Alexander Cockburn in “All The News That’s Fit To Buy” describes how the CIA disposed of Paul Robeson through drugging:
“Consider the CIA’s probable poisoning, at a fraught political moment, of Paul Robeson, the black actor, singer, and political radical. As Jeffrey St Clair and I wrote a few years ago in our book Serpents in the Garden, in the spring of 1961, Robeson planned to visit Havana, Cuba to meet with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The trip never came off because Robeson fell ill in Moscow, where he had gone to give several lectures and concerts. At the time, it was reported that Robeson had suffered a heart attack. But in fact Robeson had slashed his wrists in a suicide attempt after suffering hallucinations and severe depression. The symptoms came on following a surprise party thrown for him at his Moscow hotel.
Robeson’s son, Paul Robeson, Jr., investigated his father’s illness for more than 30 years. He believes that his father was slipped a synthetic hallucinogen called BZ by U.S. intelligence operatives at the party in Moscow. The party was hosted by anti-Soviet dissidents funded by the CIA.
Robeson Jr. visited his father in the hospital the day after the suicide attempt. Robeson told his son that he felt extreme paranoia and thought that the walls of the room were moving. He said he had locked himself in his bedroom and was overcome by a powerful sense of emptiness and depression before he tried to take his own life.
Robeson left Moscow for London, where he was admitted to Priory Hospital. There he was turned over to psychiatrists who forced him to endure 54 electro-shock treatments. At the time, electro-shock, in combination with psycho-active drugs, was a favored technique of CIA behavior modification. It turned out that the doctors treating Robeson in London and, later, in New York were CIA contractors. The timing of Robeson’s trip to Cuba was certainly a crucial factor. Three weeks after the Moscow party, the CIA launched its disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. It’s impossible to underestimate Robeson’s threat, as he was perceived by the U.S. government as the most famous black radical in the world. Through the 1950s Robeson commanded worldwide attention and esteem. He was the Nelson Mandela and Mohammed Ali of his time. He spoke more than twenty languages, including Russian, Chinese, and several African languages. Robeson was also on close terms with Nehru, Jomo Kenyatta, and other Third World leaders. His embrace of Castro in Havana would have seriously undermined U.S. efforts to overthrow the new Cuban government.
Another pressing concern for the U.S. government at the time was Robeson’s announced intentions to return to the United States and assume a leading role in the emerging civil rights movement. Like the family of Martin Luther King, Robeson had been under official surveillance for decades. As early as 1935, British intelligence had been looking at Robeson’s activities. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services, World War II predecessor to the CIA, opened a file on him. In 1947, Robeson was nearly killed in a car crash. It later turned out that the left wheel of the car had been monkey-wrenched. In the 1950s, Robeson was targeted by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings. The campaign effectively sabotaged his acting and singing career in the states.
Robeson never recovered from the drugging and the follow-up treatments from CIA-linked doctors and shrinks. He died in 1977.”
Poisonings are a Russian specialty; was never very good at them. I am sure Robeson was being played by all sides like a fiddle.
Yes…like Litvinenko, you mean?
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
Are you up on that?
Putin is the suspect, right?
Do you know anything about the story about Putin that Litvinenko had published before his death?
Re pedophilia?
Yes, like Litvinenko, which is the most extravagant case in a number of recent poisonings. But there have been many poisonings going back to at least the time of Lenin. And this is all a subtopic in the rich history of Russian state assassinations and political murder (lately business).
The people around Putin are the main suspects in the Litvinenko murder. The way it would work is that Putin wouldn’t directly order it, but someone around him would and it would just happen. Russian journalist and Putin critic Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on the same day as Putin’s birthday, causing some to think it was a “birthday present” for Putin from the people around him.
The problem with Litvinenko is that he said so many things, and made so many claims that it is impossible to trace any single one back to a motive for killing him. So the pedophile claim may or may not be true. There is a another dissident ex-FSB guy named Mikhail Trepashkin, who like Litvinenko made the claim that the FSB was behind the 1999 bombings; but unlike Litvinenko that is the only issue or claim he talks about – no one has tried to kill him because it would be obvious why.
Asia Times:
The current and past Indian governmental stance on Shastri’s death is baffling. Here was a war-time prime minister who died suddenly not just while in office, but while attending a critical summit in a super power foreign country to discuss terms to end the war. Usually, Indian governments love appointing all manner of committees of inquiry, investigations and judicial probes. But the Shastri death is cloaked in mysterious silence.
Not much controversy brews over the sequence of events on that fateful winter night of January 11, 1966, in Tashkent. After a public reception to celebrate signing the Tashkent pact, Shastri was in good health when he returned to his dacha. He was dead by 2am, following a coughing fit and losing consciousness. His personal doctor and other Russian doctors failed to revive him.
At 4am, his Soviet butler, Akhmed Sattarov, was arrested on suspicion of poisoning Shastri. He was later released and absolved of the charge.
Shastri’s wife Lalita, and later his sons Sunil and Anil, have alleged that Shastri was indeed poisoned. “I was just 16 years old then. But I remember his body had darkish blue spots on the chest, abdomen and back,” Shastri’s elder son Sunil said this month to Indian media. “My mother and we suspected he died under mysterious circumstances.”
New Delhi-based investigative journalist Anuj Dhar revived the mystery in his Right to Information petition filed on June 2. Dhar, author of books CIA’s Eye on South Asia and Back from Dead: Inside the Subhas Bose Mystery, runs website “End The Secrecy”, in which activists try to access classified Indian government documents, in a kind of Indian version of “X-File” hunters.
Responding to Dhar’s petition, in a letter dated July 1, 2009, Debraj Pradhan, joint secretary at the Ministry of External Affairs, remarkably says that the USSR government conducted no official post-mortem on the body of the former Indian prime minister.
If Shastri did not die of natural causes, then who killed him and why? Such questions continue to mystify India.
Shastri died three months before I was born, but whenever his name comes up I often recall my history professor in Loyola College declaring how much better India’s future would have been if Shastri had lived on as prime minister. I read more about him to find out why.
Shastri was prime minister for less than two years, but he is still respected, four decades later. Diminutive and soft-spoken but tough, he was considered honest, austere and a courageous leader who cared for the poor and downtrodden.
He was railway minister in Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, and among the first Indian leaders to hold himself accountable for failures. In 1956 he resigned from the post, accepting moral responsibility after a train accident that killed 144 people in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Nehru re-included him in the cabinet in 1957. Four years later, Shastri, as home minister, initiated one of independent India’s first anti-corruption measures by appointing a governmental committee, “Prevention of Corruption”.
The son of a poor schoolteacher, he came from a low-income background but remained honest in power. He was dubbed the “Homeless Home Minister” because he owned no house. He and his family lived in government quarters or in rented accommodation.
Shastri was sworn in as prime minister after Nehru’s death in 1964. He instantly caught the global media’s eye.
“Because he did not have money for the ferry fare as a schoolboy,” the New York Times wrote in its January 25, 1964, edition, “Lal Bahadur Shastri swam the Ganges twice a day with his books tied atop his head.”
Time magazine said in its January 12, 1964, story, “After Nehru, who? The man chosen last week to command one-seventh of the world’s people has a turkey neck, a smudgy mustache, and an expression of ineffable meekness. It is a little misleading, insists Lal Bahadur Shastri, the new prime minister of India. ‘I am not as simple as I look’.”
“What, then, focused attention on Shastri?” Time asked. “His personal honesty, for one thing, and his deftness at conciliation for another. A secret government poll revealed that Lal Bahadur, next to Nehru, was the best-liked, best-known figure in India.”
Shastri’s sudden death expectedly stunned India in 1966. “People then suspected the USA and CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] of being behind Shastri’s death,” remembers K K Nair, a Mumbai resident who was 32 at the time of Shastri’s death. “The talk then was that Shastri was forced into signing the Tashkent declaration, and he was killed to ensure it was not revoked.”