Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Research
Robin Ramsay
‘The unexpected and dramatic death of the famous, whether statesmen like John F Kennedy, or media stars like Marilyn Monroe, invariably give rise to conspiracy theories.’
Thus Cambridge historian, Christopher Andrew, during his disgraceful hatchet job on Hugh Thomas’ books about Rudolph Hess for BBC2 ‘s Timewatch series. (Discussed in Lobster 20) Like most of his comments on that programme, this just isn’t true. Most media stars who die ‘unexpectedly and dramatically’ do so without conspiracy theories. Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon is a long catalogue of such deaths, few of which have attracted conspiracy theories. The Andrew piece, I guess, was supposed to discredit Hugh Thomas in the way intended by the Independent attack on Wallace and Holroyd. Alas for Andrew’s chums in the British state, as with the Wallace/Holroyd case, too many people know enough about the case for this to work in the long run. In any case, it was a shoddy, incompetent hatchet job, nowhere as good as the McKittrick/Ware assault in the Independent. When we spoke after watching Timewatch, Steve Dorril and I both saw the same analogy: the Hess affair now had its Warren Commission. (Alternatively, if anyone doubted that there was something substantial at the back of the Hess/’Hess’ story, Andrew’s assault on it should have removed those doubts.)
It says much about Andrew’s ignorance of the history of the Kennedy assassination and the demolition of the Warren Commission Report that he should offer that, of all things, as an example of what he called this ‘incurably tendency’ of people — he means ordinary, non-academic people, presumably — to construct conspiracy theories. Andrew appears to be among the tiny minority of people — spooks, state propagandists and the seriously naive — who still believe the ‘lone assassin’ story. For my part, I was grateful for Andrew’s asinine comments, for ever since the reappearance of the ‘Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File’ in both Black Flag (August 15 ’88) and Cut (April and May ’88), I had been meaning to write a piece about conspiracy theory, conspiracy theorists and ‘the conspiracy theory of history’. Andrew’s display of the prejudices of the average conservative-minded academic, spurred me to get on with it.
Gemstone
With its sweeping allegations about the world-wide power of Aristotle Onassis — who allegedly killed Howard Hughes, John F. Kennedy, ran the Mafia, controlled the American elections etc. etc. — The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File (just called The Gemstone File usually) is an interesting contemporary version of the classic conspiracy theory. As part of Gemstone’s continuing appeal seems to be the mystery surrounding it, let me first digress into a short history of Gemstone.
Gemstone first appeared in the UK in 1976 in typewritten, photocopy form, attributed to ‘The Jesse James Press, New York and London’. A copy reached Hull (I have heard of copies as far away as the Sudan) with the instruction that the reader should copy it and pass it on. This I duly did. Gemstone was subsequently (1977) reproduced in the now defunct International Times. Another London ‘underground’ magazine, The Fanatic, reprinted the same version in 1977 or 78: I can no longer remember which and there is no date on my copy. Knowing nothing at all about this area at the time — I can still remember trying to find out what the World Bank was — Gemstone fascinated me. But when I went into the library and started checking it out, I discovered it was mostly fantasy, and rebutted Gemstone’s central claims in International Times (Vol 4 No 11, 1978). But, en route, I had found out some things about it.
The Gemstone File began as a set of letters from the author, Bruce Roberts, to his mother, copies of which were given to the recently deceased American conspiracy theorist and researcher, Mae Brussel, at the end of 1972, just as Watergate was flickering into life. In 1977 Brussel described Roberts’ letters to a friend of mine as ‘repetitious, giberous, libelous and unsubstantiated’; which, coming from Mae Brussel, for whom almost anything was possible, was quite a put-down. Indeed, Brussel had Roberts’ letters for five years before deeming them worthy of mention on her radio programme, ‘Dialogue Conspiracy’; and then, while repeating Roberts’ central claims, she was critical of them. What appeared in this country in 1976 as ‘The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files’ is a précis of Roberts’ allegations done by Brussel’s colleague at the time, Stephanie Caruana, with whom she was working on a piece about Howard Hughes destined for Playgirl. (1) There are no ‘files’; nor are there the ‘1000 pages’ referred to in the Key’s introduction. According to Brussel, 300 is more like it. About Gemstone author Roberts there are merely rumours: that he died in 1977, of a brain tumour, claiming, like Jack Ruby, that he had been seeded with cancer cells; (2) that he worked for OSS during the war; (3) that he had been a student at the University of Wisconsin. None of this has been checked as far as I know, for the simple reason that no conspiracy researcher has thought Gemstone (or its author) worth taking seriously. (4)
As well as the original Caruana précis, Gemstone has appeared in the Boston Globe (August 12, 1980), a version taken from one put out in book form (though it would be a very thin book) by ‘Fighting Tigers’, a subsidiary of the CIA front company, Air America. This version contained material added to the original 1976 version. Gemstone also appeared in the American porno mag, the Hustler, in 1979, presented as ‘the solution’ to the Kennedy assassination. Since then the American researcher Ace Hayes has found two other versions, little pamphlet editions in the U.S.. Such pamphlets have been in circulation in London more or less continuously since 1977. (I have seen them several times in the basement of Compendium Bookshop in London.) Entering into the spirit of the thing, Ace Hayes amalgamated these different versions to produce a new synthesis — giving four, perhaps five versions in all. Authorless, drifting around the fringes of our culture, Gemstone has become a wonderful disinformation vehicle, available to anyone to add to, modify, reprint, recirculate. The last version I saw was still about 95% Roberts, but I expect that one day, years hence, a version will appear in which Roberts’ original allegations have all but disappeared.
‘Conspiracy theorists tend to construct imaginary conspiracies both more complex and better concealed than any real conspiracy ever was.’
Christopher Andrew again. Are we supposed to take this seriously? Andrews can’t even know the sum total of all conspiracies that have been revealed (or even, I would suspect, even those printed in England in the past year: does he read Lobster, for example?), let alone all undiscovered conspiracies. This is nonsense. As evidence for this thesis, Andrew used a tiny fraction of Hugh Thomas’ ideas about Hess/’Hess’. But Thomas’ material is no ‘more complex and better concealed’ than, say, the conspiracy to convict the Guildford 4 (and the later, and more ramified conspiracy to defend the convictions), the state’s campaign to discredit Colin Wallace, or the suppression of the Kincora story. The latter, alone, would take much of an issue of Lobster, just to describe. Andrews’ proposition just is not true. Let’s be generous: Andrew hasn’t read the material and literally does not know whereof he is speaking. (And whereof he should have stayed silent.) What Andrew said is guff, nothing more than ‘yah boo, conspiracy theory’ — if an explanation of events proposes a conspiracy, it is likely to be crap, because conspiracy theories are crap.
Steve Dorril and I ran into this view on our first trip to the Big Nowhere to talk to the higher media about the Wallace-Wilson material. In late ’86, just before Wallace got out of prison, we were invited to see some people at BBC’s Newsnight. We had been told by Wallace that among the visitors to his unit, Information Policy, in Northern Ireland, had been Alan Protheroe, who in 1986 was Assistant Director General of the BBC. Nicknamed ‘the Colonel’ in the BBC, Protheroe was, and may still be, a part-time soldier/intelligence officer, specialising in military-media relations. That the Assistant Director General of the BBC should be a state-employed psy-war specialist in his spare-time, with all that implies about contacts with the British military-intelligence complex, seems not to have bothered BBC journalists at the time.
But unlike the journalists we had been talking to up to that point, Protheroe knew who Wallace was and what the Inf Pol unit had been doing. To Newsnight we said something like ‘Protheroe’s a spook; you’ll have to watch him.’ (We were already interested in him because of his actions during the BBC’s handling of the Pencourt investigation a decade earlier.) ‘Really,’ said the BBC people were we talking to, ‘it isn’t like that in the BBC’, and dismissed what we had said. Subsequently, our Newsnight journalists interviewed Wallace the day he came out of prison and then had their piece yanked out of a programme at the very last minute. We subsequently heard that Protheroe had indeed blocked the Wallace interview, but when asked, BBC denied that they had ever interviewed Wallace. (Paul Foot has seen a bootleg of the film-which-didn’t-exist.) Protheroe’s action was confirmed four months later in the Sunday Times (5th April ’87), and has been confirmed more recently by a senior Newsnight staffer who has now left the BBC. (When the Wallace story reappeared again at the end of January this year, the BBC used some of that ‘non-existent’ Newsnight footage to illustrate various news items about Wallace.)
What is interesting in retrospect is not that Wallace was right and telling the truth — so far Wallace has always told the truth, to my knowledge, though perhaps not all of the truth all at once, for tactical reasons — but the way the Newsnight people reacted to our suggestion about one of their bosses. Their response was comical, really. It was then only just over a year since there had been several weeks of intense media interest in the revelation that the BBC actually had its own in-house MI5 office vetting BBC employees (still there, as far as I know) — prima facie evidence that, au contraire, the BBC was exactly ‘like that’ on occasions. Newsnight didn’t say ‘Protheroe isn’t a spook’; or, ‘We’ll check it out’; nor even ‘It sounds unlikely to us, but we’ll bear that in mind’, all of which would have been rational responses. Instead they dismissed what we had said because we were perceived to be offering them something from that most disreputable of categories, conspiracy theory.
But we had merely suggested three propositions;
- Protheroe is a part-time spook.
- Qua part-time spook, he knows what Wallace and Information Policy were doing.
- Therefore, in our view, it is probable that he will try to block transmission of Wallace’s allegations.
Yet somehow these elementary and reasonable propositions triggered the ‘Oh dear, we’re dealing with conspiracy nutters’ response, which turned their brains off.
I was reminded of this episode on hearing Roy Hattersley MP prefacing a reply on the BBC programme Any Questions with, ‘I’m not a believer in the conspiracy theory of politics but……’. I think that is the first time I’ve come across that particular expression, ‘the conspiracy theory of politics’. Usually people refer to ‘the conspiracy theory of history’ before introducing their ‘but’, and the particular conspiracy they have in mind. In intellectually respectable company it is necessary to preface any reference to actual political, economic, military or paramilitary conspiracies with the disclaimer that the speaker ‘doesn’t believe in the conspiracy theory of history (or politics)’. What is it about conspiracy which makes our ‘chattering classes’ so nervous? It can hardly be disputed that at any time there are an infinite number of conspiracies, from the very small to the gigantic, going on in every industrialised society. Political parties always contain conspiracies at every level. As I was writing this it was announced that the Labour Party is going to examine the influence of an entryist Trotskyist group called Socialist Action, previously Socialist Organiser (known to some Trot watchers as the ‘Soggy Oggies’). Routine internal party politics is very largely conspiratorial, a network of interlocking cabals plotting how to get their hands on this or that committee, group, district, meeting. The ‘pre-meeting meeting’, the group caucus, are routine parts of ordinary politics. It is only a slight exaggeration to say, as Carl Oglesby did, that conspiracy is normal politics. Yet this produces feelings of everything from outrage to the patronising shake of the head in almost all political circles in this country. Among ‘the chattering classes’ political sophistication demands the ritual trashing of the conspiracy theorist. Dismissing our suggestion about Protheroe, the Newsnight journalists were offering as subtext, ‘You guys from up North don’t understand how a complex organisation like the BBC works. Simplisitic monocausal explanations, like “Protheroe is a spook” don’t work in complex processes like the production of televised current affairs.’ And also, perhaps, something like ‘the BBC is a great institution, and it is above things like this’ — the BBC’s idea of itself as objective and ‘balanced’.
Not that the hostility to conspiracy theories is totally stupid. There are a great many dumb conspiracy theories. The Gemstone File is one such. Faced with the complexity of human events, some people retreat into fantasy. The central features of the classic conspiracy theory are: (a) a disregard for evidence in the pursuit of (b), the explanation of complexity – anything from the whole of world history downwards – by simple causes, usually the concerted, conscious actions of small, or smallish, groups of men (almost always men). Favourites have been the Jews, Masons, and the Communist Party; with minor places for Catholics, aliens from another planet, the British Royal Family, and internationalist groupings like The Round Table, Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group. In Gemstone the traditional evil group has been further rendered down, to just one man. It is fantasies like these which are properly ‘the conspiracy theory of history’.
Classic conspiracy theories
Of course the proponents of the classic conspiracy theories, the John Birch Society, Gary Allen, Lyndon LaRouche, Nesta Webster et al have got it wrong: but not because of their assumption that small(ish) groups of people have had an influence on history. That is an unexceptional assumption: think of Lenin and his group. (Or the City of London.) It is false information and poor or non-existent attention to basic rules of evidence and inference, which discredit the classic conspiracy theory.
- For example, it may be true — I have never tried to check this — that some Wall Street money ended up indirectly funding the Bolshevik revolution (Gary Allen, John Birch and other American right-wingers). Both the British and smaller U.S. money markets had poured a lot of money into investments in Russia in the 30 years before the Bolshevik coup. It would hardly be a surprise to find all the major money-lenders of Europe, a few of whom were Jews, in there, as well. When the German state funded Lenin’s group in the hope that they would take Russia out of the war, it is not inconceivable that the funds originally came from, say, loans made by U.S. capitalists. But many of the Americans who find this important, not only don’t bother to check this factoid before recycling it, they further conclude, without evidence, that Wall St. was a bunch of Reds (or Jews; or Jewish Reds).
- For example, it may be true that Masons had a part to play in both the American and French revolutions (Nesta Webster). There is now what appears to be substantial evidence for both propositions. But Miss Webster didn’t actually offer much in her books, and this tells us nothing about the power of the Masons today — or in the 1920s, for that matter, in Webster’s heyday.
- For example, it clearly is true that the ramified Anglo-American network centred round the twin axes of the Royal Institute of International Affairs/Chatham House in England, and the Council on Foreign Relations in America, has had a considerable influence in shaping British and American foreign policy, especially before World War 2. This is demonstrably true with or without Carroll Quigley’s claims about the Round Table. But this does not in any way substantiate the absurd fantasies of the La Rouche organisation, which has incorporated Quigley et al into an absurd (if entertaining) fantasy in which the UK controls America, the British Royal Family runs the world’s drug traffic, organised the assassination of John Kennedy etc etc.
The stances of the Hattersleys and Newsnights of this world rest upon two false assumptions. The first is the juxtaposition of the complexity of social/political processes and the presumed simplicity of any explanation of events which has a conspiracy in it. This is false because, with the exception of small minorities on the far-right who espouse something like the Nesta Webster single conspiracy theory, nobody is actually suggesting that social/political events can be explained by single conspiracies. The kind of work that we attempt, and that the masters — like Peter Dale Scott and Noam Chomsky — produce is an attempted elaboration of the actual complexity of real political/social events. What might be called conspiracy research — or parapolitics — makes things more, not less, complex than the version served up by the respectable political classes.
The second false assumption is that there is always is an either/or choice, either conspiracy or cock-up. In fact, the real world is usually a complicated mixture of both. The Watergate affair, for example, contained a number of core conspiracies which were the overlaid with the consequences of human error — e.g. Nixon’s White House recording system. The denouncing of ‘the conspiracy theory of history/politics’ so commonplace among our respectable higher media, academics and politicians, is rarely more than the ritual thrashing of a straw-man almost entirely of their own construction.
Consider the different approaches to an account of the career of Roy Hattersley. Hattersley is nowadays presented as one of the inheritors of the ‘reasonable’ or ‘moderate’ wing of the Labour Party. In another sense, Hattersley is also one of the present day standard bearers of the Gaitskellite wing of the party. The orthodox view of that tendency within the party would be something along the lines that here were a group of people (mostly men) who worked together as a grouping within the Labour Party because they shared similar views. They were anti-communist, pro- NATO and so forth. The parapolitics perspective, the conspiracy perspective if you will, says ‘Yes, that’s obviously true as far as it goes; and might even be most of the story, but what about, for example:
- the links between some of the Gaitskellites and the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom;
- the links between Gaitskell and Joe Godson, the US Labour Attaché in Britain in the 50’s;
- the source of the money for the Gaitskellites’ Campaign for Democratic Socialism?
The respectable ‘chattering classes’ in this country reject this kind of approach
- because it conflicts with the model, the ideology, taught to them at British (and American) universities;
- because they are usually unaware of the existence of alternative models and sources of information; and
- even if they are aware of such alternatives, they ignore them because careers in British (or American) intellectual life are not aided by being identified with radical/deviant outlooks.
The intellectually respectable but irrational orthodoxy of our ruling intellectual elites goes under the heading of ‘pluralism’, if it has one at all. But ‘pluralism’ is virtually empty, merely stating the obvious: there are many groups in society who all have some power. The interesting questions begin where pluralism stops. ‘Pluralist’ analysts in British universities are still wrestling with the discovery (sic) of ‘interest groups’ and ‘pressure groups’.
The parapolitical perspective, on the other hand, the conspiracy perspective, takes for granted that there are likely to be hidden influences at work because there is a mountain of historical evidence which shows hidden influences at work: not giant world-conquering conspiracies by the Masons or some such nonsense, but more mundane things likes intelligence agencies tinkering with the political process, faking reality in the media etc.. It became absurd to deny the existence of large-scale conspiracies, of powerful ‘hidden forces’, the day the CIA (or the Politburo, or MI6) was begun. The interesting questions, the rational questions are not ‘Are there such things as hidden influences in political/social life?’; but, ‘Given that there are such things, where are they? Whose are they? How important are they? How can we tell the real from the fantasy? And, perhaps, how can we expose them?’ Simple empirical observation says conspiracy is a very common form of political behaviour. The mysterious thing is not that some poor deluded fools insist on seeing conspiracies (Andrew’s view), but how it is that for so long so many otherwise apparently intelligent people — for example most of Anglo-American political and social science — have managed not to notice that conspiracy is an everyday, and rather important part of the phenomena they claim to be examining. For example, although the Economic League has been collecting and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds every year in work against the British left since the 1920s, there was not a single academic essay about it between its formation and 1980. Yet in its history it must have spent nearly as much as the Conservative Party. No account of British domestic political history in the 20th century can be anything but incomplete without incorporating the Economic League. Yet I have never seen one that does.
Andrew said on the Timewatch programme that conspiracy theories survive because it is tedious falsifying them. In fact, the classic conspiracy theory collapses at the slightest investigation. The truth is that so fierce is the prejudice against anything which resembles a conspiracy, academics never bother at all. Accounts of contemporary American political history will continue to be written without bothering to mention that in a five year period one President, one probable President, and the most important black leader since the war, were victims of assassinations which were never investigated properly and have still to be solved. The contempt for simple empiricism which characterises the classic conspiracy theories is mirrored perfectly in most academics’ refusal to distinguish between conspiracy theories and conspiracy research.
Little glimmers of light
But there are little glimmers of light. There is a perceptible increase in understanding of, and interest in, the actual actions and weight of conspiratorial groups in our society and history. Look at the recent media interest in the Masons, for example. There is even now a growing academic study in Britain of the intelligence services – albeit one which, with one or two exceptions, notably Bernard Porter, is still clinging to the apron strings of the spooks’ definition of reality. (For an example of Porter’s thoughts on ‘conspiracies’, see Guardian 10 February ’90.) But paradoxically, as the subject expands it also gets more difficult to make that initial discrimination between the possibly true and worth looking at, and the fantastic. Some time ago I met someone who believed that derogatory information about him was being inserted into novels and radio programmes. He pointed out paragraphs which seemed to him to be aimed at him. The evidence was not convincing. ‘How is the material fed out to the writers?’, I asked. ‘That’s obvious’, he replied, ‘through the publishers’ secret society.’ But of this society there was not a shred of evidence, I pointed out. In any case, he was manifesting all kinds of other symptoms of paranoia: all phone calls were taped, he thought his house was bugged etc.. It was text-book paranoia. I concluded my visit by telling him that I thought he was crazy and should see a psychiatrist. Some months later he sent me a photocopy of an article from the Bookseller of 19th August 1988, ‘A touch of the leather aprons’, by Christopher Hurst — the first expose of the publishers’ secret society, précisely as described by my ‘paranoid’. I wrote back, thanking him for the article, acknowledged that it was one for him, and repeated that I still didn’t believe his story. Later I mentioned the idea that the spooks fed material into novels to Fred Holroyd, and, to my surprise, he told me that one of Britain’s leading spy fiction writers had cheerfully confirmed that the spooks did indeed send him material they wanted planting in his books.
The perceptible increase in this country of interest in conspiracies is difficult to explain. Is it the result of the slow break-up of the English ruling elite and a related break-down in their control over the information suly and the machinery of ideology? Is it a consequence of the information explosion? The declining significance of Marxist theory providing the intellectual space for the ‘naive’ empiricism of parapolitics?
As a concept ‘conspiracy’ would be of little interest or (explanatory) value were it not for the defensive refusal of our ‘chattering classes’ to acknowledge its legitimacy. We can only look forward to the day the term has lost the connotations it has at the moment and rationality finally prevails. Meanwhile, with our eyes and ears open, we just have to get on with trying to understand the nature of political and historical reality.
Notes
- Mae Brussel was a brave, resourceful woman, whose initial writing, in The Realist, was astonishing for the time. But she became a victim of information overload, getting so much material, and keeping a broad focus on things, that she lost the ability to sort out the crap. When Dave Guthrie and I first got a copy of her taped radio programme on the Gemstone file, we were really interested. Dave rang her up and, in the course of the conversation, referred to ‘the big picture’ — meaning, the overall picture, rather than the details. Lo and behold, some weeks later, Mae tells her listeners out there in Carmel California, that they are making a ‘big picture’ in England and she’s going to be in it.
- Information from Harry Irwin, erstwhile editor of the UK’s solitary newsletter on the JFK assassination, now defunct, in a letter to the author.
- But the various books on OSS do not mention him, though this in itself tells us nothing. He may have just been a minor member and OSS was a very large organisation by the end of the war.
- Black Flag described the reportedly dead Roberts as ‘an investigative reporter who is yet to publish his findings which he refers to as the ‘Gemstone File’. This is nonsense.