CHANTING DOWN BABYLON
The CIA & the Death of Bob Marley
Story by Alex Constantine. 

Did a soccer accident really cause Bob Marley's death, as has been widely 
reported? Or was the dark hand of CIA covert operations behind the death of 
the greatest countercultural prophet of our time?  

Marley knew the drill-in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music 
and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the 
island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories 
appeared in the local, regional and international press downsizing the 
achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister 
Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, 
heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death-squad rule and, as Grenada's 
Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA's 
"pernicious attempts [to] wreck the economy." 

"Destabilization," Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, "is the name 
given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the 
lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful 
country through bullying, intimidation and violence." 

In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his lyrics 
into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger "vampires" 
descending upon the island. June 1976: Then-Governor-General Florizel 
Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to stanch the bloody pre-election 
violence. Prime Minister Manley's People's National Party asked the Wailers 
to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December. Despite the rising 
political mayhem, Marley agreed to perform. 

In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates at Marley's home on 
Hope Road in Kingston. As biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9 PM, 
"the torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer noise that 
was not quite like a firecracker." Marley was in the kitchen at the rear of 
the house eating a grapefruit when he heard the bursts of automatic gunfire. 
Don Taylor, Marley's manager, had been talking to the musician when the 
bullets ripped through the back of his legs. The men were "peppering the 
house with a barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and 
splintering plaster and woodwork on the first floor." Rita Marley, trying to 
escape with her children and a reporter from the Jamaica Daily News, was shot 
by one of the men in the front yard. The bullet caught her in the head, 
lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between scalp and skull. 

Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door off 
the pantry, pushing past a fleeing Seeco Patterson, the Wailers' 
percussionist, to aim beyond Don Taylor at Bob Marley. The gunman got off 
eight shots. One bullet struck a counter, another buried itself in the 
ceiling, and five tore into Taylor. He fell but remained conscious, with four 
bullets in his legs and one buried at the base of his spine. The last shot 
creased Marley's breast below his heart and drilled deep into his arm. 

The survival of the reggae singer and his entire entourage appeared to be the 
work of Rasta. "The firepower these guys apparently brought with them was 
immense," Wailers publicist Jeff Walker recalls. "There were bullet holes 
everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, 
doorways and outside."
There has since been widespread belief that the CIA arranged the hit on Hope 
Road. Neville Garrick, a Marley insider and former art director of the 
Jamaica Daily News, had film of "suspicious characters" lurking near the 
house before the assassination attempt. The day of the shooting, he had 
snapped some photos of Marley standing beside a Volkswagen in a pool of 
mango-tree shade. The strangers in the background made Marley nervous; he 
told Garrick that they appeared to be "scouting" the property. In the prints, 
however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out. After the 
concert, Garrick took the photographs and prints to Nassau. Sadly, while the 
Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London, he discovered that the 
film had been stolen.
Many of the CIA's files on Bob Marley remain classified to the present day. 
However, on December 5, 1976, a week after the assault on Hope Road, the 
Wailers appeared at the Smile Jamaica fest, despite their wounds, to perform 
one long, defiant anthem of rage directed at the CIA-"War"-suggesting the 
Wailers' own attitude toward the "vampires" from Langley: 

Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That now hold our brothers
In Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa
In subhuman bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war… 

Only a handful of Marley's most trusted comrades knew of the band's 
whereabouts before the festival. Yet a member of the film crew, or so he 
claimed-reportedly, he didn't have a camera-managed to talk his way past 
machete-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment: one Carl Colby, son 
of the late CIA director William Colby. 

While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according to a 
witness at the enclave-a new pair of boots for Bob Marley. Former Los Angeles 
cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee (his camera work can be seen in the Oscar-winning 
documentary The Panama Deception) was close friends with members of the 
Wailers, and he believes that Marley's cancer can be traced to the boots: "He 
put his foot in and said, 'Ow!' A friend got in there… he said, 'let's [get] 
in the boot, and he pulled a length of copper wire out-it was embedded in the 
boot."  

Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The 
appearance of Colby at Marley's compound was certainly provocative. (And so 
was Colby's subsequent part in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. 
Simpson, nearly 20 years later. At Simpson's preliminary hearing in 1995, 
Colby-who resided next door to Nicole Simpson on Gretna Green Way in 
Brentwood, a mile from her residence on Bundy-and his wife both took the 
stand to testify for the prosecution that Nicole's ex-husband had badgered 
and threatened her. Colby's testimony was instrumental in the formal charge 
of murder filed against Simpson and the nationally televised fiasco known as 
the "Trial of the Century.") 

Seventeen years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir, 
Marley and Me, in which he alleges that a "senior CIA agent" had been planted 
among the crew as part of the plan to "assassinate" Marley. It's possible 
that this lapse in security allowed Colby entrance to the compound. It's 
clear that the CIA wanted Marley out of the picture. After the assassination 
attempt, a rumor circulated that the CIA was going to finish Marley off. The 
source of the rumor was the agency itself. The Wailers had set out on a world 
tour, and CIA agents informed Marley that should he return to Jamaica before 
the election, he would be murdered. 

Taylor and others close to Marley suspect that it was more than a threat. 
Lew-Lee recalls: "I didn't think so at the time, but I've always had my 
suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the 
bone wouldn't mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer 
metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he could fight this 
thing." 
British researcher Michael Conally observes: "They certainly had reasons for 
wanting to. For one, Marley's highly charged message music made him an 
important figure that the rest of the world was beginning to notice. It was 
an influence that was hard to ignore, least of all because everywhere you 
went you saw middle- and upper-class white people sprouting dreadlocks, 
smoking spliffs and adopting the Rastafarian lifestyle. This sort of thing 
didn't sit well with traditionalists and authoritarian types." 

The soccer game took place in Paris in 1977, five months after the boot 
incident. Marley took to the field with one of the leading teams in the 
country to break the monotony of the Wailers' "Exodus" tour. His right toe 
was injured in a tackle. The toenail came off. At first, it wasn't considered 
a serious wound. 

But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a physician, 
who was shocked by the toe's appearance. It was so eaten away that doctors in 
London advised it be amputated. Marley's religion forbade it: "Rasta no abide 
amputation," he insisted. He told the physician, "De living God, His Imperial 
Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah… 
He will heal me wit' de meditations of me ganja chalice." No scalpel, he 
said, "will crease me flesh…. C'yant kill Rasta. Rastamon live out." 

He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the lesion. 
The disease lingered undiagnosed and spread throughout his body. 

Isaac Fergusson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob Marley 
firsthand. In the three years separating soccer injury from cancer diagnosis, 
Marley remained immersed in music, "ignoring the advice of doctors and close 
associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination." He 
refused to give up recording and touring long enough to consult a doctor. 
Marley "would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the 
momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into the 
studio to record, he did enough for two albums. Marley would drink his fish 
tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to 
work. With incredible energy and determination, he kept strumming his guitar, 
maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak." Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed 
after Marley's death: "What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do 
on this earth." Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying, and set out to 
condense a lifetime of music into the few years remaining.  

    


    

    

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