The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (47 page)

In 1993, Paul McCartney played sly homage to the long-running conspiracy theory about his premature death by titling his live album –
Paul is Live!

On this album, as on all the other records made by Paul McCartney post-1966, Billy Shears/William Campbell sounded exactly like the pre-1966 Paul McCartney.

Funny that.

MARY MAGDALENE

She only had a walk-on part in the drama of the New Testament, but Mary Magdalene has become the star turn of modern conspiracy theory.

In the gospel accounts of Jesus’s life, Mary (a.k.a. Miriam of Magdala) is the woman from Galilee who watches his crucifixion, and is the first person to see him after the resurrection. But lo! in the modern alternative theory Mary is Jesus’s wife and the mother of his children, whose descendants then walked the face of the Earth, specifically France, where they ruled as the Merovingian dynasty. The Holy Grail of legend is no longer the platter used by Jesus at the Last Supper, but Christ’s bloodline, which has extended down over the years to reach, inter alia, the Sinclairs in Scotland, Italian nobility and Princess Diana. Safeguarding the Holy Grail are two ancient orders: the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion. Although sworn to secrecy, Templars and Priory members have been unable to resist leaving clues to the existence of Mary’s marriage and motherhood, notably in Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
painting, where it is not the apostle John that is depicted to the right of Jesus but Mary, while the V shape formed between the two acknowledges the symbol for femininity.

Obviously, all of the above contradicts the theology of the Catholic Church. To cover up Jesus’s intimacy with Mary – and so maintain its own power – the Catholic Church, it is suggested, cast Mary as a harlot and excised gospels featuring her. The Church also deliberately misinterpreted in medieval times “Sangreal” as “Saint Grail” rather than the correct “
sang real
”, meaning royal blood.

If Dan Brown’s novel
The Da Vinci Code
takes the laurels for most popular exposition of the Mary Magdalene conspiracy, the vade mecum is the 1982 “non-fiction” bestseller
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
by Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. And this in turn owes something to Hugh Schonfield’s
The Passover Plot
(1965), while the British poet Robert Graves had speculated that Mary was Jesus’s wife as early as 1946 in
King Jesus
.

The Priory of Sion, Christ’s children ruling Gaul, the mistranslation of “Sangreal”, the discovery by Father Berenger Sauniere of the Holy Grail at Rennes-le-Chateau is … all humbug, set afoot by a hoaxing minor French aristocrat, Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, who wanted to give himself regal glory by planting “evidence” that he was the rightful king of France. (He would have done a more persuasive job if the key Middle Ages documents “found” at the Bibliothèque Nationale had been written in medieval and not modern Latin.) Even so, aspects of the Mary Magdalene conspiracy hold up. The early Catholic Church did ban and burn gospels not in accordance with its views. Courtesy of the discovery in 1948 by an Egyptian peasant called Muhammad Ali al-Samman of a buried collection of “Gnostic” texts at Nag Hammadi the content of some of these banned gospels is now known. The role they assign to Mary is controversial. In the Gospel of Philip, Jesus is declared to be “the partner of Mary Magdalene, [and he] loved her more than all the disciples and often kissed her on the mouth”. In Greek, the language of the Gnostic texts, “partner” can also mean “companion”; but whether “bride” or “close friend”, it is abundantly obvious that in this early strain of Christianity Mary was regarded as being a crucial figure in Christ’s ministry. There is even a Gospel of Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi haul. A key incident in this gospel is a confrontation between Mary and the apostle Peter, in which Peter tries to humiliate Mary on the grounds that she is a woman, but is roundly told off by Jesus.

Even if Mary was the literal bride of Christ – and it is a big if – there is no guarantee that children came from the union. But it is a matter of historical record that various early Church dignitaries, from St Peter to St Paul (whose Letter to Timothy is an unintentional classic of misogyny) to Pope Gregory the Great, suppressed pro-Mary Magdalene currents in early Christianity and denigrated her role in Christ’s ministry. They would not have seen themselves as conspirators, but fighters for “orthodoxy” in what was effectively a theological battle.

Further Reading

Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln,
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
, 1982

Dan Brown,
The Da Vinci Code
, 2003

Elaine Pagels,
The Gnostic Gospels
, 1980

MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

What do Robert F. Kennedy, John Lennon, Martin Luther King and Israeli Premier Yitschak Rabin have in common? All four are alleged to have been assassinated by remote-controlled, hypnotized killers or “Manchurian candidates”.

The expression “Manchurian candidate” comes from Richard Condon’s 1959 bestselling novel of that name, which features a brainwashed killer under the control of Chinese and Soviet intelligence located in Manchuria during the Korean War. The assassin is an American POW repatriated to the US, where he is programmed to kill the president.

Condon did not pluck the scenario out of thin air. During the Korean War, the Communists were understood to have achieved conspicuous success in brainwashing US POWs into confessing to war crimes they could not possibly have committed. Although a 1953 investigation by Drs Harold Wolff and Lawrence Hinkle of Cornell Medical College found that the Chinese had not used hypnosis or drugs to “re-educate” POWs (relying rather on violence to produce “confessions”), this did not stop the Agency heading pell-mell into a secret project to create a programmed assassin using hypnosis and drugs. Set up by CIA head Allen Dulles in 1953, Project MK-ULTRA experimented with LSD, electronic brain implants, mescaline, psilocybin, radiation, barbiturates, amphetamines and sensory deprivation on hapless subjects as it sought the Holy Grail of mind control. Probably the most grotesque of the MK-ULTRA experiments was subcontracted to Montreal psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron, which involved the “breaking down of ongoing pattern of the patient’s behaviour by means of particularly intensive electroshocks” while LSD was simultaneously applied. Some of Cameron’s subjects received electro-convulsive therapy at thirty to forty times the normal rate, this followed by weeks of LSD-induced coma in which they were played an endless loop of noise or speech.

At one stage, MK-ULTRA consumed 6 per cent of the CIA’s entire budget. Whether the CIA succeeded in programming a Manchurian candidate is unknown. The Agency has always claimed that its attempt to produce a real life Raymond Shaw – Condon’s assassin character – was fruitless, and this was also the conclusion of a Senate Committee headed by Ted Kennedy when the MK-ULTRA programme was finally dragged out into the light by the
New York Times
in 1974.

The cynics are legion, however. By 1974, CIA director Richard Helms had destroyed the bulk of the MK-ULTRA files because of a “burgeoning paper problem”. Suspicious? Almost as suspicious as the 1953 defenestration suicide of Dr Frank Olsen, a CIA researcher, who had voiced opposition to the MK-ULTRA project. On later exhumation Olsen’s body was found to have marks on the skull consistent with a repeated attack. Suspicious? Almost as suspicious as the accidental death by drowning of ex-CIA director William Colby in 1993 days after being subpoenaed to testify about Olsen.

Cults like the Scientologists are widely held to achieve brainwashing. Is it really plausible that the CIA with millions of dollars and legions of scientists failed where L. Ron Hubbard succeeded?

Then there is the assassination of Robert Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on 4 June 1968. Dozens of witnesses saw “lone nut” Sirhan Sirhan pull the trigger on Kennedy. But Sirhan himself could never recall the shooting, and to this day protests his innocence. William Turner and John Christian in
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
and Philip Melanson in
The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination
all suggest that Sirhan was programmed by hypnosis to kill Kennedy. One leading expert, Dr Herbert Spiegal, estimates that Sirhan is among the 10 per cent of the population most susceptible to hypnosis. Under hypnosis by prosecution psychiatrist Dr Seymour Pollack, Sirhan answered the question, “Who was with you when you shot Kennedy?” as follows: “Girl the girl, the girl …” A girl in a polka-dot dress was seen running from the Ambassador shouting “We shot him!” If Sirhan was a Manchurian candidate, then the girl was his handler. According to a BBC
Newsnight
investigation in 2006, several CIA operatives were also in the Ambassador on the fateful night, although they had no reason to be there, since the CIA has no domestic jurisdiction.

The CIA had a plausible motive to kill RFK: if RFK had succeeded to the White House he might have uncovered evidence of the CIA’s complicity in the killing of his brother. The CIA also had the immoral appetite to kill an American politician: a 1954 CIA memo specifically proposed using a hypno-programmed killer to assassinate “a prominent [deleted] politician or, if necessary, against an American official”.

The official version remains that Sirhan alone killed RFK. Few believe it.

Further Reading

John Marks,
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control
, 1989

Philip H. Melanson,
The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations on the Conspiracy and Cover Up
, 1991

Gordon Thomas,
Journey into Madness: The True Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse
, 1989

William Turner and John G. Christian,
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
, 1978

DOCUMENT: DECLASSIFIED MKULTRA MEMOS

I)
The CIA memo below was written on April 18, 1958 by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the Chemical Division of the Agency’s Technical Services Staff.

DRAFT/

18 April 1958

MEMORANDUM FOR: THE RECORD

SUBJECT: MKULTRA, Subproject No. 83

1. The purpose of Subproject No. 83 will be to support the editorial and technical survey activities of [deleted] assigned to the [deleted] and is covered as an employee of the [deleted]. During the past six months, his activities have been to make technical surveys of social and behavioral science matters of interest to TSS/CD/Branch III. During this period he has been carried on the budget of the [deletion]. However, it was originally proposed that as soon as he demonstrated his ability, he would be established as an independent project and his activities widened.