Richard M Bennett
London: Virgin Books, 2003
£20 hardback
This is 350 pages of summaries of political and historical conspiracies. It starts in 2330 BC but the first 2007 years take up only 84 pages. The content is mostly Anglo-American, especially after WW2. It is done chronologically, so you get odd sequences of subjects: Gehlen, Roswell, Operation Paperclip, the murder of Gandhi; and Watergate, Littlejohn, Kincora, Allende; and AIDS conspiracy, Iran-Contra conspiracy, Hilda Murrel, Get Scargill, assassination of Mrs Ghandi. And so on.
I haven’t read the whole book but the sections I have read contain the kind of errors which are bound to arise unless the text is carefully proof-read by experts. There is also one very striking claim. In the section on the murder of Robert Kennedy it states: ‘….video footage, though not ideal, does suggest that someone in a guard’s uniform appears to fire into the back of Kennedy’s head.’ This is the first I have heard of said video footage if it exists; and the author’s use of ‘not ideal…..does suggest……… appears’ is about as vague as you can do it and still appear to be saying something. (Were news organisations using video in 1968?)
There is no documentation, just a short list of the ‘most interesting’ books consulted, in which Jim Hougan has become Jim Houghton and his book Spooks has become The Haunting of America, the subtitle of the American edition.
Even if the content of the book was accurate, there is a bigger problem with the authorial voice. The author wants us to accept that some conspiracies are real but isn’t always willing to decide which ones. The section ‘Colin Wallace conspiracy’ contains a major inaccuracy and the author’s cop-op formula. After a quick whizz through some of the well known stories planted in the media by Information Policy, the Army psy-ops unit in Northern Ireland in which Wallace worked, we are told:
‘The propaganda war continued [when?] with a new committee chaired by Michael Cudlipp and staffed by representatives of the North Ireland Office, the RUC and the army; including Jeremy Rail-ton, then head of Information Policy’.
In fact Cudlipp was appointed as Chief Information Officer in Northern Ireland in 1975 by Prime Minister Harold Wilson to try and get political control over the propaganda apparatus, which was then being directed as much at Northern Ireland Secretary of State Merlyn Rees as it was against the IRA. Bennett makes it sound as though Cudlipp was in charge of black propaganda.
Bennett then tells us:
‘The British establishment obviously decided, according to conspiracy theorists and perhaps a good few impartial observers, that Colin Wallace had to be silenced before these facts became public knowledge.’
When the author doesn’t want to commit himself to a position he attributes claims to conspiracy theorists: ‘conspiracy theorists point out…….. many conspiracy theorists believe……’. A particularly irritating example occurs in his account of the killing of Pat Finucane:
‘Conspiracy theorists point out that the full extent of the role of the British authorities in arming the Protestant Loyalists has to be finally exposed as part of the peace process.’
In Wallace’s case, he adds those ‘good few impartial observers’, to hint to the reader that Wallace is probably telling the truth.
There are structural problems with the book. You cannot do a summary, let alone a good summary, of Wallace’s story in two pages of large type, JFK’s assassination in fifteen, or the Jim Jones/ Jonestown story in three. With these subjects, detail is everything; and detail is what we don’t have and couldn’t have, given the format. The second problem is that in many of the cases cited by Bennett there is no clear narrative to summarise. Jonestown is a good example. Bennett tells us that it might have been a CIA experiment, tells us it is ‘believed [by whom?] that the CIA had planted a number of their agents in Jonestown’ and that it might have been a spinoff from the MK-Ultra programme (even though MK-Ultra had long ceased when Jonestown occurred). And for none of which he gives any evidence.
In many of the sections the book is less an account of conspiracies than it is of conspiracy theories; and another collection of conspiracy theories we do not need.