-Caveat Lector-
Sunday times
March 14 1999 UNITED STATES
US 'poisoned Robeson' with mind-bending drug
by Tom Rhodes
New York
THE round of meetings, interviews and speeches had been strenuous but by the
time he reached his Moscow hotel on a spring evening in 1961, Paul Robeson,
the singer, actor and black American radical, was in unusually good spirits.
He was planning to meet Fidel Castro in Cuba before returning to America to
join the growing wave of civil rights activism led by Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X. It was an exciting prospect.
However, Robeson never made it to Cuba. After a surprise party in his hotel
suite, he was hit by a sense of extreme paranoia and tried to kill himself
by slashing his wrists.
Three weeks later Cuban exiles led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
landed in the island's Bay of Pigs in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow
Castro. This led to an international crisis that brought the world to the
brink of nuclear war.
On the surface, the two events appear unconnected. But now Robeson's son is
blaming the CIA for the sudden deterioration in his father's health, from
which the singer never fully recovered before his death in 1977.
Paul Robeson Jr claims his father may have been poisoned by the agency to
prevent what would have been a high-profile visit to Havana at the time of
the American-backed invasion. He believes this was part of a wider plot to
ensure that the charismatic activist never assumed his place in the vanguard
of the civil rights movement.
According to Robeson Jr, his father's symptoms at the time of the attempted
suicide were identical to those produced by BZ, a mind-altering drug
developed by intelligence agencies in Britain and America for use in a
highly classified psychological warfare programme known as MK-Ultra. He says
that at least two doctors who subsequently treated his father in London and
New York had links to the programme.
In an initiative that coincides with the centenary of Robeson's birth, the
singer's son is making a formal approach to British, American and Russian
intelligence organisations, demanding the release of classified documents
relating to his father's visit to Moscow and medical treatment.
Most people remember Robeson for his rich bass voice and songs such as Ol'
Man River and Summertime that formed the core of his repertoire. In Britain
he was also famous for his portrayal of Othello opposite the young Peggy
Ashcroft's Desdemona - and the couple's controversial love affair.
Robeson, however, was more than an actor and singer. He learnt more than 20
languages, including several African dialects, Chinese and Russian. He was
also the first black man to be employed by a leading New York law firm.
For intelligence agencies in America and Britain, Robeson's stature as an
artist, combined with his increasingly radical politics, made him a serious
threat. He was a close friend not only to American activists but also to
leading lights of the colonial independence movement such as Jawaharlal
Nehru and Jomo Kenyatta.
As early as 1935, MI5 officers visited Robeson on the set of Sanders of the
River, an Alexander Korda epic that was the first to feature a powerful
black male star. The CIA opened a file on Robeson in 1943. At the end of the
war his case was assigned to the agent directly responsible for covert
operations.
According to his son, Robeson had several close brushes with death in the
next decade. In 1947, a car in which he was a passenger suddenly lost its
left wheel and was found to have been sabotaged. He was a target of Senator
Joseph McCarthy's 1950-54 anti-communist witch-hunt and, with the onset of
the cold war, his politics effectively ended his mainstream musical and
theatrical careers.
Robeson Jr formed his theory about an attempt to "neutralise" his father in
Moscow after more than 35 years of investigation and the gradual
declassification of intelligence documents. A fluent Russian speaker, he has
interviewed senior officials in Moscow, including the hosts of the surprise
party - which appeared to have been filled with anti-Soviet dissidents.
When he visited his father in hospital the day after the suicide attempt,
the singer said he had felt trapped in a real-life "James Bond nightmare".
The walls had seemed to undulate and everyone appeared hostile to the
communist regime. He shut himself in his bedroom, suffering extreme
depression and feelings of utter worthlessness - symptoms that can be
induced by hallucinogenic drugs.
Shortly afterwards he was admitted to the Priory hospital in London. Within
36 hours of his arrival, and against the advice of his Soviet doctors,
Robeson was subjected to the first of 54 electro-convulsive shock therapy
sessions.
Mike Miniccino, an MK-Ultra historian with contacts in American
intelligence, said the argument that Robeson had been targeted by the CIA
was "entirely plausible". The Russian doctors and his family kept his
suicide attempt and depression a secret, claiming he had suffered a heart
attack. But between April and June 1961 the FBI kept a "status of health"
file on the artist which reveals that plans were made to prevent the world
communist movement from exploiting his "imminent" death.
"The fact that such a file was opened at all is sinister in itself," said
Robeson Jr, 71, at his house in Brooklyn, New York, last week. "It indicates
a degree of prior knowledge that something was about to happen to him."
Additional reporting: Kevin Dowling
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