Most people find it quite easy to believe that the airplane crash that killed Yevgeny Pigrozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, who had led a mutiny against the Russian government, was no simple accident. In fact, word has leaked from U.S. intelligence that an intentional explosion brought the airplane down and that President Vladimir Putin was behind it.
The CIA would have some familiarity with such methods. The contrived “accident” is right there in their assassination manual as an expedient form of secret assassination, allowing the perpetrator to deny responsibility for something deemed not to be a murder at all and attracting little attention. An airplane crash is not on their list of contrived accidents, but it takes little imagination to see that that would be one of the easiest forms to pull off. All it would require would be access to the airplane for the purpose of planting a timed explosive prior to the flight. Suspicions of such secret assassinations in the United States are widespread.
The first one that comes to mind is that of John Kennedy, Jr. Michael Rivero includes him on his voluminous “Clinton body count” list because he was said to be seriously considering running for the U.S. Senate seat for New York that Hillary Clinton eventually won, using it as a springboard for her political career. In fact, Rivero has the names of 39 people on the list who have died in airplane accidents alone.
As suspicions of air crash fatalities with a political angle go, that of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone probably tops the list. Right next to it would be the disappearance in Alaska of the airplane of Rep. Hale Boggs of Louisiana along with Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska. We need say little more about that one than to remind readers that Boggs had been a critical member of the Warren Commission that “investigated” the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And even The Washington Post is still suspicious of the plane crash that killed Dorothy Hunt, the wife of Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, with James D. Robenalt writing in that newspaper in 2022, “Fifty years later, it is still unclear whether there was ‘foul play,’ as the National Transportation Safety Board characterized the speculation, in the downing of United 553.”
In the international realm, the two cases of suspicious plane crashes that probably top the list are those of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld and Pakistani dictator Muhammed Zia ul-Haq.
A form of contrived accident that the CIA assassination manual does mention is an automobile accident. The most famous possible one of that sort was that of General George S. Patton. General Patton had been quite open in his pro-German and anti-Jewish sentiments, and he had many supporters in the United States. Much lesser known is the very suspicious death of the young Rolling Stone reporter, Michael Hastings, in 2013. I link to an account of his strange fatal “accident” in my poem, “Assassination 101.” Here is how Carl Gibson’s article on the subject begins:
Early in the morning on June 18, a brand new Mercedes C250 coupe was driving through the Melrose intersection on Highland Avenue in Hollywood when suddenly, out of nowhere, it sped up. According to an eye-witness, the car accelerated rapidly, bounced several times then fishtailed out of control before it slammed into a palm tree and burst into flames, ejecting its engine some 200 feet away.
We learn from Gibson that Hastings had written very critically and trenchantly about the U.S. military in Afghanistan in general and General Stanley McChrystal in particular, and that his life had actually been threatened by one of Gen. McChrystal’s aides.
We have also written about the supposedly accidental deaths of two very prominent people that are also very suspicious, bearing very strong earmarks that they were really secret assassinations. The first article was about the supposed skiing accident by the experienced skier, California Congressman Sonny Bono in January of 1998. Bono had exhibited greater public curiosity than any other member of Congress about the siege in 1993 upon the compound of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.
The second one is about the death of the 84-year-old Washington Post publisher, Katharine Graham, supposedly from a simple fall on a sidewalk in Sun Valley, Idaho, in July of 2001. We speculate that she must have been a stumbling block to the 9/11 false flag operation that was in its planning stages. Our main reason for being suspicious of the death is that no one seems to have witnessed the fall, which somehow managed to cause multiple fractures of her skull (unreported by the national press, including Graham’s own newspaper) and that we were not even told who found her lying on the sidewalk and summoned emergency workers.
Along with Hugh Turley, we have gone far beyond the Bono and Graham level of speculation in our examination of the supposed death-by-accidental-electrocution on December 10, 1968, of the famous Catholic monk and writer, Thomas Merton. We have now produced two books, The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, and Thomas Merton’s Betrayers: The Case against Abbot James Fox and Author John Howard Griffin, and numerous articles on the subject. We believe that we have shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that Merton was not killed by the faulty Hitachi fan in his room found lying across his supine body in a Red Cross retreat center in Thailand, which is the press-promoted story but was never the official cause of death as determined by the Thai police.
T.E. Lawrence’s “Motorcycle Accident”
This brings us to the main title character of this essay. The Englishman, Mark J.T. Griffin, with his 2022 book, Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia,* has now produced two major works on the man’s very suspicious death. The first was the critically acclaimed and multiply awarded fictionalized movie, Lawrence after Arabia. The fate of that movie up to now is well captured by the title we chose for the essay we wrote about it, “Important Assassination Movie Quashed.” Not only did the film get no commercial distributor, despite its artistic quality and the importance of the subject, which should have sparked worldwide interest, but there has hardly even been any mention of it on the Internet.
We did find a Fox News article entitled “Lawrence of Arabia might have been murdered by British secret service, new film suggests” written by a reporter named Benjamin Weinthal. It was published on December 11, 2018, which is before the movie was released, and Weinthal makes it clear that he had not had the opportunity to see the movie. Nevertheless, Weinthal writes in his article, “The problem with Griffin’s claims are [sic] the lack of any solid evidence. Leading Lawrence scholars such as Jeremy Wilson, the author of ‘Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T. E. Lawrence (1989)’, said: ‘Countless fictions have built up around Lawrence’s life.’”
The article is accompanied by a short video, which consists of a series of declarative statements against a background of still photographs and a musical background suggesting tension. Right at the beginning it states as a fact that Lawrence “died in a 1935 motorcycle accident in England.” Near the end we have this: “Griffin lacks any substantial evidence for his claims. Many prominent Lawrence biographers have tried to debunk the rumors for years.”
The video is doubtless Weinthal’s handiwork as well, written, as we have noted, without his even having seen the movie. What one sees here, in lieu of evidence, is the invocation of nos. 3 and 7 of our “Seventeen Techniques for Truth Suppression.” Number 3 is “Characterize the charges as rumors”; number 7 is “Invoke authority.” The authority that he invokes is that of “many prominent Lawrence biographers, only one of whom he names, the authorized biographer Wilson.
We admit that we haven’t read Wilson’s book, but from reading Griffin’s very persuasive one, we strongly suspect that when it comes to the matter of Lawrence’s death that Wilson is even less authoritative than authorized biographer, Michael Mott, is concerning Thomas Merton’s death. As for those other “prominent” people who have weighed in, we think it’s likely that they are of a piece with the numerous prominent people who have “informed us” about Merton’s death.
We also must wonder if some of the supposed “conspiracy theorists” in the case might not just be another layer in the cover-up. In my essay on Griffin’s movie, I quote from a 2013 Internet article by Tony Hays entitled “The Murder of Lawrence of Arabia,” reminding readers that Hays has demonstrated shortcomings as a source of information in the case of U.S. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal’s death. Hays leads off with this passage:
On May 13, 1935, Lawrence was out riding his motorcycle near Clouds Hill, his cottage close to Wareham. According to the official version of the story, he came to a dip in the road. As he rode up the rise, he found himself about to hit two boys on bicycles. Swerving, he lost control and was flipped over the handlebars of his motorcycle, sustaining a mortal head wound, but not without clipping one of the boys.
Hays then goes on to tell us about witnesses who saw a black car that might have struck the motorcycle causing it to go out of control, but nowhere does he have anything to say about Lawrence finding himself suddenly about to hit the bicyclists after coming over a rise. When one hears that Lawrence had collided with the rear of a bicycle, the first thing that comes to mind is that he must have come upon the bike blindly and suddenly, sort of like the false image of a decrepit Third World situation that comes to mind upon hearing that Thomas Merton has been killed in Thailand by a faulty fan.
Hays, we find, is not alone in perpetuating the seemingly plausible scenario that Lawrence came upon the cyclists suddenly. This is from the T.E. Lawrence Wikipedia page:
On 13 May 1935, Lawrence was fatally injured in an accident on his Brough Superior SS100 motorcycle in Dorset close to his cottage Clouds Hill, near Wareham, just two months after leaving military service. A dip in the road obstructed his view of two boys on their bicycles; he swerved to avoid them, lost control, and was thrown over the handlebars.
Wikipedia’s footnote reference for that is a 2009 book review from the BBC. But here’s what the BBC article actually said:
On May 13th he set out on his Brough motorcycle from Clouds Hill to the camp at Bovington, but as he returned home he swerved to avoid two boys cycling along the road, and was thrown over the handlebars, fracturing his skull. He never regained consciousness, and died six days later.
Notice that there is no obstructed view caused by a dip in the road in the referenced BBC account. Writer Jane Curran only says falsely that Lawrence swerved away from the boys when, in fact, he swerved into the trailing bicycle.
Actually, the entire Wikipedia scenario, the one that Hays fails to debunk, is utterly false, as we see from this passage from Griffin:
Given that Lawrence was riding downhill towards the two cyclists, he would have most likely seen them from 500 yards away and would not have ridden into the back of them unless, of course, there was something which he needed to avoid, i.e., another vehicle. (p. 53)
Indeed! That’s why the existence of the black four-door car that had met the two boys riding single file hugging the side of the road single file and appeared to cause Lawrence’s motorcycle to swerve out of control after meeting with it is so important. The road was narrow, about 13 ft. wide according to Griffin’s estimate, but that still would have allowed plenty of room for Lawrence to pass the cyclists. The normal thing for him to have done would have been to steer toward the middle of the road and routinely pass the two boys. They had been riding abreast, but upon hearing the loud motorcycle approaching from behind, they had gone into single file to get out of the motorcycle’s way. This, too, is routine behavior.
What could have possibly disrupted the routine? Yates states quite carelessly, “Almost immediately, rumors cropped up of a mysterious black car that ran Lawrence off the road.”
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