so bunching the assassinations together or having one section dedicated to air crashes and another to CIA plots didn’t seem right. In the end, the running order has been chosen with an eye to pacing and readability, with surprise as the key ingredient. If you are not being shocked or surprised every couple of pages, this book is not doing its job.