Lawrence of Arabia and Yevgeny Prigrozhin

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Most people find it quite easy to believe that the airplane crash that killed Yevgeny Prigrozhin, 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 suspicious air crash fatalities with a political angle go, that of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone is also high on 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 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.”

There are those darned “rumors” again.  Then Yates follows with this mishmash:

Dorset historian Rodney Legg and Lawrence biographer Desmond Stewart both believed that Lawrence was assassinated. Four witnesses stated that they saw the mysterious black car: the two children who were involved in the incident;  a man in a delivery van;  and a soldier, one Private Catchpole, who happened to be in a nearby field. The children were kept incommunicado in a hospital and did not testify at the inquest, which was conducted, oddly enough, at Bovington Camp, and controlled by MI-5 rather than the local police. Catchpole did testify about the black car, but he, conveniently, killed himself shortly thereafter. The inquest was held in the morning; Lawrence was buried the same afternoon. (bolding in the original)

The soldier in question was Corporal, not Private, Ernest Catchpole.  Stationed at Bovington Camp by the side of the road, he stated at the inquest that he was some 100 yards away from the incident when he saw the oncoming black car meet first the boys on the bike and then Lawrence’s motorcycle.  He did not see any collision between the motorcycle and the car, but he did see the motorcycle go out of control after it had encountered the car. He stuck to his story until he was ruled to have shot himself to death some five years later while on military assignment in Cairo, Egypt.  Griffin does not question the suicide verdict, but he seems not to have looked into the matter, and its very fact should raise eyebrows.  Staff Sergeant Catchpole—to which he had been promoted—left a wife and daughter.

Griffin writes on page 50, “Catchpole’s testimony became notorious after Lawrence’s death and the press, very much like the present day undertook a ‘hatchet job’ on him, for example reporting he had a history of mental instability.”  To the contrary, according to Griffin, the two military-associate sources he was able to find described him as a generally normal, sober, and sensible person whose most notable abnormality might have been his scrupulous honesty.

Griffin doesn’t enumerate the witnesses who say they saw the black car, but from his description it sounds like there were more than four of them.  The two bicyclists were not exactly children.  Frank Fletcher, riding in front, and Albert Hargraves, whose bicycle Lawrence’s motorcycle hit, were both fourteen years old.   Yates notwithstanding, they both testified at the inquest, sounding as though they had been coached, according to Griffin, and both claimed not to have seen any such car.  But here’s Griffin’s telling paragraph regarding the black-car witnesses:

Rodney Legg, a well-known local historian, knew many of the people at the scene of the incident.  His findings were that a number of soldiers, as well as Catchpole, had seen the black car.  Legg said one of the reasons Catchpole was selected as a kind of spokesman was because he insisted that he make an appearance in court and would act as a representative for a group of soldiers who were witnesses at the accident site. (p. 44)

Three paragraphs later Griffin writes, “Catchpole was one of a group of men who had helped put Lawrence on the lorry.  A number of these men, soldiers and civilians, corroborated Catchpole’s report of the car.” (p. 45)

Yates is probably correct, then, that the historian Legg believed that Lawrence was assassinated, because the official conclusion that there was no such black car is a cornerstone of the simple-accident conclusion.  And on page 167 Griffin writes, “Desmond Morris compiled evidence that Lawrence’s death was a cold-blooded murder.”

Griffin has no citation for his observation about Morris, but he is doubtless referring to the 1977 book, T.E. Lawrence: A New Biography, which is listed in Griffin’s short bibliography.   One of the customer reviewers on Amazon writes, “Stewart details the circumstances of his death, in a motorcycle ‘accident,’ of which some salient irregularities have never been explained.”

So, the impression that Fox News would leave with us that Griffin is out on a lonesome limb among scholars concerning Lawrence of Arabia’s death is false.  Concerning the one scholar that the writer Weinthal names, Griffin has this to say: “T.E. Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson covers the crash in one five-lined paragraph in his seminal 1,188-page biography.”

I would say that the many “salient irregularities” in the case would have been a bit much for Wilson to tackle in five lines, or in five pages, for that matter, and Wilson doubtless knew where his bread was buttered.

Speaking of those irregularities, it gets worse, much worse, for the official simple-accident conclusion.  First, Ralph Neville-Jones, the East Dorset coroner who conducted the inquest before a seven-person jury made up of local men, which took place just two days after Lawrence’s death, which came six days after the road incident, directed the jury with this summary statement:

The only conflicting point in the evidence seemed to be that with regard to the black car.  I do not necessarily mean that the car had anything to do with the accident, but the fact that Corporal Catchpole is certain that he saw it and the boys were certain that they had not seen a car is rather unsatisfactory.  You have now heard the evidence and I do not think you will have any difficulty in arriving at your verdict.  The facts are only too clear, and that that the collision was an accident there can be no doubt.  What caused the deceased to run into the pedal cyclist from the rear we shall never know, but the evidence would lead one to think that Mr Shaw [the last name that Lawrence had assumed in an attempt to get out of the public spotlight] must have been travelling at so very fast a speed that he lost control of his motorcycle.

I do not think there can be any other conclusion on the evidence.  Under the circumstances you will doubtless consider the proper verdict to bring in will be one of accidental death.

In his outrageous direction of the jury to a verdict, Neville-Jones stuck narrowly to the testimony that was permitted at the short and suspiciously hasty inquest, leaving out the fact that there were several other witnesses, all of whom corroborated Catchpole’s testimony.  He also failed to tell them, as Griffin tells us on page 27, that both military and civilian police had told the fathers of Fletcher and Hargraves “that on no account were their sons to be interviewed without authority.”  The military personnel at Bovington Camp had also been ordered not to speak to the press lest they run afoul of the severe penalties associated with Britain’s Official Secrets Act.

Even that might not have been the most important evidence omitted from the inquest, though.  Two hours after the incident, the maker of the motorcycle, George Brough, had examined it for defects.  As Griffin puts it on page 48, “Although he found no serious structural or mechanical fault, he noted there was black paint on the offside (right) handlebar and the petrol tank.”

Whoa!  What else do you need?  Recall that they drive on the left in Britain.  The rider of a motorcycle goes wildly out of control after meeting a black car, and flecks of black paint are found on the handlebar that would have been closest to the car, and on the fuel tank.  Could there be clearer evidence of hit-and-run?  That’s how Brough interpreted it, and so did the historian Legg, and that’s surely how any objective person or competent accident investigator would see it.  And yet, no all-points bulletin was sent out for the car, and it was never located.  Brough did not testify in person at the inquest, because he felt that it would have been incumbent upon him to mention the black paint on the motorcycle, and the authorities were clear that he was only to weigh in on its mechanical soundness; his relatively innocuous written statement on that was therefore all that was entered into the record.

That the immediate “investigators,” the news media, and the preponderance  of the historians have ignored this well-nigh definitive evidence of a collision speaks volumes.  Notice, as well, that the muckraking Internet writer, Tony Yates, makes no mention of Brough’s discovery, either, while freely throwing around the mind-deadening “rumor” word.

Who Did It and Why?

With respect to the first question, the volumes spoken by what we have just recounted demonstrate that the British equivalent of America’s Deep State was up to its eyeballs in the murder.  Yates says flat out that the inquest was controlled by MI5 instead of the local police, which might well have been true, but that would have been making matters altogether too obvious, and Yates doesn’t tell us how he knows that, so we can just chalk that one up to another example of the man’s loose connection to the truth.  It was quite odd, though, as Griffin points out, that a civilian proceeding should have been held in a room of the military facility of Bovington Camp.  The fact of the matter is that Britain’s secret service doubtless has its own version of the CIA’s assassination manual, and this one has all the earmarks of the “accident” version of a secret assassination.

But one hasn’t reached the heart of the matter by saying that Britain’s spooks did it.  Who pulls their strings, or, more precisely, who was pulling their strings in this instance, and who continued to pull the strings of people like biographer Jeremy Wilson and reporter Benjamin Weinthal at Fox News?  To get an answer to that question, one must move quickly to the “why.”

At this point, an observation by the American social critic, Paul Goodman, that I like to quote is appropriate, “In America, you can say anything you want as long as it has no effect.”  I dare say that the saying applies as well in Britain, and it also was the case in 1935 when T.E. Lawrence met his death.  It begs the question of what might happen to you if what you say does have an effect and it runs contrary to what those in power want the public to hear.

Lawrence, only 46 years old when he died, was already a legendary character because of his success in mobilizing the Arabs in insurrection against the Turkish allies of the Germans in World War I.  Thanks largely to the writing, films, and lectures about his exploits by the American journalist, Lowell Thomas, he was already “Lawrence of Arabia.”  His opinions had great effect because of his prominence, and he was not shy in giving his opinion.

Lawrence’s position as the most prominent spokesman for the aggrieved Arabs would have put him squarely in the crosshairs of the Zionists, which must make them the top suspect in his death.   Here is how I conclude my article on the quashing of Griffin’s movie:

Avoiding the [Zionism] topic keeps people away from suspecting that the people behind Lawrence’s death are those with a very extensive assassination record in furtherance of their political objectives such as the killing of Lord MoyneCount Bernadotte, and likely of Gerald Bull, and of Palestinian leaders too numerous to mention.  For clandestine assassinations the staged accident is almost as popular as the staged suicide, which was clearly the fate of the leading U.S. opponent of Zionism, Defense Secretary James Forrestal.    It’s really very easy to get by with when you have the government and the news media in your pocket.  The effective suppression of Lawrence: After Arabia shows that it’s also very helpful to have control over the entertainment industry, as well.

I might also have mentioned that the Zionists attempted to kill British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in 1946 with letter bombs and even U.S. President Harry Truman by the same method in 1947.  The “natural” death of the powerful anti-Zionist publisher, Lord Northcliffe, in 1922 is also highly suspicious.  Chapter 7 of the second edition of The Assassination of James Forrestal, entitled “Britain’s Forrestal,” is devoted to the Bevin case, and chapter 8, “The Other British Forrestal,” deals with Northcliffe and other suspicious deaths of prominent people.  The concluding chapter 18 sums up the stunningly murderous Zionist record.

From Griffin we learn that we might add a couple of more prominent names to the suspicious-death list.  A man whom Lawrence had befriended and supported, Faisal bin Hussein, king of Syria in 1920 and of Iraq from 1921 until his death in Switzerland, supposedly died from a heart attack in 1933.  He was only 48 years old.  His son Ghazi, who succeeded him as king at age 20, was killed in what Griffin characterizes as “a mysterious car accident” in April 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II.

Griffin runs through a list of suspects in Lawrence’s murder, which includes the Zionists, but, curiously, he doesn’t quite make them his prime suspects.  He notes that there were Zionist Haganah agents based in England and that the violent Stern Gang was active throughout Europe, but he doesn’t think that they did it.  But he apparently means that in the sense that they weren’t the ones driving the black car, because he concludes his section on the Zionists this way:

However, it is more likely they would have contacted British Zionists and indeed British Intelligence Services if they had concerns, and if they thought action was necessary against Lawrence.

The Zionists would have had “agents” in England, but it is far more likely that they would have outsourced any action to British intelligence.

Yes, we would agree that that’s how it would have been done, but we would go farther than Griffin and say that, in all likelihood, that’s how it was done.

Considering the very strong evidence of Zionist interest in seeing Lawrence dead, Griffin has a quite curious passage in his afterword.  The afterword begins with what Griffin seemed to regard as a surprising interest by the Israelis in his movie project.  An Israeli journalist, he tells us, kept pestering him with questions as to whether he might point the finger of blame for Lawrence’s death at the Zionists.  Griffin just put the man off and never did answer his questions, but when his movie, which does mention almost in passing the possibility of Zionist involvement, failed to get a distributor, he began to wonder.  Then comes the odd passage on his concluding page 204:

I began to realise that even if the movie didn’t contain hints of Zionist culpability, and even if they weren’t behind his assassination (which I believe), the very suggestion that Lawrence was assassinated is certain to make some suspect the Zionists, with their assassination record, their power, and how much they stood to benefit in the mid-1930s by getting the bothersome Lawrence out of the way.

How could Griffin possibly believe that the Zionists were not behind it, one might wonder.  That would doubtless be because of the other big issue, which we have not previously mentioned, over which Lawrence was seriously at odds with British government leadership at the time.  He had been cozying up to relatively pro-German, antiwar elements within British society, which was a good deal stronger at the time than most people now realize.

Both Yates and Griffin mention Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), as one of the people Lawrence was aligning himself with, but neither offers any evidence that there was even any communication between the two men.  The nature writer and fellow WW I veteran, Henry Williamson, who was quite pro-German and antiwar, who would join the BUF in 1937, whom both Yates and Griffin also name as a Lawrence associate, is a horse of a different color, though.  Williamson and Lawrence were quite close.  In fact, on his fateful motorcycle ride, he was on his way back from the post office in Bovington, where he had sent a telegraph in response to a letter that he had received from Williamson a couple of days before.  (That letter was among the things taken from Lawrence’s house when government agents scoured it immediately after his death, and it was never made public).

Perhaps it was Lawrence’s pro-German, antiwar orientation that got him assassinated.  At this point, though, we would call Griffin’s attention to the footnote on page 90 of The Assassination of James Forrestal in which we quote from The Forrestal Diaries:

22 December 1945: Played golf today with Joe Kennedy [Joseph P. Kennedy, who was Roosevelt’s Ambassador to Great Britain in the years immediately before the war].  I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on…Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war.

If we believe Kennedy and Winston Churchill’s predecessor as British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, the motivation for bumping off Lawrence traces back, then, to pretty much the same people.

Finally, one can hardly help noticing the similarities between Lawrence’s death and that of Princess Diana in August of 1997 in Paris.  Diana also died in a highly suspicious vehicular crash, in her case, as a passenger in a car that crashed in a tunnel.  If the same organization was behind each of the “accidents,” the one that killed Diana might have shown what they had learned from their earlier experience.  There had turned out to be too many troublesome, unexpected witnesses who had to be leaned on and silenced.  One of them, Corporal Catchpole, who was intimidated and urged to change his story about the black car the same as the young cyclists and their fathers were leaned on, turned out to be a rare, courageous person who would not bend.  He was very much like the witness, Patrick Knowlton, in the case of the death of Bill Clinton’s Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster.  Knowlton would not change his story at the urging of his two FBI interrogators and later frightening intimidation on the streets of Washington, DC.  He insisted that the car he had seen parked in the lot at Fort Marcy Park was different in color and in age from Foster’s, when Foster’s body lay in the back of the park, and he stuck to the story.

In his book, The Big Breach: From Top Secret to Maximum Security, former MI6 agent, Richard Tomlinson, who was assigned to Sarajevo during the Bosnian War for independence in the mid-1990s, talks of a proposal by his supervisor “to arrange a car ‘accident’ to kill [Serbian President Slobodan] Milosevic, possibly while attending the ICFY (International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia) peace talks in Geneva.  [The supervisor] proposed using a bright flashing strobe gun to disorientate Milosevic’s chauffeur while the cavalcade passed through a tunnel.  The advantage of a tunnel crash was that there would be fewer incidental witnesses and a greater chance that the ensuing accident would be fatal.”  (p. 142)

Indeed, Griffin has also noticed the similarities and devotes a page to the matter in a section entitled “Princess Diana and T.E. Lawrence.”  It consists primarily of eight bullet points.  No. 2 is, “The British Establishment regarded them as ‘loose cannons’ and both were under surveillance by the Secret Service,” and no. 6 is, “Key witnesses to Diana and Lawrence’s crash died or committed suicide soon after.”

Griffin overlooked what might well be the greatest similarity of all, one that to my mind points the finger at the most likely perpetrator of both assassinations.  For that one, we turn to Noel Bothan’s 2018 book, The Murder of Princess Diana: “The princess’s decision to embrace Islam could easily have affected relations between Church and state; in Israel, it was widely believed the union of Diana and Dodi [Al Fayed] signaled a change in world opinion in favor of the Arabs and consequently against Israeli interests.”

And T.E. Lawrence was “Lawrence of Arabia,” after all.

*Griffin’s book has been little read, at least by Amazon.com customers, because it has received virtually no publicity, and it is expensive.  For those who find the price off-putting, I strongly recommend that they buy or rent his movie from Amazon, which they can do at a fraction of the price.  They can just take my word for it that he supports the scenario painted by the movie quite well with the book.

David Martin

14 Thoughts to “Lawrence of Arabia and Yevgeny Prigrozhin”

  1. John

    Curious whether you think Georgia Congressman Lawrence McDonald and/or Ann Hecht might also belong on the list.

    1. I must say that I was suspicious of the shoot-down by the Soviets of KAL 707 on which John Birch Society member and leading anti-Coummunist Rep. Larry McDonald was a passenger at the time. It didn’t make sense that they could mistake this obvious civilian airliner for a military aircraft. For them to have specifically targeted the plane because McDonald was on it didn’t seem at all plausible to me then, but having since learned of the pro-Communist sympathies of people at the highest levels of power in this country, I might have some second thoughts about that. The primary objection, as I see it, was that for all I know McDonald was no more than a pinprick of a nuisance to them, hardly worth such a monstrous crime. He was hardly a Lawrence of Arabia when it came to his words having any effect. And I don’t know of any particular scandal that McDonald was looking into, as was the case with Sonny Bono. And unlike the Bono death, it would have required the complicity of the Soviets over a likely parochial scandal that should hardly interest them. For what it is worth, like Vince Foster, the rare muckraking journalist Whitney Webb, and this writer, McDonald was a graduate of Davidson College.

      Like that of journalist Michael Hastings, the fatal car crash of actress Anne Heche seems very odd, but unlike that of Hastings, Heche’s death would seem to be of benefit to no one politically, that is, that I know of. So my level of suspicion of that one is at this point pretty low.

      1. One of my West Coast correspondents, who is better informed about this matter than I am, writes, “Anne Heche was reportedly trying to expose the Hollywood pedophiles and their satanic crimes , which apparently include ritual infanticide. There’s the possible motive.”

        That would be really shocking, but hardly beyond belief, so bad have things become. There might also have been a pedophile-protection motivation behind Vince Foster’s murder, after all. See my article, “Was Vince Foster’s Murder PizzaGate-Related?” https://www.dcdave.com/article5/161213.htm. That article makes up chapter 16 of my book, “The Murder of Vince Foster: America’s Would-Be Dreyfus Affair.”

  2. Crackin’ article David. I think you’ve covered the bases and more besides. Meanwhile, the documentary “Who Killed Lawrence of Arabia” based on the book is in now pre-production and hopefully release in 2024/25.
    Well done !

  3. Curmudgeon

    I’ve ridden motorcycles for over 50 years. I can’t imagine how “clipping” the back of a bicycle would cause a rider, especially an experienced rider like Lawrence, to go over the handlebars. Experienced riders know how to “lay” the bike down, particularly when swerving. As for the motorcycle itself, Brough Superiors were very heavy motorcycles for their day. “Superior” came from sourcing the best parts from every motorcycle, including Harley Davidson, and assembling/adapting them. “Clipping” a bicycle would hardly create a collision with enough force to send a rider “over the handlebars”, but would cause damage to the bicycle.
    A photo of Lawrence on his Brough can be seen here. https://www.motorcyclespecs.co.za/bikes/brough-superior.html

  4. John McClain

    I’ve ridden motorcycles for better than fifty years, I own half a dozen right now, two with my own custom designed frames and built entirely by myself. I’ve been “clipped by cars” accidentally and with deliberate intent and am alive only because I’ve laid down bikes at high speeds many times since age 11. I don’t believe clipping a bicycle would be sufficient to cause a fatal crash. It’s been fifteen years since the last time “I was clipped” going to California from North Carolina, I was only fifty then.

  5. Dimitri Ledkovsky

    Probably there is no entry anywhere by which to spell check Prigozhin’s name, which is contrary to the one offered in this article – “Pigrozhin.” However it’s a funny typo since “rozha” in Russian is a crude word meaning “face.” Thus you can read “Pigrozhin” as “Pigface.” Hard to argue with the aptness of such a name.

    1. Drat! I knew something didn’t look quite right. Originally I had it even worse, “Pidrozhin,” but the person who caught it only had me change the “d” to a “g.” Funny error, though, which I shall fix forthwith.

  6. A Bostonian

    What about the plane crash that killed Alaska Senator Ted Stevens?

    1. I don’t know of any particular reason for anyone to want to see Senator Stevens dead. The best article I have been able to find online on the subject seems to be this one: https://www.adn.com/ted-stevens-1923-2010/article/ted-stevens-plane-crash-did-pilots-health-issues-contribute-accident/2011/04/22/. We’ve seen that Wikipedia and the major news sources are not to be trusted. It’s a good sign that everything was on the up and up that the FBI had nothing to do with the crash investigation, as they did with TWA 800, if we might bring up another highly suspicious plane crash. That one appears to have been an accidental shoot-down by the U.S. military, in my opinion.

  7. Doug's Boonie

    Having ridden motorcycles since 1964 – a different perspective I will offer. And not to start any argument about riding; only to point out almost every motorcycle course advises against “laying down” a bike.
    The reason is simple, steel does not slow down anywhere near as fast as rubber (tires) on pavement or gravel. Plus once the bike is down the rider loses all control of what once was operating a some controllable energy.
    All that said I have logged many thousands of mile aboard motorcycles and endured my share of mishaps – I have the scars to prove it.
    “Clipping” anything most often does not cause an experienced rider to go down or even
    make good sense as explained in the above paragraphs.
    I’ve “clipped” deer, mailboxes, off road trees, and even objects that fell from vehicles in front of me. Not one time did “clipping cause me to “go down” or crash.
    Hitting something is entirely different and that will most assuredly ruin your ride or worse.
    Laying a motorcycle down you will hit something. First will be the pavement and the second (third etc) will be beyond your control – Good luck with that.

    1. I should point out that the author and film-maker Griffin thinks that a rear seat passenger opened the door to hit the motorcycle with it. That goes beyond mere “clipping,” considering the fact that the two vehicles were going in opposite directions. In that case, Lawrence would have stood no chance of maintaining any semblance of control of his bike. All I can attest to from experience as a long-distance road bicyclist is that for certain the boys would have been in single file as near to the edge of the road as they could get, and that typically a narrow motorcycle coming from behind would have been less of a danger than a wider automobile.

  8. Jeff

    I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was about 12 years old (I’m now nearly 72), and have owned more bikes than I can remember. I’ve gone down a number of times and at different speeds, all resulting in minor injuries. I once rear ended a Buick at 25 MPH full on as I hit a patch of sand and couldn’t stop or steer away and did NOT go over the bars…only bent the forks. Hitting a bicycle would cause zero damage, much less loss of control.

  9. […] Before that, in 1944, the Zionists had assassinated Lord Moyne, the top British administrator for the Middle East.  Not known to the public—but probably known to Forrestal as we surmise in The Assassination of James Forrestal—is that they had sent letter bombs to the leading opponent of the Zionists within the British government, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1946, and they had even sent a letter bomb to President Truman in 1947.  Later, in September of 1948, they would assassinate the man in charge of mediating the Arab-Israeli conflict, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden.  Most recently we have discovered evidence that the man who was potentially the strongest, most prominent advocate for the rights of the Arabs in Palestine, T. E. Lawrence, known for good reason as Lawrence of Arabia, died in 1935 not from a simple motorcycle accident according to the official determination but from an assassination. […]

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