Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (17 page)

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HURCHILL TO BLAME
Other conspiracy theorists, who find it hard to believe that the Roosevelt administration could be quite so callous and cynical, particularly in view of the number of casualties sustained, point to Winston Churchill of Britain as a major culprit. They claim that British intelligence knew about the imminent attack and did nothing to inform Roosevelt about it. The British motive, of course, was that they needed help in the war effort to overcome the Nazis, who were allies of Japan under the Axis Alliance (of Germany, Italy and Japan). By turning a blind eye to Japanese plans for the bombing of the American fleet, the British would help draw the United States into the conflict and thereby gain a powerful new ally. Certainly, the result of the attack was to mobilize public opinion against the Japanese so it made America's entry into the Second World War inevitable.

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LOTTERS OR INCOMPETENTS?
Many believe that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was not so much a conspiracy as a series of errors committed by incompetent military officials. Enquiries into what happened have since revealed that general warnings about Japanese aggression were sent to Pacific commands well before the attack, but that the admiral and the general in Hawaii did not take them very seriously. Later, radio warnings were issued as the Japanese force approached Hawaii, but radio contact was temporarily broken. Also, the FBI had assumed that the Navy were tapping the Japanese Consulate but, as it turned out, their bug had been discovered and disconnected. Another factor in the surprise attack was that the US Navy were not familiar with the new technology of torpedo systems. They believed that their ships could not be torpedoed in the shallow water of Pearl Harbor, which was seen as a protection to their fleet. Unbeknown to them, the Japanese had developed torpedoes that operated in shallow water – to devastating effect, as the Americans found out.

A number of individuals have come forward over the years, claiming to have information that shows Pearl Harbor to be a conspiracy. "Seaman Z" claims that he overheard signals from the Japanese, but it has since been counter-claimed that the Japanese did not send any signals at the time because they wished to preserve secrecy as they crept up on the American fleet. In the same way, cryptologists have discussed the so-called "Winds Code" signal, claiming that this Japanese weather report was in fact a signal to the Japanese forces to attack Pearl Harbor. However, to date this seems far from conclusive.

What seems likely is that the British and the American intelligence services were both busy with other issues at the time – Britain, in particular, was in the midst of fighting the Germans in World War Two! Through a series of bungled communications, therefore, they failed to realise the significance of what was going on in the Pacific. There was simply too much conflict taking place in Europe and other parts of the world for America and the Allies to be able to pay much attention to the threat from Japan and deal with it effectively. In addition, various internal rivalries among the top United States military officials in Hawaii at the time prevented efficient intelligence gathering and swift action to avert the attack.

However, many questions still remain unanswered, so much so that conspiracy theories will continue to abound. After all, it is hard to believe that such a devastating strike on Pearl Harbor's "Battleship Row", as it was called, could be the result of sheer incompetence. But, unlikely as it may seem, that might just be the case.

The first Gulf War, prompted by Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, has given rise to a whole variety of conspiracy theories. Some suspect that George Bush Senr. deliberately sat by and watched as Iraq invaded Kuwait, happy to use that as an excuse to launch a war that would revive his popularity at home. Others mutter darkly about why the war was called off when Saddam's army was on the run. The question has to be asked: why was the Dictator allowed to lick his wounds and oppress his people for another decade? Perhaps the most enduring and best documented conspiracy theory, however, has to do with the mysterious illness suffered by thousands of combatants, which was known as Gulf War Syndrome.

Gulf War Syndrome began to emerge soon after the end of the war. A steady stream of veterans began to complain of disturbing symptoms. Some were clearly physical while others appeared to be psychological and they included chronic fatigue, loss of muscle control, diarrhoea, migraine, dizziness, memory problems and loss of balance.

As more and more people complained of these symptoms and began talking to each other, members of the Gulf War veterans' groups started to believe that their ailments might have something to do with the war. They began to look for the common causes of their symptoms.

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EADLY NERVE GAS
There were several sinister possibilities – could Saddam Hussein have used biological or chemical weapons after all, or could soldiers have been exposed to unused stocks of the weapons including, perhaps, the nerve gas sarin? Could exposure to the fumes from the oil well fires be responsible? Could it be simply to do with parasites found in the desert? Or local pesticides? One theory that attracted a lot of attention was the possibility that something in the anti-anthrax vaccines the soldiers had been given might be responsible.

Some commentators, however, believed that Gulf War Syndrome was really no more than mass hysteria. In their view, the Gulf War veterans were either suffering from common ailments that were no different to those suffered by the general population, or their complaints were essentially psychosomatic: brought on by all the negative publicity that surrounded the Gulf War. Certain cynics even suggested that in the litigious compensation culture of the United States such complaints were merely a prelude to launching potentially profitable actions for damages.

At first the latter point of view was common but since those days Gulf War veterans' groups have steadily pressed their case, backed by the findings of various research groups, and popular opinion has gradually begun to shift. A panel chaired by United States Department of Veterans Affairs secretary Anthony Principi reviewed recent studies that suggested that some of the veterans' illnesses were indeed neurological and could be linked to exposure to neurotoxins like the nerve gas sarin, the anti-nerve gas drug pyridostigmine bromide or even certain pesticides. "Research studies conducted since the war have consistently indicated that psychiatric illness, combat experience or other deployment-related stressors do not explain Gulf War veterans illnesses in the large majority of ill veterans," the panel concluded.

If anything, Britain was even more dubious than the United States about the existence of Gulf War Syndrome, but in recent years the authorities have begun to change their tune. In June 2003 the High Court upheld a claim by a war veteran that the depression, eczema, fatigue, nausea and breathing problems that he had experienced after returning from the Gulf War were directly caused by his military service. The court's ruling was backed up by a British inquiry in November 2004 which concluded that thousands of British and American Gulf War veterans had been made ill by their service. This report found that war veterans were twice as likely to suffer from ill health than if they had been deployed elsewhere. Rather than fix on one reason, however, the inquiry suggested that their illnesses might be caused by multiple factors including injections of vaccines, the use of organophosphate pesticides to spray tents, low level exposure to nerve gas and the inhalation of depleted uranium dust.

Another British study, which compared 24,000 Gulf War veterans with a control group of 18,000 men, found that those who had taken part in the Gulf war had a lower fertility count. Their partners' failure to conceive was 2.5 per cent vs. 1.7 per cent in the control group and the rate of miscarriage was 3.4 per cent vs. 2.3 per cent. These differences are small but statistically significant.

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OISONING OR SHELL SHOCK?
The studies went a long way to winning the argument in the face of those who still maintained that Gulf War Syndrome was essentially stress-related and was similar to "shell shock" after World War I and post-traumatic stress disorder after the Vietnam War. However, as if to prove that there are lies, damn lies and statistics, several other surveys seemed to demonstrate the opposite point of view. A study for the British Ministry of Defence found no correlation between service in the Gulf and death from illness.

Increasingly, many of the veterans' groups began to focus on the question of vaccination. And this is where the conspiracy theories really began to mushroom. Data published in the February 2000 and August 2002 issues of
Experimental and Molecular Pathology
strongly suggested that Gulf War Syndrome was caused by an anti-anthrax vaccine contaminated with squalene. What was worrying about this was that for a long time the United States Army denied that there was any squalene – a substance used in experimental vaccines but not licensed for general use – in the anti-anthrax vaccines. Eventually they were forced to admit that it had been present but claimed that it was because of accidental contamination. Many veterans' groups found this hard to believe, suspecting that United States soldiers had been used as unwitting guinea pigs in a mass trial of an experimental vaccine that was perhaps intended as the model for an anti-HIV vaccine.

The US and UK governments naturally continue to deny that anything of the kind happened. So is Gulf War Syndrome a conspiracy? Or is it just a sad fact of warfare that many combatants end up with stress-related ailments? To date, the jury is still out but it seems likely that the squalene issue may prove to be the key.