Tag: conspiracy

The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion

Polymeropoulos was a covert CIA operative, a jovial, burly man who likes to refer to himself as “grizzled.” Moscow was not the first time he had been on enemy territory. He had spent most of his career in the Middle East, fighting America’s long war on terrorism. He had hunted terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. He did the same in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had been shot at, ducked under rocket fire, and had shrapnel whiz by uncomfortably close to his head. But that night, paralyzed with seasickness in the landlocked Russian capital, Polymeropoulos felt terrified and utterly helpless for the first time.

Struggling to regain control over his body, Polymeropoulos couldn’t have imagined that this incident would upend his life. It would end a promising career that had just catapulted him into the ranks of senior CIA leadership, and threw him into the middle of a growing international mystery that has puzzled diplomats and scientists, and raised concerns on Capitol Hill. In the months ahead, he would come to realize that it wasn’t a spoiled sandwich that had mowed him down. Rather, it was his macabre initiation into a growing club of dozens of American diplomats, spies, and government employees posted abroad who were suffering in much the same way he was—targets of what some experts and doctors now believe were attacks perpetrated by unknown assailants wielding novel directed energy weapons. Though many of these apparent attacks have been publicized, including those that took place in Cuba and China, others have not been revealed until now, including at least three incidents that officials from the CIA and Capitol Hill say targeted American citizens on American soil.

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The Last Secrets of Skull and Bones

First consider the account of the origins of Bones to be found in a century-old pamphlet published by an anonymous group that called itself File and Claw after the tools they used to pry their way inside Bones late one night. I came upon the File and Claw break-in pamphlet in a box of disintegrating documents filed in the library’s manuscript room under Skull and Bones’s corporate name, Russell Trust Association. The foundation was named for William H. (later General) Russell, the man who founded Bones in 1832. I was trying to figure out what mission Russell had for the secret order he founded and why he had chosen that particular death’s-head brand of mumbo jumbo to embody his vision. Well, according to the File and Claw break-in crew,  

Bones is a chapter of a corps of a German university. It should properly be called the Skull and Bones chapter. General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his senior year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. The meaning of the permanent number “322” in all Bones literature is that it was founded in ’32 as the second chapter of the German society. But the Bonesman has a pleasing fiction that his fraternity is a descendant of an old Greek patriot society founded by Demosthenes, who died in 322 B.C.

They go on to describe a German slogan painted “on the arched walls above the vault” of the sacred room, 322. The slogan appears above a painting of skulls surrounded by Masonic symbols, a picture said to be “a gift of the German chapter.” “Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, Ob Reich, im Tode gleich,” the slogan reads, or, “Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all’s the same in death.”*

Imagine my surprise when I ran into that very slogan in a 1798 Scottish anti-Illuminist tract reprinted in 1967 by the John Birch Society. The tract (Proofs of a Conspiracy by John Robison) prints alleged excerpts from Illuminist ritual manuals supposedly confiscated by the Bavarian police when the secret order was banned in 1785. Toward the end of the ceremony of initiation into the “Regent degree” of Illuminism, according to the tract, “a skeleton is pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar. As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, ‘The character of being a man is the only one that is of importance’ ” (my italics).

Doesn’t that sound similar to the German slogan the File and Claw team claims to have found inside Bones? Now consider a haunting photograph of the altar room of one of the Masonic lodges at Nuremberg that is closely associated with Illuminism. Haunting because at the altar room’s center, approached through an aisle of hanging human skeletons, is a coffin surmounted by—you guessed it—a skull and crossbones that look exactly like the particular arrangement of jawbones and thighbones in the official Bones emblem. The skull and crossbones was the official crest of another key Illuminist lodge, one right-wing Illuminist theoretician told me.

Now you can look at this three ways. One possibility is that the Bircher right—and the conspiracy-minded left—are correct: The Eastern establishment is the demonic creation of a clandestine elite manipulating history, and Skull and Bones is one of its recruiting centers. A more plausible explanation is that the death’s-head symbolism was so prevalent in Germany when the impressionable young Russell visited that he just stumbled on the same mother lode of pseudo-Masonic mummery as the Illuminists. The third possibility is that the break-in pamphlets are an elaborate fraud designed by the File and Claw crew to pin the taint of Illuminism on Bones and that the rituals of Bones have innocent Athenian themes, 322 being only the date of the death of Demosthenes. (In fact, some Bones literature I’ve seen in the archives does express the year as if 322 B.C. were the year one, making 1977 anno Demostheni 2299.)

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Who betrayed Navy SEAL Team 6?

The U.S. military claimed that the Chinook was blown to pieces by a shoulder-fired missile, in which everyone on board was burned beyond recognition. Hence, senior military officials ordered the American bodies cremated without the prior approval of their family members.

The military’s narrative, however, is false. Charles Strange, whose son, Michael, died during the attack, says he viewed the pictures of the crash site. “I saw Mike’s dead body,” Mr. Strange said in an interview. “It was clearly recognizable. He was clutching his gun. He wasn’t burned to a crisp. Why did they cremate my boy? They didn’t need to do that. Something’s not right.”

There are numerous questions that need to be answered. Why was the Chinook’s black box never found? The military claims it was washed away in a flash flood. Impossible. Flash flooding is extremely rare — almost unheard of — in that part of Afghanistan. Why was the Chinook not given aerial backup, which is standard military procedure when special forces are deployed?

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