The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (28 page)

A renewed federal research commitment is needed to identify effective treatments for Gulf War illness and address other priority Gulf War health issues.
Adequate funding is required to achieve the critical objectives of improving the health of Gulf War veterans and preventing similar problems in future deployments. This is a national obligation, made especially urgent by the many years that Gulf War veterans have waited for answers and assistance.

HAARP

HAARP is the trip-off-the-tongue abbreviation for the mouthful that is America’s High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program housed near Gakona, Alaska. Here, on a 33-acre site, scientists transmit a 3.6million megawatt signal into the ionosphere so that other colleagues in white lab coats can “understand … and control ionospheric processors that might alter the performance of communication and surveillance systems”.

HAARP is about improving communications? Oh no, it is not, say a legion of conspiracists, starting with Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, authors of
Angels Don’t Play This HAARP
(1995) and Jerry E. Smith, the penner of
HAARP
(1998). Smith’s subtitle gives the conspiracists’ game away: HAARP is “The Ultimate Weapon of Conspiracy”. Since the HAARP transmitter works by heating the ionosphere, Begich, Manning, Smith et al claim it is capable of altering the world’s weather systems to the advantage of the US. The cases in point being the 2004
Indian Ocean Tsunami
(which allowed Uncle Sam to gain control over the oil rich Aceh province), and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the 2011 Japanese Tsunami (both of which devastated the economies of America’s chief Asian competitors).

More common is the notion that HAARP’s Ionospheric Research Instrument (IRI) transmitter can be used as a “death beam” capable of destroying enemy satellites. A misfire in 1993 is claimed to have caused an electricity blackout in Canada and the north-east of the USA. Technologically, HAARP does have – although officialdom tends to deny it – a striking similarity to the patented defence system designed by Dr Bernard Eastlund, which fires pulses of electromagnetic radiation at incoming missiles. As Eastlund readily acknowledged, his patent owed much to principles laid down by Nikola Tesla, pioneer of
Free Electricity
, although the exact system powering Tesla’s own “weapon of doom” is unknown. On Tesla’s death, many of his papers went missing, while others were seized by the FBI who still have them under wraps.

Suspicions that HAARP has an ulterior military function are roused further by following the cash trail: the programme is funded by the Office of Naval Research, and managed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Even so, all nefarious applications of HAARP are denied by US officialdom, who point out that the HAARP site holds open days every summer.

Which is great if you are an Eskimo or a polar bear. Otherwise, Gakona, 200 miles east of Anchorage, is the end of the earth.

But not literally. Fingers crossed.

Further Reading

Nick Begich and Jeane Manning,
Angels Don’t Play This HAARP
, 1995

DAG HAMMARSKJOLD

On the night of 17 September 1961 a Douglas DC-6 crashed in North Rhodesia (now Zambia), killing all sixteen passengers aboard. One of the dead was Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, who had been on his way to negotiate a ceasefire between UN forces and Katangese troops of Moise Tshombe.

The official inquiry, undertaken by the Rhodesians (read British, because Rhodesia was a colony) blamed the plane’s pilot for the crash, concluding that he had misjudged the approach to Ndola airport. A subsequent UN inquiry largely confirmed the British findings. However, rumours of foul play began to surface, and have continued to float around. Among the early sceptics was Harry Truman, ex-president of the US, who is reputed to have said, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said, ‘when they killed him’.”

Who did Truman mean by “they”? Answer: European mining companies, with Britain and America’s spies wiping away the traces. In 1961, the unhappy Congo was the scene of a rebellion by the mineral-rich Katanga region. Backing the rebellion were western mining companies, white settlers – and secretly, suspected Hammarskjold, Great Britain. The Secretary-General, on the other hand, was using all his clout to support the Congolese Government, and had recently authorized a UN military mission (Operation Morthor) against the Katanga rebels. The British were not the only enemies of Hammarskjold; the fiercely independent Swedish diplomat had enraged almost all the major powers on the Security Council with his support for decolonization. On the other hand, he was much loved by developing countries, and his re-election as secretary-general was virtually guaranteed in the general assembly vote due in 1962.

There is a deal of evidence to suggest that Hammarskjold’s plane was shot down. One of the DC-6’s passengers, US Sergeant Harold Julian, was able to tell investigators before he died that he had seen sparks in the sky before the crash. His account tallies with those of charcoal burners and other eyewitnesses in the Ndola area interviewed by Swedish aid worker Göran Björkdahl, who say that they saw a plane shooting at the DC-6. Two of Hammarskjold’s aides, Conor Cruise O’Brien and George Ivan Smith, both became convinced after their own investigations that the Secretary-General had been shot down by mercenaries working for European industrialists in Katanga, with the British covering up the shooting and possibly sponsoring it. (O’Brien knew of what he spoke: he had been the target of assassination by pro-Katanga mercenaries.) Norwegian Major-General Egge, the first UN officer to see Hammarskjold’s body, declared that the Secretary-General had a hole in his forehead, which was subsequently airbrushed from photos. Even the official reports agree that six of the DC-6 passengers’ bodies showed evidence of bullet wounds, but attribute these to exploding ammunition in the fire after the plane’s crash. This contention was refuted by Major C. F. Westell, a ballistics expert, who said: “I can certainly describe as sheer nonsense the statement that cartridges of machine guns or pistols detonated in a fire can penetrate a human body.” He based his opinion on a large-scale experiment that had been done to determine if military fire brigades would be in danger working near munitions depots.

Is there any tangible evidence of British – or even American – involvement in Hammarskjold’s death? In 1997, documents uncovered by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission indicated a conspiracy between the CIA and MI5 to remove Hammarskjold in “Operation Celeste”. It is perhaps timely to recall here that the CIA, by its own later admission, assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in January 1961. According to press reports, one document turned up by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission refers to a meeting between the CIA, South African and British intelligence in which CIA chief Allen Dulles agreed that “Dag is becoming troublesome … and should be removed.” Dulles, according to the documents, promised “full cooperation from his people”.

The British Foreign Office have declared the documents to be Soviet disinformation.

Further Reading

Arthur Gavshon
, The Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold
, 1962

Lisa Pease, “Midnight in the Congo: The Assassination of Lumumba and the Mysterious Death of Dag Hammarskjold”,
Probe
, March–April 1999

HEINRICH HIMMLER

In conspiracy land, bad Nazis never die. Either they are taken by
Vril
-powered UFOs to Antarctica (like Hitler) or remodelled by plastic surgery to live in the USSR (like Martin Bormann). Then there is the strange case of Heinrich Himmler.

In April 1945, as the end of the Third Reich loomed, Hitler’s number one – and the architect of the Holocaust – found a sudden and urgent desire to make peace with the Allies. When he was rebuffed, and his treason made public, Hitler ordered his arrest. Luckily for Himmler, Hitler promptly committed suicide in his Berlin bunker and news of the excommunication seems never to have reached Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Reich’s new chief, whose Flensburg Government Himmler joined. To curry favour with the oncoming Allies, Dönitz dismissed Himmler on 6 May 1945.

Himmler then tried his luck with the Americans, offering Dwight Eisenhower the surrender of all Germany if he was spared from prosecution. He even suggested to Ike that he, Himmler, be the Minister of Police in the new Germany. Ike said, “‘
Nein
!” and Himmler was declared a war criminal. Now actively hunted by the Allies, Himmler wandered around Flensburg near the Danish border disguised as a member of the gendarmerie. However, the stamps on his papers raised the suspicions of a British soldier, Arthur Britton, who arrested “Heinrich Hitzinger” on 22 May 1945 on suspicion of being a member of the SS. In captivity he was soon recognized. According to the official account, before Himmler could be interrogated he committed suicide in Lüneburg by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule. Attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.The date was 23 May 1945.

The Himmler conspiracy is two-fold: was the man who committed suicide in Lüneburg Himmler or a double? And, if it was Himmler, was he “suicided”.

Among the first to proclaim that a “fake” Himmler died in Lüneburg were members of the Nazi “ratline”
ODESSA
, who maintained that the real Himmler escaped to the village of Strones in the Waldviertel, a hilly forested area in Lower Austria, where he was involved in reviving the Nazi movement. Conspiracies make odd bedfellows; the ODESSA “double” case is somewhat supported by the British forensic historian Hugh Thomas who in
SS-1
questions whether the body examined by British military authorities was really that of the ex-chicken farmer and SS leader. Certain physical details of the dead man photographed lying on a bed at Lüneburg do, indeed, seem different from Himmler’s. One nostril is larger than the other; Himmler’s were symmetrical. The corpse seems to be free of a duelling scar, meaning he wasn’t the boy born to Anna and Dr Gebhard Himmler on 7 October 1900. Of course he might have been wearing make-up, which Nazi leaders were rather fond of. What bangs a nail into the “Himmler double” theory, grainy photography aside, is Himmler’s daughter. Gudrun Himmler (born 1929) was devoted to her father (and his politics, being a member of Stille Hilfe, the SS veterans’ support group), and he to her. If he had survived 1945, it is near inconceivable that they would have not been in touch. And there is not the slightest whiff of their corresponding or meeting.

Revisionist author Joseph Bellinger and British writer Martin Allen are amongst the most prominent promoters of the alternative version of Himmler’s death. Both suggest that Himmler was assassinated by the British, with Allen claiming that Himmler had secretly negotiated with Britain as early as 1943. Churchill had him murdered to cover up the fact. Much of Allen’s “evidence” from the National Archives turned out to be twenty-nine forged papers. Allen’s protestations of innocence or deliberate planting by MI5/the Establishment/jealous historians to discredit his thesis were undone by his professional record: his two previous books also seem to have relied on documents of dubious provenance and authenticity.

The mystery surrounding Himmler’s death is unlikely to be settled anytime soon. Army personnel at Lüneburg were ordered to sign the Official Secrets Act, and unusually the relevant papers – those, that is, that haven’t conveniently disappeared – are not due for release until 2045. The mystery is compounded by the fact that British soldiers took Himmler’s body and buried it in an unmarked grave on Lüneburg Heath. It has never been found.