Everything, with the documents attached

American hostility to Manley is documented beyond argument. A 1976 destabilisation operation is not. The three intelligence papers in the published record are assessments, not operations, and contain no covert action options. The one action Ford actually approved in the run up to the election was school feeding aid, approved precisely to blunt the destabilisation charge. That is not proof that nothing happened, because covert action records are the category most often withheld. It does mean the 1976 claim has no documentary leg to stand on yet.

There was a real proposal, in the CIA's own words, to make confidential contact with Manley's opponent, to fund his opponent's party, and to replace his government. Anyone who says the idea was pure invention has not read the file.

And here is the correction we have to make in the same breath, because it is the single most important fact in this section. That proposal is dated 1978 to 1979 and it targets the 1980 election. It is not the 1976 programme. At the Special Coordination Committee meeting of 23 October 1979 the political proposal was found premature, Brzezinski ordered a fuller review, and the committee authorised only propaganda in support of existing policy. The American ambassador of the day is recorded as opposed to any covert action in Jamaica at all. So the documents prove the intent existed and prove it was held back, three years after the year everyone cites.

Three months before the shooting, in private, the man with every political reason to blame Washington told the American ambassador that he no longer believed it was happening. In 1977 he still maintained some CIA people had tried, but accepted that top officials likely gave no direct orders, claimed his intelligence was irrefutable and would not produce it. And in 1983 he conceded in public that they had never found the smoking gun. We publish this because it cuts against the easy version, and a case that hides its own worst document is not a case.

That the naming happened is documented. That the naming was correct is not. No American government confirmation has ever been given, and every later retelling traces back to the same one man. Two things have to be said about him. He was, by the account of his own colleague at his memorial, in Jamaica alongside someone who had come to work for Manley's re-election campaign, so he was naming the station while working for the incumbent. That does not make him wrong, but it does stop him being disinterested. And his list contained errors: the embassy flagged one named woman as a Canadian national working in the passport section, and another man on the list went on to an entirely conventional diplomatic career as ambassador to Uganda, chief of mission in Addis Ababa, deputy assistant secretary for African affairs, and first American ambassador to Eritrea.

What is documented is the attack itself. On the evening of 3 December 1976 armed men came into the yard. Bob Marley was shot in the chest and arm, Rita Marley in the head while sitting in her car, Don Taylor in the legs and torso, Louis Griffith in the torso. Nobody died, and nobody was ever charged. Marley played the Smile Jamaica concert two days later, wounded.

What is not documented is who sent them. The CIA version rests on a late, single source, second hand confession attributed to a man reportedly killed afterwards, with no contemporaneous record of the court at which it was supposedly given. That is close to the lowest grade of evidence there is. The ordinary explanation fits every known fact: Jamaica's garrison politics, a snap election called on 22 November after the concert was already scheduled, a singer the opposition read as endorsing the government, and gunmen who in that system were routinely never charged. We cannot prove either account, and we will not pretend otherwise.

We would rather lose a good story than keep a false one, and this one is false. The medicine settles it. Marley had acral lentiginous melanoma of the right great toe, confirmed by biopsy at Munich in June 1977 and read by two independent pathologists. That cancer is a melanocytic disease which falls disproportionately on people with darker skin. It is not caused by puncture wounds or by wires. The clinical literature is explicit that the football injury revealed the lesion rather than caused it, and records Marley describing a mark at that spot on and off for years before December 1976, on his own account.

Two further marks of folklore. The story mutates: the gift is cowboy boots, or Converse, or size ten sneakers; the agent is Colby, or a man called Bill Oxley who never existed; the wire is copper, or radioactive, or infected. And its most shared version, the Bill Oxley deathbed confession, was simply invented by a fake news site and taken apart by Channel 4's FactCheck, which found the photograph was a doctored Polish stock image, no such officer traceable, and the named hospital confirming no such patient.

What is true is that Carl Colby was in Jamaica, filming, and was the son of the Director of Central Intelligence. That coincidence of identity is the whole engine of the legend. A coincidence is not an act.

A bad summary of a source we could have opened at any time nearly became a published finding, and it would have inverted what the source actually says. That is the worst kind of error because it looks like scholarship. It is the reason every claim on this page now has to name the document it rests on, and the reason we say, each time, whether we read the thing itself or are trusting someone who said they did.

We say not found rather than does not exist, because three catalogues refused us and an honest search reports its own blind spots. If you hold a copy, or a library record, send it and we will publish it here the same day.

And we separate this from the thing it is usually offered to prove. Whether Garvey dealt with white supremacists does not depend on this book at all. That question we answer below, on documents, and the answer is not comfortable in either direction.

We drop the funding claim. We keep, because it is documented and it is damning on its own terms, that Garvey met with, platformed and promoted white supremacists. He did not need their money to have done that. Dropping the false half makes the true half harder to dismiss, which is the entire reason for doing it this way.

Dropped completely. And we note the variant that adds Prince Charles to the same picture: he was about seven years old in 1955.

What is documented, and is more interesting than the fake, is that the two met twice as heads of state. She received him in London in October 1954 and made him a Stranger Knight of the Garter. He received her in Addis Ababa in February 1965. A reigning sovereign does not bow to another head of state, which is why no such photograph exists to be found.

Dropped. The real history underneath is better than the legend: the face was assembled by artists out of Zeus, Jupiter, the philosopher type and imperial portraiture, which is a documented act of invention. You do not need a Borgia to make that point.

We were asked specifically to carry this one with a disclaimer, in case later evidence made it true. We have not done that, and here is why said plainly: later evidence cannot reverse the order of two dated words. Nothing found in the future will make a nineteen seventies Brazilian name the parent of a thirteenth century Dutch one.

What survives, and we think it is the stronger observation anyway, is the pattern. Religious movements have repeatedly given cannabis a holy name and a devotional reason, within living memory and in the open. Santa Maria in Brazil is the proof of that, not of an etymology.