"Ambush in the night, all guns aiming at me
Ambush in the night, they opened fire on me
Ambush in the night, protected by His Majesty..."
Bob Marley
Marley knew the drill in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when
music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled
into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization
politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press
down-sizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government
under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was
flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death
squad rule, and as Grenadaıs Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it
three years later, the CIAıs "pernicious attempts [to] wreck the
[Jamaican] economy."
"Destabilization," Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, "is the name
given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting
the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more
powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence."
In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his
lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger
"vampires" descending upon the island. June 1976: then Jamaican
Governor-General Florizel Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to
stanch the bloody pre-election violence. The Peopleıs National Party
(PNP) asked the Wailers to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December.
Despite the rising political mayhem, he agreed to perform.
In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates at Marleyıs
Hope Road home. As Marley biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9
p.m., "the torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer
noise that was not quite like a firecracker." Marley was in the kitchen
at the rear of the house eating a grapefruit when he heard the bursts of
automatic gunfire. Don Taylor, Marleyıs manager, had been talking to the
musician when the bullets ripped through the back of his legs. Taylor
fell but remained conscious with four bullets in his legs and one buried
at the base of his spine.
The men were "peppering the house with a
barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and splintering
plaster and woodwork on the first floor." Rita, trying to escape with
Marleyıs children and a reporter from the Jamaican Daily News, was shot
by one of the men in the front yard. The bullet caught her in the head,
lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between scalp and skull.
Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door
off the pantry, pushing past a fleeing Seeco Patterson to aim beyond Don
Taylor at Bob Marley.... The gunman got off eight shots. One bullet
struck a counter, another buried itself in the ceiling and five tore into
Don Taylor. The last creased Marleyıs breast below his heart and drilled
deep into his arm.
The survival of the raggae singer and his entire entourage appeared to be
the work of Rasta. "The firepower these guys apparently brought with them
was immense," Wailer publicist Jeff Walker recalls. "There were bullet
holes
everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors,
ceilings, doorways and outside."
There has since been widespread belief that the CIA arranged the hit on
Hope Road. Neville Garrick, a student of Angela Davis and art director of
the Jamaica Daily News, took photos of Kingston, Nassau and the Hope Road
enclave before and after the shooting. Garrick had film of "suspicious
characters" lurking near the house before the assassination attempt. The
day of the shooting, he had snapped some photos of Marley standing beside
a Volkswagen in a pool of Mango shade. The strangers made Marley nervous;
he told Garrick that they appeared to be "scouting" the property. In the
prints, however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out.
After the concert, Garrick took the photographs and prints to Nassau.
Sadly, while the Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London,
Garrick discovered that the film had been stolen.
Many of the CIAıs files on Bob Marley remain classified to the present
day. However, on December 5, a week after the assault on Hope Road, the
Wailersı appeared at the Smile Jamaica fest despite their bullet wounds
to perform one long, defiant anthem of rage directed at the CIA
"War"suggesting the Wailersı own attitude toward the "vampires" from
Langley:
Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That now hold our brothers
In Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa
In subhuman bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war...
Only a handful of Marleyıs most trusted comrades knew of the bandıs
whereabouts before the festival. Yet a member of the film crew, or so he
claimedreportedly, he didnıt have a cameramanaged to talk his way past
macheté-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment: one Carl Colby,
son of the late CIA director William Colby.
While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according
to a witness at the enclavea new pair of boots for Bob Marley. Former
Los Angeles cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee (his camera work can be seen in
the Oscar-winning documentary The Panama Deception) was close friends
with members of the Wailers, and he believes that Marleyıs cancer can be
traced to the boots: "He put his foot in and said, Ow!ı A friend got in
there ... he said, letıs [get] in the boot, and he pulled a length of
copper wire outit was embedded in the boot."
Had the wire been treated
chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marleyıs
compound was certainly provocative. (And so was Colbyıs subsequent part
in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. Simpson, nearly 20 years
later. At Simpsonıs preliminary hearing in 1995, Colbywho resided next
door to Nicole Simpson on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood, a mile from her
reisidence on Bundyand his wife both took the stand to testify for the
prosecution that Nicoleıs ex-husband had badgered and threatened her.
Colbyıs testimony was instrumental in the formal charge of murder filed
against Simpson and the nationally-televised fiasco known as the "Trial
of the Century.")
Ten years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir,
Marley & Me, in which he alleges that a "senior CIA agent" had been
planted among the crew as part of the plan to "assassinate" Marley. Itıs
possible that this lapse in security allowed Colby entrance to the
compound. Itıs clear that the CIA wanted Marley out of the picture. After
the assassination attempt, a rumour circulated that the CIA was going to
finish Marley off. The source of the rumor was the Agency itself. The
Wailers had set out on a world tour, and CIA agents informed Marley that
should he return to Jamaica before the election, he would be murdered.
Don Taylor and others close to Marley suspect that it was more than a
threat. Lew-Lee recalls: "I didnıt think so at the time, but Iıve always
had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and
when the bone wouldnıt mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer.
The cancer metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he
could fight this thing."
British researcher Michael Conally observes: "They certainly had reasons
for wanting to. For one, Marleyıs highly charged message music made him
an important figure that the rest of the world was beginning to notice.
It was an influence that was hard to ignore least of all because
everywhere you went you saw middle and upper class white people sprouting
dreadlocks, smoking spliffs and adopting the Rastafarian lifestyle. This
sort of thing didnıt sit well with traditionalists and authoritarian
types."
The soccer game took place in Paris ... five months after the boot
incident. Marley took to the field with one of the leading teams in the
country to break the monotony of the Wailersı Exodus tour. His right toe
was injured in a tackle. The toenail came off. At first, it wasnıt
considered a serious wound.
But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a
physician, who was shocked by the toeıs appearance. It was so eaten away
that doctors in London advised it be amputated. Marleyıs religion forbade
it: "Rasta no abide amputation," he insisted. He told the physician, "de
living God, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering
Lion of the Tribe of Judah ... He will heal me witı de meditations of me
ganja chalice." No scalpel, he said, "will crease me flesh.... Cıyant
kill Rasta. Rastamon live out."
He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the
lesion. The disease lingered undiagnosed and spread throughout his body.
Isaac Ferguson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob
Marley first-hand. In the five years separating soccer injury from cancer
diagnosis, Marley remained immersed in music, "ignoring the advice of
doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical
examination." He refused to give up recording and touring long enough to
consult a doctor. Marley "would have to quit the stage and it would take
years to recoup the momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it.
Whenever he went into the studio to record, he did enough for two albums.
Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself
about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and
determination, he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes
till daybreak." Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed after Marleyıs death:
"What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do on this earth."
Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying and set out to condense a
lifetime of music into the few years remaining.
The CIA Rocks Trenchtown
In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a diplomatic junket to
the island, had assured Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley in a
private meeting that there was "no attempt now underway involving covert
actions against the Jamaican government." But in the real world something
of a Caribbean pogrom was underway, overseen, of course, by the CIA. As
Kissinger croaked his denials to Manley, the destabilization push was
already afoot. The emphasis at this stage was on psychological operations
but in the election year of 1976 a series of covert
interventionsemploying arson, bombing and assassination as
requiredcompletely disrupted Manleyıs democratic socialist rule.
An arsenal of automatic weapons somehow found their way to Jamaica. The
CIAıs thugs, directed by a growing coven of pin-striped officers
reporting to the American embassy in Kingston, quietly organized secret
police cadrés to stoke political violence. Huge consignments of guns and
advanced communications gear were smuggled onto the island. One such
shipment was intercepted by Manleyıs security patrolsa caché of 500
man-eating submachine guns.
The firearms were shipped to the island from Miami by the Jamaica Freedom
League, a right-wing paramilitary faction with roots in Langley, financed
largely by drugs. Peter Whittington, the groupıs second-in-command, was
convicted of drug trafficking in Dade County. The funds were laundered by
the League at Miamiıs Bank of Perrine, the key American subsidiary of
Castle Bank, then the CIAıs financial base in Latin America. The bank was
owned and operated by Paul Helliwell, bagman for the Bay of Pigs
invasion, accused even by the conservative Wall Street Journal of
involvement in the global narcotics trade.
A paramilitary force was mustered to quell the Rastafarian backlash, and
the inevitable CIA-trained Cuban exiles beached in Jamaica, among them
Luis Posada Cariles, an ex-secret police official under Cuban dictator
Batista, currently a full-fledged agent of the CIA.
The "duppies" (ghosts) policed dissent by incarnating the chemical
warfare tactics of the1960s. In a yearıs time, Marley saw the Rastafarian
resistance disintegrate with the rise of a ruthless, highly-organized
narcotics syndicate, apparently from the Jamaican sand. The sudden
abundance of hard narcotics in Jamaica wounded the Rastafarian movement
with the burning spear of addiction. Marley and former Wailer Peter Tosh
promoted ganja as an alternative to cocaine and heroin, a statement of
independence and cohesion against the brutal strategems of colonial rule.
For the first time in Jamaican politics, public figures roundly
criticized the governing elite. Peter Tosh, in particular, split from his
peers in the local music scene by serving up impassioned political
"livalogues" at his public performances. While a dying Bob Marley saw the
wisdom in softening his political statements ("The War is Over"), and
Bunny Wailer slipped into a snug harbor of reclusiveness, Tosh pushed on
alone, the cursing, joint-smoking, speechifying black militant until his
death six years after the passing of Marley.
The suppression of Rastafarian protest escalated in the late 1970s and
grotesque human rights abuses were commonplace. And the political climate
in the Caribbean sweltered with the escalation of American covert
operations well into the next decade.
The Nazi Doctor
In September 1980, Bob Marley suffered a stroke while jogging in Central
Park. He was released by a physician the following day and recuperated in
his room at New Yorkıs Essex Hotel. Rita Marley flew in from Pittsburgh
and choked when she saw him. Her fears rose into uncontrollable sobs,
"Whaı has happened to you?" "Doctor say brain tumor black me out," Marley
told her. Isaac Fergusson caught the dying rebelıs performance at Madison
Square Garden a few days before, and realized then that something was
terribly wrong, even as Marley gripped his guitar "like a machine gun"
and "threw his ropelike hair about," a "whirlwind around his small black
face. The crack of a drum exploded into bass, into organ." Midway into
the set, the Wailers stood back and Marley did a solo: "These songs of
freedom is all I ever had..." Why, Fergusson wondered, was he singing
this alone? Why the past tense?
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery..."
Fergusson noticed that Marley "was always rubbing his forehead and
grimacing while performing." The following weekend, Fergusson stopped to
visit Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. He asked about Bobıs condition. "We
donıt know for sure," Rita told him, "the doctors say he has a tumor in
his brain." In a silent moment, Fergusson realized that Marley was dying.
He was convinced at last to seek medical treatment. Marley was admitted
to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. Tests revealed that
the cancer had spread to his brain, lungs and liver. The patient received
a few radiation treatments but checked out when the New York papers let
on that the reggae legend was seriously ill. Marley consulted physicians
in Miami, briefly returned to Sloan-Kettering, then Jamaica where he met
with Dr. Carl "Pee Wee" Fraser, recommended to him by fellow
Rastafarians. Dr, Fraser advised that Marley talk to Dr. Josef Issels, a
"holistic comprehensive immunotherapist" then practicing at the Ringberg
Clinic in Rottach-Egern, a small Bavarian village located at the southern
end of Tegernsee Lake.
Marley traveled to Bavaria and checked into the clinic.
Dr. Issels met him, looked him over and allowed, without naming sources:
"I hear that youıre one of the most dangerous black men in the world."
The portrait offered by publicity releases from the Issels Foundation is
imposing enough: Dr. Issels, born in 1907, founded the first hospital
(financed by the estate of Karl Gischler, a Dutch shipping magnate) in
Europe for comprehensive immunotherapy of cancer in 1951. He was the
Medical Director and Director of Research.
All well and good ... until it is considered that by this time, Dr.
Issels was 44 years old. Certainly, his medical career did not begin in
1951. Why the unexplained gap in his bona-fidés? During WW II, it seems,
Dr. Issels could be found plying his "research" skills for Hitlerıs SS.
Lew-Lee claims that Dr. Issels was assigned to the Auschwitz
concentration camp, working aside Dr. Joseph Mengele. But author Gordon
Thomas, in a long out of print biography of Issels, contends that the
doctor served in the SS only briefly. At any rate, he was indeed a member
of the Nazi Party and served under Himmler. Bob Marley, the "dangerous"
black upstart, had placed his life in the hands of a Nazi doctor.
Lew-Lee recalls that Marley rejected conventional cancer treatments,
"wanted to do anything but turn to Western medicine. This may have been a
mistake." Evidently so. "Dr. Issels said that he could cure Bob. And they
cut Bobıs dreadlocks off. And he was getting all of this crazy, crazy
medical treatment in Bavaria. I know this because Devon Evans [a musician
then playing with the Wailers] told me that Bob was receiving these
medical treatments." Evans came by "every two or three months1979-80and
told me: Yeah, mon,theyıre killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob.ı I said,
What do you mean they are killing Bob?ı No, no, mon,ı he said. Dis
Dr. Issels, heıs a Nazi!ı"
Dr. Issels was one of scores of Nazi practitioners to escape the
attention of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Michael Kater, a professor of
history at York University in Canada, informs us that physicians of the
Hitler period were steeped in Nazi racial doctrines at medical school,
that many of them continued to practice undisturbed by war crime
tribunals: "it was in a conventional medical culture infiltrated from one
side by a science alienated from humanity and from another by charlantry
that young physicians in the Third Reich were raised to learn and prepare
for practice, with many predestined to practice after 1945."
Dr. Joseph Issels first offered his alternative cancer therapies in a
nazified atmosphere of ruthlessness and quackery. In the 1930s, chronic
cancer patients consulted Dr. Issels and received his experimental
"combination therapy," a regimen of diet, homeopathic remedies, vitamins,
exercise and detoxification, among other holistic approaches. Today his
clinic offers training in cancer immunization vaccines, UV blood
irradiation, oxygen and ozone therapy, "biological dentistry" [tooth
extraction], immunity elicitation by mixed bacterial vaccine, blood
heating, and so on.)
The medical establishment, particularly in the UK, has long rallied
against some of Isselıs therapies. Thomas, a former BBC producer,
reported in an televised documentary that Dr. Issels was arrested in
September, 1960. The police warrant alleged, "the accused claims to treat
... cancer.... In fact [he] has neither reliable diagnostic methods nor a
method to treat cancer successfully. It is contended [that] he is aware
of the complete ineffectiveness of the so-called ... tumor treatment."
The warrant noted that Issels was a flight risk, that "he had prepared
for all contingencies by depositing huge amounts in foreign banks."
Marley, unaware of his physicianıs past, was placed on a regimen of
exercise, vaccines (some illegal), ozone injections, vitamin and trace
minerals.
In time, Dr. Issels also introduced torture. Long needles were plunged
through Marleyıs stomach through to the spine. The patient-victim was
told that this was part of his "treatment." The torture continued until
Marley foundered on the threshold of death.
Cedella Booker-Marley, his mother, visited him three times in the course
of the "treatments." She found Dr. Issels to be an "arrogant wretch" with
the "gruff manners of a bully" who subjected her dying son to a bloodless
brand of "hocus-pocus" medicine. Booker-Marley: "I myself witnessed
Isselsı rough treatment of Nesta [Marley]. One time I went with Nesta to
the clinic, and we settled down in a treatment room. Issels came in and
announced to Nesta, Iım going to give you a needle.ı" Dr. Issels
"plunged the needle straight into Nestaıs navel right down to the
syringe. [Marley] grunted and winced. He could only lie there helplessly,
writhing on the table, trying his best to hide his pain. Jesus Christ,ı
I heard myself mumbling." Issels yanked out the needle and strolled
casually out of the room. Marley was left groaning with pain. "I went and
stood at his side and held his hand."
"With every visit," she recalls, "I found him smaller, frailer, thinner.
As the months of dying dragged past, the suffering was etched all over
his face. He would fall into fits of shaking, when he would lose all
control and shiver from head to toe like a coconut leaf in a breeze. His
eyes would turn in his head, rolling in their sockets until even the
white jelly was quivering."
Marleyıs torment was aggravated by starvation. "For a whole week
sometimes," Booker laments, her son "would be allowed no nourishment
other than what he got intravenously. Constantly hungry, even starving,
he wasted away to a skeleton"starved to death like an Auschwitz inmate.
"To watch my first-born shrivel up to skin and bone ripped at my motherıs
heart." Marley weighed 82 pounds on the day of his death. The starvation
diet must have devastated his immune system and rushed his demise, not
prolonged his life as Dr. Issels and some biographers have contended. It
also caused him intense pain. "It would drag on so, for one long painful
month after the other, and every day would be a knife that death stabbed
and twisted anew in an already open, bleeding wound." The agony "wrapped
him up like a crushing
snake."
Death finally claimed Marley on May 11, 1980. In Jamaica, the 20th was
declared a national day of mourning. Marleyıs wake at the National Arena
was attended by some 30,000 mourners.
He was survived by his old partner Peter Tosh, who was shot to death in
1987. Marley and Tosh were not the only musicians murdered for political
reasons in Jamaca. By the end of the decade, all Jamaican musicians were
censored and subject to shell-casing politics.
The islandıs Daily Gleamer reported in 1987 that Winston "Yellowman"
Foster, stopped at a police roadblock and frisked for drugs, resisted
detainment. One of the officers hissed, "You want to go like Tosh?" When
Tosh went there was nothing random about it. Witnesses and friends insist
that he was a political hit. Two of the gunmen fled New York and remain
at large. The third was Leppo Leppon, an ex-con sentenced for the murder
after an 11-minute trial.
Like Marley, Peter Tosh found the bloodshed and hypocrisy of death squad
justice and CIA covert ops in the Third World unbearable. He was so
obsessed with hidden evil and the upswell of violence in Jamaica that
they visited him in his sleep. He had "visions" of "destruction [and]
millions of people inside of [a] pit going down. And I ... say, blood
bath, where so much people come from?ı And looking in the pit, mon, it
the biggest pit...but the way the people was crying, it was awful."