Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (9 page)

But it is not only high-profile figures who are Skull and Bones members. More often than not they are influential, but not well-known, people in the judiciary, the government and the CIA. In fact, the Skull and Bones are a gift for the conspiracy theorists. If you read that the Illuminati, say, had been involved in the development of the atomic bomb and its eventual use, had been leading figures in the post-war occupation of Germany, had played a leading role in post-war United States foreign policy and had substantial representation on little-known but powerful bodies like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, you'd take it with a pinch of salt. In the case of Skull and Bones, though, it is verifiably true.

On the other hand, some will argue, there is nothing surprising about the fact that a number of powerful people all belong to the same club. After all, doesn't that just indicate that they were the brightest and best at an elite university? Such people would naturally go on to run the country, of course.

S
EXUAL HISTORY
Not so, say the conspiracy theorists, pointing to the bizarre bonding rituals and obsessive secrecy of the Skull and Bones crew. Their bonding rituals include lying in coffins and telling your fellow initiates your entire sexual history, thereby potentially laying yourself open to blackmail. And the secrecy itself inevitably invites suspicion – not to mention the financial support the Skull and Bones offers to its members or the private island in the Hudson River that is kept exclusively for the use of members. How does all that square with the democratic ideals of America?

Some have been minded to compare the Skull and Bones oath of secrecy with the Mafia's code of omerta. However, as leading Skull and Bones expert Ron Rosenbaum has pointed out, "I think Skull and Bones has had slightly more success than the mafia in the sense that the leaders of the five mafia families are all doing 100 years in jail, while the leaders of the Skull and Bones families are doing four and eight years in the White House."

The document known as The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion is one of the earliest, most successful and enduring of all conspiracy theories. First circulated in Russia during the early twentieth century it purports to be a kind of manual for world domination that was written by a mysterious cabal of Jewish elders. It was then used to fuel fears that there was an international Jewish conspiracy that sought to take over the world. So successful was it in its aims that it has been used again and again over the ensuing century. Wherever there has been a rush of anti-Semitism, from Hitler's Germany to the training camps of Al-Qaeda, you can guarantee that a copy of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion will never be hard to find.

The document may only have appeared in its currently recognized form in the final years of Tsarist Russia, but it has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century. The story begins with a French popular novel called
The Mysteries Of The People
, written by Eugène Sue, which featured a group of Jesuits that were plotting to take over the world. This notion of a massive conspiracy was then taken up by the French satirist Maurice Joly, who used it in an 1864 pamphlet titled "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu", which attacked the political ambitions of the then French ruler, Napoleon III. This time, however, the plotters, as the title suggests, were operating from beyond the grave.

Then, in 1868, Hermann Goedsche, a German anti-Semite and spy, wrote a book named
Biarritz
. This included a chapter entitled "The Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Council of Representatives of the Twelve Tribes of Israel". The chapter described an imaginary secret rabbinical cabal meeting which was held in the cemetery at midnight every hundred years to plan the agenda for the Jewish Conspiracy. The set-up was plainly taken from an Alexandre Dumas novel, while the supposed secret agenda was actually straight from Joly's "Dialogues in Hell...".

S
ECRET POLICE
However, turning the supposed conspirators from Jesuits or dead philosophers into Jews touched a nerve and by the 1890s copies of this chapter of Goedsche's book, now treated as fact rather than fantasy or satire, were starting to circulate in Russia. Before long the Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, recognized the potential popularity of the material and one of their operatives, Matvei Golovinski, worked up a book-length version of this fantastical Zionist plot. The book, now known as The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, was widely circulated and was undoubtedly influential in inflaming the anti-Jewish pogrom that swept Russia in 1905–1906.

Curiously, one of the visions put forward by the Protocols – that of a small group taking over a huge country – was repeated by the real events of a decade later when the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution transformed Russia. Before long this was seen by many as evidence that the Bolshevik revolution was in fact part of the Jewish conspiracy. Jews and communists were now bracketed together across much of the world and the Protocols were put forward as damning evidence. The Protocols were popular with right wing elements in 1920s Germany and also in the United States. No less a man than Henry Ford sponsored the printing of half a million copies in America.

Then the debunking began. Experts looked at the document and soon noticed that its origins lay in pulp fiction rather than historical fact. In 1920, one Lucien Wolf published an exposé tracing the history of the Protocols back to the works of Goedsche and Joly. The
Times
soon followed suit and, later that year, a book documenting the hoax was published in the United States by Herman Bernstein.

A
DOLF
H
ITLER
One might have thought that this would have been the end of the tale. Sadly not. By the 1920s anti-Semitism was endemic, nowhere more so than in Germany. Adolf Hitler referred to the Protocols in
Mein Kampf
: "To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews", he wrote. He acknowledged the claims that the book was a forgery but ignored them, claiming instead that "with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims."

Once the Nazis took power in Germany the book became a set text in schools and helped fuel all the horrors of the Holocaust. It did not matter to the German Nazis that in 1934 a Swiss Nazi was brought to court after he had published a series of articles accepting the Protocols as fact. The trial, known as the Berne Trial, finished in May 1935 when the court declared the Protocols to be forgeries, plagiarisms and obscene literature. As far as Hitler was concerned, however, a lurid lie beat the truth every time and the Swiss verdict was completely ignored.

The palpable falsity of the Protocols has not stopped their circulation in more recent times, either. They are widely published across the Arab world and have proved particularly popular in Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where they have been used to inflame opinion over the whole Palestinian question. In America, too, the Protocols are still accepted as fact by both neo-Nazi organizations and Louis Farrakhan's Nation Of Islam, which has distributed copies.

The history of the Protocols demonstrates that a powerful conspiracy theory need not have any factual basis to gain acceptance: it also reminds us that false conspiracy theories can do an enormous amount of harm if they are cynically used to back up the worst political objectives and to persecute innocent people.

One of the most outrageous and entertaining global conspiracy theories is that of the mysterious Gemstone Files. This theory in essence suggests that the Mafia, led for a time by Aristotle Onassis, controlled America during the 1950s and 1960s.

Allegedly, the original Gemstone files were compiled from a series of writings and talks given by a man named Bruce Roberts in San Francisco during the late sixties and early seventies. The mysterious Roberts was supoosedly responsible for inventing the synthetic ruby used in laser technology, but claimed to have been swindled out of his discovery by the Howard Hughes organisation. He also claimed to have been involved in, or have knowledge of, a whole range of intelligence operations. He frequented a San Francisco pub called the Drift Inn where he would entertain his fellow regulars – including ex-intelligence agents – with improbable stories of outlandish secrets. Some of these may have been recorded and transcribed by the pub landlord. Others were written down by Roberts himself. Collected together, they run to over a thousand pages.

It's hard to know for sure, though, as very few, if any people, have ever seen the original manuscript. Instead what people have read is something called the
Skeleton Key To the Gemstone File
, a thirty-page summary of the original produced by one Stephanie Caruana, who was introduced to the original by a conspiracy theorist called Mae Brussell. All of this is hard to check because the mysterious Roberts allegedly died of cancer in 1975, and Mae Brussell died in 1988. As for the original files, according to another conspiracy theorist named Bill Keith, who has written a book about them, there are only four or five photocopies in existence and the owners refuse to part with them.

O
NASSIS THE
M
AFIA
B
OSS
!
So what we are left with is Caruana's
Skeleton Key
. This document was first hinted at in an article Caruana wrote for
Playgirl
magazine (of all the unlikely places for a sensational journalistic expose). Then, in 1974, she began to circulate Xeroxes of the Skeleton Key itself. These were copied and re-copied by conspiracy enthusiasts around the world. Partly because most copies looked illicit, the document soon gained an underground reputation.

So what was in the Gemstone Files, according to this
Skeleton Key
? Essentially, it is an impressionistic alternative history of the post-war era, one that weaves links between the CIA, FBI, and the Mafia, and seeks to explain the deaths of JFK, LBJ and Martin Luther King. Along the way, it brings in Ted Kennedy, Richard Nixon and San Francisco's Mayor Joe Alioto. At the heart of the conspiracy are two shadowy figures, Howard Hughes and Aristotle Onassis.