“Bill Close … had come to Congo just before Independence as a missionary worker, though he was a trained physician. Somehow he became President Mobutu’s personal physician as well as director of the biggest hospital in the country.
“But this didn’t fully explain the extent of his power and influence in Zaire. He was a mysterious man, thoroughly likable, with an unmatched knowledge of Zaire and connections at all levels in society."
NOTE: The AIDS Crisis began in the Congo, in Kinshasa, around 1975.
It first affected the (hetrosexual) black urban upper and middle-classes of the Congolese Civil Service, and is believed to have originated radiating outwards from two brothels known to be frequented by government officials and other elites as their primary or sole clientele.
AIDS in Africa is primarily a hetrosexual disease and intravenous drugs use is incredibly rare.
The US Embassy in Kinshasa was the regional station for all of Southern Africa - the illegal secret war in Angola was run from there, by Philip Agee and many others.
Surviving MK-Ultra documentation confirms the use by CIA of brothels as intelligence and clinical trial fronts in New York and San Francisco for non-informed consent drug trials of LSD-25, mescaline, psilocybin and other mooted "truth" drug candidates.
If Glenn Close's father was Mobutu's personal physican throughout this period, as with the Shah of Iran's personal physician, he would certainly have been an asset of CIA - the physical and psychological condition of the leaders of US Client States, especially "Strong Men" dictators installed and kept in power by CIA as Mobutu was with the assassination of Lamumba, was essential intelligence required for long term GeoStrategic planning.
"Ambassador" Richard Helms and Director of Central Intelligence, George HW Bush knew of Shah Reza Pahlavi's terminal cancer in 1975 - before the Shah's wife, twin sister, and likely before the Shah himself, and 5 years before even his inner circle.
In 1969 the famed Hollywood actress and six-time Academy Award nominee, Glenn Close, had set her sights on holy matrimony. But the budding actress, who had spent much of her childhood in the political cauldron of the newly independent Belgian Congo and later touring the world with the Moral Re-Armament singing group “Up with People”, was unable to afford the Greenwich, Connecticut, wedding befitting her pedigree.
Her father was a descendant of the prominent Taliaferros family who settled in Virginia in the 17th century, and her maternal grandfather was Charles Arthur Moore, part of the well-known American manufacturers, Manning, Maxwell and Moore. So, in stepped Joseph Desire Mobutu Sese Seko.
By the late 1960s Close’s father, the American surgeon Dr William Taliaferros Close (or Bill Close for short) had already spent close to a decade in the employ of Mobutu as the president’s personal physician. More importantly, Dr Close and Mobutu had become intimate friends; drinking pink champagne and vintage cognac together in the presidential palace in Kinshasa and taking cruises together on Mobutu’s boat that sailed the vast and meandering River Congo. Mobutu watched as Bill Close provided medical care to impoverished Congolese villagers.
So, when Close and his wife, Bettine Moore, found it difficult to pay for the wedding of their actress daughter, Mobutu stepped in and offered to pay Bill Close an astonishing (at that time) $40,000 for his decade of service to him and the people of Congo, as well as an annual $20,000 retainer fee for his medical services.
Not only was Glenn Close’s wedding to Cabot Wade well catered for, but Bill Close was also able to make a downpayment on a ranch in the US state of Wyoming, where he would spend the remainder of his life until his death in 2009 from a heart attack.
Dr Peter Piot, the Belgian former undersecretary general of the United Nations and ex-executive director of UNAIDS, confirms in his new book, No Time to Lose that, when he worked in Congo trying to save the country from the deadly Ebola virus in 1976, he became very close to Dr Bill Close. Piot writes in his memoir, published this year:
“Bill Close … had come to Congo just before Independence as a missionary worker, though he was a trained physician. Somehow he became President Mobutu’s personal physician as well as director of the biggest hospital in the country, Mama Yemo Hospital in Kinshasa (it was named for Mobutu’s mother).
“But this didn’t fully explain the extent of his power and influence in Zaire. He was a mysterious man, thoroughly likable, with an unmatched knowledge of Zaire and connections at all levels in society. A year later, he left Zaire, disillusioned by the Mobutu regime. We stayed in touch until his death in Wyoming in 2009.”
Moral Re-Armament
In 1950s America, and in the climate of the post-World War II optimism, Bill and Bettine Close became part of the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) religious movement that was started by Frank Buchman, the American Lutheran minister whose preaching centered on personal change through the application of what he believed to be the four absolute moral standards: honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Buchanan believed these would create a “force: of men and women capable of changing the world.” Years later however, the MRA shifted its focus from personal change to what Dr Close said was “a highly vocal anti-Communist lobby”.
[NOTE: "Moral Re-Armament" was a CIA/Scottish Rite/B'nai Brith/Mormon Missionary front promoted by the likes of Governor George Romney as a means to wage the Cold War via White Surpremacy and subversion of the Third World.]
At the time of his MRA activities, Bill Close had only six months left to complete his surgical residency at the Roosevelt Hospital in New York. And against the advice of his professors (and some MRA leaders) who implored him to at least finish the residency, he remained steadfast and left.
“The prospect of a ‘world mission’ that would change people and nations impelled me to resign from my surgical residency at Roosevelt six months early and commit to MRA full time”, he explained in his 2007 book, Beyond the Storm: Treating the Powerless and the Powerful in Mobutu’s Congo/Zaire. “But ‘singleness of purpose’ and ‘boundless enthusiasm’ labels pinned on me by my teachers in England, joined forces with the glorious feeling of being ‘called’, and plugged my ears to good sense.”
In May 1960, the MRA developed a plan to send a team from their group to Congo to help with the smooth transition from the then Belgian Congo to the independent nation now called DRCongo.
At the time, Chief Kalamba was the grand monarch of the Lulua community who inhabited the areas near the Lulua River, between the Kasai and Sankuru rivers in southern Congo. He and his personal assistant, Lwakabanga, were invited to the MRA headquarters in Caux, a Swiss village located just above Lake Geneva.
At the meeting, Chief Kalamba was persuaded that MRA might be useful in helping to resolve the bloody conflicts between the Lulua and their bitter enemies the Baluba. Convinced, the Chief invited an MRA team, which included Bill Close, to fly immediately to the Belgian Congo.
“I was chosen to go because I was bilingual in French and English, and had a black medical bag. Anyway, I wanted to get out of the headquarters and do something useful,” Bill Close told this writer in a 2007 interview from his Wyoming ranch. No sooner had Bill Close stepped off the 707 jet airliner in Leopoldville (Kinshasa today), then all hell broke loose. In June 1960, when the Belgian Congo became independent, Patrice Lumumba became the country’s prime minister and Joseph Kasavubu its president. However, not long after that the Congolese army mutinied against the Belgian officers who still controlled it. General Emile Janssen, the Belgian commander of the Force Publique, told his Congolese troops that for them nothing would change after independence, not even their ranks.
Soldiers in the Congolese army stationed in Leopoldville broke into the armories and went on a rampage. Bands of armed soldiers roamed the streets stopping Belgians or pulling them out of their vehicles in a frantic search for firearms and valuables.
Reports of murders and rape spread across the city. The result was a massive exodus of Europeans from the city. Bill Close estimated that some 3,000 Europeans boarded ferries and barges from Leopoldville heading to Brazzaville, capital of the neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville just across the Congo River. But not long after the mutineers blocked this escape route. Bill Close and many others found themselves trapped in the melee.
“The whites who had not fled to Brazzaville hid behind shutters, fearing more violence,” Bill Close told me in the 2007 interview.
Dr Close, I presume
Meanwhile, he looked for some way of putting his surgical skills to good use. He had heard that almost all the Belgian doctors had also fled the chaos, and there were no Congolese doctors because none had been trained by the colonial master, Belgium. Darting through the besieged streets of Leopoldville as the sounds of distant gunfire rocked the largely deserted city, Dr Close managed to push his way through an unruly mob and into the Hôpital des Congolais, the city’s largest hospital.
During that first day, Bill Close was given a crash course in developing and fixing film for x-rays by the long suffering Belgian doctor Marcel Pirquin. Close, Pirquin and other hospital staff took care of the numerous victims and perpetrators of the violence, Congolese and Belgian alike.
In the weeks that followed, Dr Close went from taking x-rays to making plaster casts for fractures and eventually to surgery. However, the hospital conditions were appalling. There was no blood in the blood bank. Used gauze pads were retrieved from the bins, washed and re-used. There was no laboratory to speak of.
Yet, Bill Close quickly became a master at surgical improvisation. He concocted his own gas-oxygen-ether anaesthesia and taught Makila, the floor sweeper, to push on the balloon in rhythm with his own breathing to administer the anaesthesia. He would use a brace and a drill bit from a carpentry shop to make a burr hole in a small boy’s skull to relieve the pressure on his brain – “primitive craniotomy,” he called it. Close and the staff averaged 350 operations a month. Later, when Dr Pirquin escorted a wounded Belgian police commissioner back to Europe, Close, for a while, found himself the only surgeon at the hospital.
But the post-independence tensions would play themselves out at the Hôpital des Congolais. Among the other hospital staff he met during that first day was La Mere Marie-Germaine, the Belgian nun who was in charge of the operating rooms. She later became an air hostess for Sabena Airlines.
“She was a tyrant,” Bill Close joked about her in our 2007 interview. “If she had been in charge of the Congolese army, there wouldn’t have been a mutiny. But she was a hell of a good nurse and a good assistant.”
There was also Samuel, a Congolese who he remembers as a highly skilled surgical assistant. However, the relationship between Sister Germaine and Samuel was bitter and aptly reflected the post-
independence tensions between the Congolese and the remaining Belgians.
independence tensions between the Congolese and the remaining Belgians.
“The atmosphere in the operating room was poisonous. The surgeon and his nurse, a Belgian nun, were tight-lipped and bitter; the Congolese aides were insolent and flaunted their new independence from white authority. Everyone was frightened,” Bill Close wrote in ‘Beyond the Storm’.
During these turbulent days, Close and the surgical staff were conducting many of their operations at gunpoint. Once, a Congolese soldier who had been shot in the thigh by a Belgian paratrooper was stretchered into the operating room by three fellow soldiers dressed in full combat gear. When Close tried to get more catgut from an adjacent room, two of the soldiers blocked his way, one declaring: “You can’t leave. If you don’t save our man, I’ll kill you.”
Enter Mobutu
Before Dr Pirquin’s departure, Joseph Desire Mobutu had been appointed chief of staff of the Congolese army with the rank of colonel. The Force Publique would now be called theArmée Nationale Congolaise. According to Close: “…Mobutu, addressing the troops in Lingala, the official language of the army, announced that they should elect their officers, designate which white officers were acceptable, and restore order in the camps.”
But this did little to prevent the mutiny from spreading to Elisabethville, capital of the mineral-rich Katanga (Shaba) province. Secessionist Moise Tshombe, who was also a client of Close, declared Katanga independent from the rest of the Congo. This move was said to be backed by Belgium and the United States.
Belgium’s colonial policy cared only for natural resource exploitation and gave no thought to good governance. An estimated 60% of Congo’s national income came from the mines in Katanga.
While the Congo struggled with its growing pains as a newly independent African nation, Bill Close was having his own personal struggles. His dedication to Hôpital des Congolais led to a conflict with his MRA colleagues.
In 1961, Frank Buchman died and Peter Howard became the MRA boss. Howard, who had been a political correspondent and investigative reporter for the London Daily Express under Lord Beaverbrook, vocally disapproved of Close’s hospital exploits, calling it an “unhealthy obsession” and advised him to disassociate himself from the Hôpital des Congolais.
Dr Close promptly resigned from the MRA. His responsibility as the only surgeon at the hospital greatly outweighed any dictates from an evangelical movement that was unable or unwilling to see that Close was indeed following his calling in life. Bill Close’s first encounter with Mobutu occurred within the background of the unfolding violence in Leopoldville and the Congo generally.
“At the time, I had just become the physician for the First Parachute Battalion and Mobutu’s house was in the paratrooper’s camp”, Close recounted. “We were having huge amounts of trauma in the operating rooms and I had been told by the British military attaché, Colonel John Sinclair, that Colonel Mobutu was the most effective guy in the army.
“So as a sort of typical naïve American, I waved for his car to stop as he was leaving his house and said: ‘Bonsoir, mon Colonel. I am the surgeon at the Hôpital des Congolais, and I wondered if you can do something about all the violence in town so we can catch up in the operating room’. He looked at me and sort of raised his eyebrows and said: ‘Oui, c’est possible’, and then he rolled up the car window and sped away.”
Not long after that encounter, Bill Close noticed a decrease in the steady stream of trauma cases. Some weeks later, Mobutu summoned Close to tend to the medical needs of several family members.
He was asked to remove a fish bone that was stuck in the throat of one of the colonel’s great aunts. Close was also asked to circumcise a new born son, a procedure he had not previously performed. Mobutu also asked him to go and sit with his extended family as one great aunt lay dying.If Close’s bold approach to Mobutu to reduce the violence in Leopoldville and his successful medical care with his relatives won him over, then the American was equally enamoured with Mobutu’s courage and compassion.
Once there was an attempted mutiny at the police barracks. Mobutu, Col Sinclair, and Close, along with three paratroopers, went to confront the mutineers. Mobutu told the others to stay back as he walked towards the armed and angry rebels.
“Mobutu halted in front of the police. Slowly and deliberately he scrutinised the men,” Bill Close recalls in Beyond the Storm. “Then, standing at attention with his shoulders back and fists clenched, he commanded: Deposez vos armes – ‘drop your weapons’. A low murmur came from the men. No one moved.
“Their weapons were levelled at the colonel. I held my breath. Two men in the front row dropped the butts of their rifles, released the barrels, and the guns clattered to the ground. In seconds, the crashing of weapons echoed in the camp. The handful of defiant men in the front row stepped forward and saluted. The mutiny was over.”
Mobutu’s origins
Joseph Desire Mobutu was born in Lisala, in Congo’s northern Équateur province on 14 October 1930. His name means “soil” or “sand”, a reference to his mother, Marie-Madeleine Yemo’s social and economic status at the time. They were dirt poor. Although he was christened Joseph Desire, in 1972 he acquired the name SeSe Seko koko Ngbendu Wazabanga, literally translated as “hot pepper”, “green,” and “it stings”. Kuku ngbendu wazabanga is a Ngbandi proverb whose translation could mean: “Even if it is not ripe, hot pepper stings.”
Marie-Madeleine Yemo was abandoned by her husband, Alberic Gbemany, after he and his family refused to retrieve her following the end of a mourning period of a deceased relative in Gbadolite in the far north of Congo bordering the Central African Republic (CAR).
It was the local custom for married women mourners to remain lying on the floor after the end of the mourning period until their husbands came to “release” them. Neither Alberic Gbemany nor anyone in his family came to release Marie-Madeleine.
“This was a deep and painful insult,” wrote Bill Close in his book, “and she was subjected to humiliating looks from the other women whose husbands arrived to free them from the constraints of mourning.”
It was a fait accompli for the mother of the future leader of Africa’s second-largest and potentially richest (by mineral wealth) country. Marie-Madeleine would join the fraternity of femmes libres or “free women”, a lightly veiled euphemism for a prostitute. Such women were ordered by the colonial medical authorities to undergo a monthly medical check-up for sexually transmitted diseases.
Although Marie-Madeleine never married again, Mobutu was the result of one of numerous liaisons she had with various men. Mobutu (and his siblings) had no knowledge of the identity of his (their) biological father.
Mobutu was a bright but undisciplined student when he attended primary school in Lisala during the 1930s. When Marie-Madeleine moved back to Gbadolite, hunting and fishing with his maternal grandfather and a great uncle occupied most of Mobutu’s time.
However, he returned to school. When the Catholic missionaries organised a football team, young Mobutu became the team’s goalkeeper. But years later, he was booted out of high school when the missionaries learned that he had spent his vacation in Leopoldville (a place forbidden for students), boozing and cavorting with girls. The colonial law regarding young men who were booted out of school was austere. Such individuals were immediately drafted into the Force Publique, the national army. Mobutu was all but 19 years old when he donned the uniform of the Force Publique.
Mobutu’s command of the French language landed him the position of secretary-accountant to the commander of the special company. Less than a year later, he was sent to the Ecole Centrale in Luluabourg in the south of the country.
After successfully completing his studies, Mobutu was sent to army headquarters in Leopoldville where he was assigned to the provincial secretary of G2, the unit dealing with intelligence, mobilisation and operations. He was promoted to sergeant in April 1954. Mobutu would also marry his 15-year-old fiancée, Marie-Antoinette.
It was around this time that Mobutu parted company with the military and became a freelance journalist and began writing articles for L’Avenir, the only newspaper at the time that accepted articles from the Congolese. He became responsible for the editorial pages of both L’Avenir and its successor Actualités Africaines.
Patrice Lumumba, who was at the time imprisoned for embezzlement, read and admired Mobutu’s articles. When he was finally released from prison, Lumumba appointed Mobutu his personal secretary,
a position that was made official in July 1960 when Lumumba became prime minister. Not long after that Mobutu was appointed army chief of staff with the rank of colonel.
a position that was made official in July 1960 when Lumumba became prime minister. Not long after that Mobutu was appointed army chief of staff with the rank of colonel.
The crisis
During the chaotic “Congo crisis” following Lumumba’s assassination and the power struggle between Joseph Kasavubu, Moise Tshombe and Antoine Gizenga (who became prime minister of Congo), Bill Close remained faithful to the Hippocratic oath and continued his surgical work at the Hôpital des Congolais despite the atmosphere of sectarian Congolese politics.
“My reaction to the whole bloody mess was to work all out and hope that some semblance of order would be returned to the streets and the slums”, Close wrote in Beyond the Storm. “I spent no time trying to figure out where the patient on the table was from, what he did, what side he was on, or whether he was a ‘good guy’ or a ‘bad guy’. ”
In January 1962, Mobutu appointed Bill Close chief doctor for the Armée Nationale Congolaise. Shortly thereafter, he became Mobutu’s personal physician.
“Mobutu was never sick,” Close revealed in our 2007 interview, “until he had a minor stroke [...] when his blood pressure went up. Then I had to be with him all the time.”
Bill Close’s surgical work at the Hôpital des Congolais came to an end in February that year when, through a combination of the Congo Minister for Health and the World Health Organisation (WHO), a young Belgian surgeon replaced him.
In the years to come, Close and Mobutu enjoyed a friendly doctor/patient relationship. Evenings at Mobutu’s house in the paratrooper camp would be spent with him playing 13 games of checkers with Close and drinking cognac.
There were also boat excursions on the Congo River. Both Close and Mobutu would bring their families on board during these occasions. It was not unusual for Mobutu’s boat to dock at a remote village en route and welcome some of the villagers to come aboard and greet Mobutu. Often locals needed medical attention. Bill Close was frequently asked to treat patients for elephantiasis or examine the heartbeats of newborn babies.
“Mobutu had a way of putting everyone at ease, whether a stuffy diplomat or an ancient, arthritic mama from an obscure village on the river’s edge,” remembered Bill Close. “His charm could disarm an angry man, who might even forget the cause of his anger and come out from the interview with a smile on his face.”
Napoleon Bonaparte and General Charles de Gaulle, two French-speaking Europeans, were Mobuto’s historical mentors. He was also a voracious reader of economics, geopolitics, and history.
Five years after Bill Close arrived in Congo, Mobutu asked the American surgeon to become the administrator for Hôpital des Congolais. Close accepted and with the assistance of doctors recruited from the US, Canada, and Western Europe, the hospital underwent a major renovation with substantial staff hired.
Ultimately it became a national referral centre of over 2,000 beds. Hôpital des Congolaiswas later renamed Mama Yemo Hospital, after Mobutu’s mother, Marie Madeleine Yemo. According to Close, the hospital also became one of the biggest centres in Africa for patients with Aids. Sadly, in October 1991, the Congolese army mutinied once again and the Aids research facilities at the hospital were destroyed.
But the rot had already taken hold of Mobutu’s government. At the time, Dr Close was unable to comprehend the corruption and patronage that Mobutu’s family members and close allies would come to expect of Mobutu.
“Mobutu used money to buy loyalty,” Close said, “but that’s a very slippery path to be on because what happens is that you end up needing more and more money, and if the source of your cash, such as minerals and a few agricultural products, start losing their value on the world market, then you are in trouble.”
In the end, as Dr Peter Piot reveals in his book, Dr Bill Close “left Zaire, disillusioned by the Mobutu regime”.
New York Times, September 27th 1988
(One month prior to former Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush's election as President)
The Assassination of Dr. David Kelly of MI6 and Porton Down has deep roots
Dr David Kelly knew too much and died rather mysteriously.
Police have now admitted that the following objects found with his body did not have fingerprints on them:
His mobile phone
A watch
The knife he allegedly used to slash his wrist
The packs of pills he is said to have overdosed on
A water bottle
A secret file of evidence was submitted to the Hutton inquiry by Thames Valley Police.
The contents remain secret.
But 'the cover is publicly available and reveals that the codename for the investigation was Operation Mason.'
This has given rise to 'rumours of a freemasonry angle'.
The start time of Operation Mason is given as 2.30pm on Thursday July 17.
That was at least half an hour BEFORE Dr Kelly set off from his home on his fatal walk.
And, it is nearly ten hours before Dr Kelly's wife rang the police to sound the alert over her missing husband.
Margrethe P. Rask
(1930 – December 12, 1977)
I quote The Enemy:
"Born in 1930 in the Danish town of Thisted, Dr. Rask practiced medicine in Zaïre for a brief period in 1964, when she was recalled back to Europe for training in stomach surgery and tropical illnesses, and from 1972 to 1977, first at a small local hospital in the Zairian town of Abumombazi, and then at the Danish Red Cross Hospital in Kinshasa starting in 1975.
She was likely first exposed to HIV during the late 1960s. [?]
[This implies she was exposed to HIV in Denmark, not in Zaire]
Her friend and colleague, Ib Bygbjerg (a physician specializing in communicable diseases), wrote in a 1983 letter to The Lancet that "while working as a surgeon under primitive conditions, she [Rask] must have been heavily exposed to blood and excretions of African patients."
["Must have" is not the language of science. It is the language of the Guilty.
Also, it has already been stated that Dr. Raske was in Europe during these years; even if she was working on "Tropical Diseases" with African patients, in no sense can the late 1960s in Denmark be considered "Primitive conditions" - what is being covered up, here..?]
Rask apparently suffered from symptoms of AIDS starting in late 1974, including diarrhea, swollen lymph nodes, weight loss, and fatigue.
Although the symptoms receded temporarily following drug treatments [what drugs? experimental cures? Antiretrovirals?] in 1975,the symptoms later grew considerably worse.
Following a vacation in South Africa [interesting...] in July 1977, she could no longer breathe and relied on bottled oxygen.
She flew back to Denmark, where tests at Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet discovered she had contracted a number of opportunistic infections, such as Staphylococcus aureus (staph infection), candidiasis (yeast infection), and Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia (PCP, a fungal infection of the lungs formerly known as Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia). Tests also showed that Rask had a nearly non-existent T-cell count, leading to a severely depressed immune system.
At the time, the doctors treating Rask were at a loss to explain her disease progression, which in retrospect, would come to be seen as one of the first cases of AIDS recorded outside Africa.
[But they still want to imply infection occurred IN Africa - which is it?]
After numerous tests and unsuccessful treatments, she eventually returned home to her cottage on a fjord in November 1977, where her long-time female partner (a nurse) cared for her. She was called back for more tests in December, and returned to the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, where she remained until she died of AIDS-related Pneumocystis jiroveci pneumonia, on December 12, 1977.
[This simply a lie: cause of death cannot possibly be have been given as "AIDS-related", since AIDS as a diagnosis did not exist in 1977]
A subsequent autopsy revealed that Rask's lungs were filled with a fungus known as Pneumocystis jiroveci, a rare type of pneumonia that mostly affected people that were immunocompromised and that is today known as a common symptom of AIDS.
Rask's blood samples were assayed in Copenhagen in 1984 following extensive research on AIDS.
The test was done with a very early version of ELISA and tested NEGATIVE for HIV/AIDS."
[ELISAs are notorious for rendering false-positives;
False negatives DO occur, but they are relatively rare.]
