The Covert War Against Rock Read online

  THE COVERT WAR

  AGAINST ROCK

  THE COVERT WAR

  AGAINST ROCK

  WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE DEATHS OF

  JIM MORRISON

  TUPAC SHAKUR

  MICHAEL HUTCHENCE

  BRIAN JONES

  JIMI HENDRIX

  PHIL OCHS

  BOB MARLEY

  PETER TOSH

  JOHN LENNON

  THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G.

  ALEX CONSTANTINE

  FERAL HOUSE

  The Covert War Against Rock © 2000 by Alex Constantine

  All rights reserved.

  eISBN 978-1-936239-50-4

  Feral House

  1240 W. Sims Way Suite 124

  Port Townsend, WA. 98368

  Design by Linda Hayashi

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the victims of

  Operation CHAOS and COINTELPRO

  COVERT CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Prelude

  ASSASSINATION POLITICS OF THE VIETNAM WAR PERIOD: FASCISM, AMERICAN-STYLE AND THE RISE OF RICHARD NIXON

  Chapter One

  A [KILLING] FIELD DAY FOR THE HEAT

  Chapter Two

  TIME MACHINE: THE BIRTH OF TOP 40 RADIO AND ALAN FREED’S NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE (EARLY CIA AND MOB INFLUENCES ON THE ROCK MUSIC INDUSTRY)

  Chapter Three

  PARAPOLITICAL STARS IN THE DOPE SHOW

  Chapter Four

  THE DEATH OF CASS ELLIOT AND OTHER “RESTLESS YOUTH”

  Chapter Five

  A MURDER IN THE HOUSE OF POOH: BRIAN JONES

  Chapter Six

  PORTRAITS IN CARNAGE:

  THE END OF THE ROCK FESTIVALS

  Chapter Seven

  I DON’T LIVE TODAY:

  THE JIMI HENDRIX POLITICAL HARASSMENT, KIDNAP AND MURDER EXPERIENCE

  Chapter Eight

  WHEN YOU’RE A STRANGER:

  FRAGRANCE DÉ CHAOS — INVESTIGATIVE

  FINDINGS ON THE DEATH OF JIM MORRISON

  Chapter Nine

  LIKE COFFINS IN A CAGE: THE BAEZ CONTRAS AND THE DEATH OF PHIL OCHS

  Chapter Ten

  WHO KILLED THE KENNEDYS? (AND SAL MINEO?)

  Chapter Eleven

  “PROJECT WALRUS” AND HOLDEN CAULFIELD’S WARM GUN

  Chapter Twelve

  WHAT’CHA GONNA DO? . . .

  THE DEATHS OF BOB MARLEY AND PETER TOSH

  Chapter Thirteen

  GANG WAR: SONS OF CHAOS VS. THUGS A TUPAC SHAKUR AND NOTORIOUS B.I.G. ASSASSINATION DIGEST

  Chapter Fourteen

  DANCING ON THE JETTY:

  THE DEATH OF MICHAEL HUTCHENCE, ET AL

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Operation CHAOS a draft outline found among the papers of late political researcher Mae Brussell, provided the framework and inspiration for this study. The decision to write it was made ten years ago, and since that time the author has gathered pertinent material toward this end, often at the suggestion of friends who had a piece of the puzzle to contribute, including Will Robinson, Marilyn Colman and the Brussell Sprouts, David X, Patrick Fourmy, publisher of Prevailing Winds, Al Marcelliene, John Judge, Lee Lew-Lee, Cynthia Ford, Lynn Moss-Sharman, Adam Parfrey, Bennett Theissen, Matty, DasGoat, Virginia McCullough, Dick Farley, “Cynthia Richards,” the late Sharon White, Andrew and David, MIHRA, Linda Minor and CTRL’s researchers, Vicky Flores-Guerra, Michael Putini, S.M., Melissa Darpino and the patient librarians at UCLA’s Research Library and Los Angeles municipal library system. The author also wishes to thank Elliot Mintz, spokesman for Bob Dylan and Yoko Ono, reggae archivist Roger Steffans and Realist editor Paul Krassner for the admirable roles they have played in opposing some of the ignoble acts described in this volume.

  FOREWORD

  The corporate media harbors hundreds of CIA propagandists and fawning loyalists who find revelations concerning domestic political assassinations inconvenient and stroll by with little comment. The central revelation of this volume is the fact that the Agency and Organized Crime have, for over over thirty years, engaged in a program to silence popular musicians whose influence subverts the cynical thought control tactics of American government and media. There exists within both worlds a rigidly “conservative” infrastructure that has little regard for human rights. This infrastructure has contributed to the rise of every fascist regime in the Third World. It has overthrown many a democratically-elected leader and favors death squad rule. It thrives on war, propaganda and social control. It takes a dim view of critics in the music industry, particularly young “communards” who advocate demilitarization, dread-locked musicians standing up for their rights, or street Thugs who condemn police violence and suggest shooting back.

  The untimely deaths of John Lennon, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and other rock musicians who lashed out at the established order were followed by widespread suspicion of foul play. The murder of Lennon led Fenton Bressler, an English barrister, to descend reluctantly into the hidden labyrinth of CIA mind control operations, and the result of his investigation, Who Killed John Lennon? (1989), raised provocative questions regarding the deep history of Mark David Chapman But Bressler was an exception. Hard questions concerning the deaths of most musicians in this book have never been asked. On the contrary, many reporters and biographers are inclined to dismiss, with varying degrees of condescension, evidence of murder as grist for exotic conspiracy theories (though these, of course, do tend to run rampant when fascism, which is inherently conspiratorial, dominates the intelligence community). This unwillingness to dissect covert operations renders reporters with integrity incapable of evaluating the evidence and arriving at an objective judgment. An attempt is made here to correct this imbalance, to treat the evidence with the seriousness it deserves.

  A sobering example: ten years ago, the statement that Brian Jones, founding member of the Rolling Stones, was murdered would have been met with ridicule. Everyone knew that Jones died in 1969 by accidental drowning. The “rational” view held that Jones was a fiercely talented but precocious, drug-crazed rogue with an irrepressible death wish. But the subsequent confession of his killer, and the testimony of several witnesses intimidated into silence, has since dispelled the status quo belief (though the press remains largely indifferent). Brian Jones was murdered. Journalists should take care not to let it happen again, but this is not a profession that readily learns from its mistakes. Reporters will transcribe the official verdict on the next “accidental drowning,” pride themselves on their “objectivity” for refusing to be lured by bothersome details into contradicting the official record. A politically indifferent public will accept all this and the hypocritical distortions of the propagandists.

  Anyone with a penchant to research the subject is advised that there are patterns to look for to distinguish a political hit from the apolitical variety and accidental or natural causes. Nearly all celebrity subjects of this volume knew extreme “paranoia” before their deaths. John Lennon and Jim Morrison were both driven to desperation by constant FBI harassment. Jones was made a nervous wreck by police raids and the intimidations of a circle of killers who infiltrated his household. Jimi Hendrix feared Michael Jeffrey, his manager, a self-avowed intelligence agent with Mafia ties, who stole from him, then arranged for his kidnapping and probable murder. Bob Marley received a death threat from the CIA, and sang about his “War” with the Agency. Tupac Shakur lived in defiance of a COINTELPRO-type operation waged, he realized, to destroy his career and silence him.

  Another recurring theme is the posthumous publication of books libelling the deceased and misleading the reader on the circumstances of death. Bob Woodward, Danny
Sugarman and the late Albert Goldman worked this genre and profited handsomely from it. In the “mainstream” media, discrediting tactics are also common, and the death is almost always blamed on the victim. Cass Elliott, according to one fraudulent medical expert and a flurry of erroneous press reports, was claimed by “gluttony.” Jones was a victim of vague “misadventure,” and drugs were said to have contributed—despite the fact that he had been off them for a month before he died. It was widely reported falsely that Jimi Hendrix overdosed on heroin, and it is universally held that he “choked on his own vomit,” though the true circumstances are complex and have driven many of his friends to demand an investigation. Michael Hutchence was supposedly done in by auto-erotic sex, but a broken hand, split lip and contusions on his body have not been explained. In each case, cruel exaggeration and blatant falsehood parade as fact.

  The victim often leaves behind witnesses whose testimony is wildly at variance. Sometimes they even contradict themselves on the essential facts. It’s tempting to walk away from a case like this in a fit of frustration—until considering the chill that death threats put on eyewitness testimony. A coerced witness makes false statements to police and the press. Three or four witnesses, knowing that the killers mean business, will fabricate details to fill in the gaps of information they are forced to withhold under threat of retaliation. When seen in this light, blaring contradictions in a murder case should be interpreted as possible duress.

  And this brings us to another recurring theme: the cover-up proves the crime. And in each case examined, the perpetrators and their accomplices have altered history by concealing crucial evidence. This book is an attempt to return that evidence to the historical record.

  Alex Constantine

  PRELUDE

  Assassination Politics of the Vietnam War Period: Fascism, American-Style and the Rise of Richard Nixon

  I’M NOT SCREAMING, I’M NOT SCREAMING, TELL ME I’M NOT SCREAMING. PHIL OCHS

  In 1980 Danish journalist Henrik Krüger collected scraps of suppressed information on the Nixon wing of Republican politics, then observed in The Great Heroin Coup: “Assassination became a modus operandi under Richard Nixon.”1 Political murder, an unplumbed scandal in the bulging file of criminal acts collectively known as Watergate, went unexplored while investigative committees and reporters taking dictation concentrated on milk funds, Nixon’s possible knowledge of a routine bugging and the cover-up.

  As a result, the dankest political horrors—including the assassination of celebrities on the left and Nixon’s rivals for the White House—have never been ventilated by the corporate media. Beneath the surface of Watergate ran a spring of excesses far more scandalous than any exposed by the Washington Post, and these never did see the light of day—for the simple reason that everything known about the Nixon administration was planted in the Post by ranking intelligence officers.2 The leading candidates for the identity of “Deep Throat,” the professed source of Woodward and Bernstein’s most significant Watergate leads:

  ♦ Washington attorney Robert Bennett, then director of Mullen and Associates, the firm that founded the Free Cuba Committee, a front that once claimed Lee Harvey Oswald as a member, employer of White House Plumber E. Howard Hunt in his glory days.

  ♦ Former CIA official Richard Ober, director of Operation CHAOS, the most expansive domestic surveillance and covert operations network in American history, the intelligence sector’s response to the anti-war and civil rights movements. (Bennett and Ober both ran covert assassination programs, as will be seen.)

  ♦ General Alex Haig, who gave up the Pentagon but “not to shuffle papers.” Formerly a staffer under General Douglas MacArthur in Korea and scion of the National Security Council, he was chief of staff at the White House under Nixon, nosing out some 245 generals for the appointment.

  Whoever the skulking insider may have been, “Deep Throat” proved to be a shallow well of revelations after all. The depths of CIA corruption under Nixon, particularly political murder, went unreported by the celebrated authors of the Post’s Watergate coverage because one of them, Bob Woodward, was himself a cut-out for distant “conservative” forces in the intelligence and military establishment.3 This was a “journalist” who could be counted on to contain the Watergate story, steer it away from the most serious acts of corruption.

  Bob Woodward has taken a walk around the block repeatedly when asked about his military intelligence bona fidés: On June 13, 1965, three days after his graduation from Yale, young Woodward was declared a Navy ensign in a 20-minute ceremony conducted by Senator George Smathers in a school auditorium. (As it happens, the Democratic senator from Florida was a partner in the real estate holdings of the Lansky Family,4 a branch of the Mafia closely aligned with the CIA.) One Naval intelligence officer on the USS Wright recalls that Woodward held “top secret ‘crypto’ clearance, which allowed him access to nearly any declassified [government] document.” Reporter Adrian Havill notes that, at the hub of the nation’s defense networks, Woodward “had plenty of time to ingratiate himself with the nation’s military leadership inside the Pentagon, across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital.”5

  The Nixon administration rose on a foundation of political murder, a fact obscured by Woodward and the Post, and it continued to be a useful policy in the Watergate period, according to Edward Jay Epstein in Agency of Fear (1990): “E. Howard Hunt, after forging a State Department telegram implicating President Kennedy in the murder of Diem, showed the forged document to [Lucien] Conein, who then appeared on an NBC documentary and divulged its contents. (Hunt also briefed the producer of the program, Fred Freed, on the ‘secret telegram,’ which shaped the program in such a way as to imply Kennedy’s complicity in the murder.) However, in an interview with the Washington Post on June 13, 1976, Conein acknowledged that he had been brought to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to superintend a special unit which would have the capacity to assassinate selected targets in the narcotics business.”6

  Assassination was all the rage among Nixon’s inner-circle. One of them, “Eduardo” Hunt, mustered a pair of professional hit-men to kill syndicated columnist Jack Anderson—G. Gordon Liddy, subsequently of Watergate and talk radio fame, and Dr. Edward Gunn, a toxin specialist and director of the CIA’s Medical Services Division. Liddy’s deposition concerning his recruitment to the murder plot was submitted to the court in a 1980 suit filed by Hunt against reporter A.J. Weberman:

  Q: Did Hunt ever discuss any assassination plots?

  Liddy: Well, there came a time in 1972, I think it was around February, when Mr. Hunt came to me concerning the journalist Jack Anderson. . . . Mr. Hunt came to me, and he said, “Anderson has now gone too far. He has just identified and caused the death or imminent death under torture of one of our human assets abroad.” And he, Hunt, had been charged by his principals, meaning his superiors at the White House, with conferring with me and someone from the CIA who was represented as retired, namely Dr. Gunn, as to how best to prevent Mr. Anderson from repeating his behavior

  This meeting was held in the then existing downstairs luncheon room of the Hay Adams Hotel, now no longer in existence. And Mr. Hunt brought up that LSD business again. Dr. Gunn rejected it on technical grounds. I suggested that the only way to effectively stop Mr. Anderson, was to kill him. Mr. Hunt and Dr. Gunn agreed. The remainder of the conversation consisted of how we ought to do it best. The conclusion was that the Cuban assets were to stage a mugging in Washington which would be fatal to Anderson.

  Q: All right. Now if Mr. Hunt had said he had merely discussed with you and Dr. Gunn nothing more than a discreditation of Mr. Anderson, would that be correct or incorrect?

  Liddy : That would be absolutely incorrect.

  Q: The story reflecting this situation occurred in The Washington Post under an article by Woodward and Bernstein. Are you aware of that article, and were you surprised to see that that had come to light?

  Liddy : I was in prison at the time. T
he article was made available to me. I read it at the time. And I was surprised to see that it was incorrect in that it did not narrate the incident as I have just narrated it to you, which is what actually happened 7

  In July, 1984, Liddy testified in another lawsuit, this one filed by E. Howard Hunt against the ultra-conservative Spotlight press, an arm of the Liberty Lobby, proclaiming that several approaches to disposing of the columnist were considered—killing methods with the stamp of the CIA. The Agency assigned Hunt the task of killing Anderson, employing methods found routinely in foreign political plots: “We discussed with Mr. Gunn aspirin roulette in which one takes a single tablet of deadly poison, packs it in a Bayer aspirin jar, we place it in the man’s medicine chest, and one day he gets the tablet and that’s that. Hunt referred to aspirin roulette . . .” Hunt at this time was employed by the aforementioned CIA front, Mullen and Associates, then nun by Washington attorney Robert Bennett. “We discussed Dr. Gunn’s suggestion of the use of an automobile to hit Mr. Anderson’s automobile when it was in a turn in the circle, up near Chevy Chase. There is a way . . . known by the CIA that if you hit a car at just the right speed and angle, it will . . . burn and kill the occupant. . . . But what I suggested is we just kill him. And they both agreed that would be the way to go about it, and the task would be assigned to Cuban assets.”8

  Hunt’s employer, the Mullen agency, had a long history of participation in political killings. Rolling Stone reported on May 20, 1976: “The Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination are motifs that run through the Watergate affair. Howard Hunt, the chief Watergate burglar, helped establish a CIA front group for the Bay of Pigs, and Robert Bennett, as head of the Mullen Agency, played a decisive role in the undoing of Richard Nixon.”9