On its opening weekend, the movie Bob Marley: One Love sold more tickets than any other movie in the United States, far outpacing other films in the theaters. While the film appeared to stay away from U.S.’s involvement in Marley’s death in order to get wider distribution, the question as to whether the CIA orchestrated the reggae music icon’s early death at 36 years old deserves an exploration.

Marley Rose to Musical Stardom with Revolutionary Lyrics as Jamaicans Elect a Socialist Leader

Blacks around the world hailed reggae superstar Bob Marley for his revolutionary lyrics. Having grown up poor in Jamaica and rising quickly to musical stardom, Marley never forgot his humble beginnings, as he sang for people to “Get Up, Stand Up” for their rights against exploitation and government oppression.

Jamaica had gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962. The CIA, wanting to gain a U.S. economic foothold in the country, was particularly worried about Marley helping socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley win re-election against the candidate it backed, Edward Seaga (spelled “CIAga” in Jamaican graffiti).^[1]

Bob Marley grew up in a squalid Jamaican home. He met Peter Tosh and formed a singing group called The Wailers in the mid-1960s. By the mid-1970s they broke into the American and British music world.

Their 1974 Burnin’ album was known for its Black Power songs such as “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Burnin’ and Lootin’,” and the aforementioned “Get Up, Stand Up.” His next album’s “Revolution” was particularly incendiary in saying that there was no political change without revolutionary struggle. ^[2]

Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and their friends in the Rastafarian community preached that Jamaicans should resist U.S. interventions. They also, for better or worse, preached for the use of marijuana. They said it was to resist the use of heroin and cocaine that conservative political forces had contributed to becoming part of the country’s trade.^[3]

Democratic socialist leader Michael Manley had won the 1972 election as the Prime Minister of Jamaica with his People’s National Party (PNP). Manley lived near Bob Marley and was friends with him, spending many nights at his house.^[4]

Marley Lyrics Put Down the CIA, As Gunman Says It Trained Him to Kill Marley

Despite U.S. government denials, researchers found covert interventions used against Manley’s government that included arson, bombing and assassination. Manley’s forces intercepted at least one shipment of 500 machine guns coming from a right-wing paramilitary faction with CIA roots and leaders convicted of drug trafficking. This right-wing group reportedly aided the trafficking of cocaine and heroin into Jamaica.^[5]

Evidence supports that the CIA acted on increasing concerns about Bob Marley, who singled out the CIA with revulsion in political songs such as “Rat Race,” where he sang, “Rasta don’t work for no CIA!”

In 1976, Prime Minister Michael Manley said the CIA-supported groups fueled unrest to influence the results of the upcoming elections. The Governor-General of Jamaica declared a state of emergency. The government police fought this unrest that Manley claimed was organized by CIA-backed opposition leader Edward Seaga and his Jamaica Labour Party (JLP).^[6]

Close to the day of the 1976 election, Prime Minister Manley planned a free concert with Bob Marley, sponsored by the Jamaican Ministry of Culture. A number of weeks before the concert, the “Shower Posse,” a CIA-linked paramilitary gang that supported opposition leader Edward Seaga’s JLP, had held Marley at gunpoint and extorted regular payments from him.

Manley’s PNP sent gunmen to guard Marley’s home and ward off the extortionists.

Days before the concert, Shower Posse gunmen broke into a neighbor’s home where they shot Marley, his wife Rita, and his manager, Don Taylor.^[7]

Police scared off the attackers before they could kill the Marleys. Miraculously, they all survived after hospitalizations.

Don Taylor said that Rastafarians eventually captured four of the gunmen who shot them and held a people’s court with them. Taylor said that “One, a young man I knew only as Leggo Beast, told the ghetto court that four of them had been trained by the CIA and given guns and unlimited supplies of cocaine to do the assassination.”^[8]

Witnesses Believe the CIA Director’s Son Poisoned Marley with a Cancer-Causing Agent

Prime Minister Manley had police, soldiers and Rastafarians escort the Marleys and Wailers band members to a secluded mountain encampment where they were guarded.

Several days after his recovery, Marley appeared at the concert on stage with Manley. He and his PNP handily won the election.^[9]

Those present at the encampment said an unarmed right-wing agent did get past the guards to attack Marley covertly. A group was making a documentary on Marley and the concert. Unknown to anyone on the film crew at the time, the cameraman, Carl Colby, was the son of CIA Director William Colby.^[10]

Cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee, a former Black Panther, was part of the film crew. Lew-Lee, who later gained acclaim as cameraman for the Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception, was close with members of the Wailers.

Present when Carl Colby came into the encampment, Lew-Lee said that Colby brought a new pair of boots for Marley. The reggae star tried the boots on immediately—a reported customary gesture among Rastafarians. Sticking his foot in, the singer exclaimed “Ow” as something jabbed him. Marley pulled out a length of metal wire that was embedded in the boot.^[11]

Lew-Lee said he thought nothing of the boot incident at the time, but became suspicious when Marley was playing soccer five months later and broke his toe on that same foot. When the bone would not mend, doctors found it was cancerous. The cancer quickly metastasized throughout Marley’s body.

Marley’s manager, Don Taylor, also claimed in his memoir that a “senior CIA agent” had been planted among the pre-election concert film crew as part of a plan to “assassinate” Marley. A theory holds that the wire in Colby’s gift boots was either made out of a radioactive metal or contained a highly carcinogenic chemical element on its tip (The New York Times cited U.S. possible use of this tactic elsewhere).^[12]

The IMF Squeezes Jamaica’s Economy as Ex-CIA Agent Agee Describes CIA-Trained Terrorism

After Michael Manley’s socialist PNP won that 1976 election, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reportedly “came down on Jamaica,” causing economic havoc, according to NPR radio host and writer Roger Stephens.^[13]

The Emmy-nominated documentary film Who Shot the Sheriff? presented former Cuban intelligence agent, Osvaldo Cardenas, who said that Manley was good friends with Fidel Castro. The film also had Roger Stephens saying that the U.S. was behind JLP head Ed Seaga, and that the CIA labeled Bob Marley as a subversive in their heavily redacted file on him.^[14]

Cuban agent Cardenas further said that the CIA was bringing in “guns and training streetfighters against Manley,” through the gangs in Jamaica.^[15]

CIA agent whistleblower Phil Agee (co-founder of CovertAction Magazine) said that “these gangs used paramilitary tactics. They would go into shanty towns and seal off whole blocks. They’d hold the police department and fire department at bay while they burned down the whole block. In some cases they would throw children and babies back into the flames. This served to turn the people against the government of Michael Manley.”^[16]

Marley Beloved in Europe and Africa as He Supported African Anti-Colonialist Struggles

By 1981, despite serious illness from his progressing cancer, Bob Marley had become a hero for Africans. A New York radio network owner said in 1980 that, in Europe and Africa, Marley was “bigger than Christ and Muhammad combined.”

Marley played concerts for leftist leaders such as Marxist Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. Marley also supported leftist struggles in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. New York’s Black Liberation Movement-aligned WLIB radio worked to get Marley’s next album, Uprising, nationwide play on conservative-controlled Black radio.^[17]

The CIA and its collaborating forces, bent on defeating the democratic socialist People’s National Party in Jamaica in the 1980 elections, threatened Marley in his last days and democracy thereafter. Marley performed despite his approaching death and CIA operatives’ threats to not come back to Jamaica before the election.

The Gleaner helped the pro-American, reactionary JLP finally defeat Manley’s socialist PNP in the 1980 election. (The CIA reportedly worked inside the Inter-American Press Association to influence the right-wing transformation of the Jamaican newspaper, The Gleaner.)^[18]

Bob Marley died in May 1981, and 30,000 mourners attended his Jamaican wake. The JLP-linked Shower Posse paramilitary group resumed perpetrating violence after the PNP regained leadership in 2000, as attacks continued against Marley’s bandmate, Peter Tosh.^[19]

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[Note: this article is partly adapted from chapters of the author’s book Drugs as Weapons Against Us (2015).]

1. Seen in the Emmy-nominated Who Shot the Sheriff? (2018) directed by Kief Davidson and co-written by Jeff Zimbalist and Michael Zimbalist. ↑

2. On growing up poor, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), pp. 49-55. On his Burnin’ album’s songs, pp. 260-61, 268. On CIA and conservative government forces, election and Tosh, see pp. 264-65, 304, 317-18, 364-65. Also see Alex Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), pp. 134-36, 144. ↑

3. White, Catch a Fire, p. 307, and Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991), pp. 112-13. ↑

4. White, Catch a Fire, pp. 264-65. ↑

5. “Despite U.S. government…into Jamaica.” Ellen Ray and Bill Schaap, “Massive Destabilization in Jamaica,” CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 10, August-September 1980, pp. 13, 16. William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 301. Jerry Meldon, “The CIA’s Dope-Smuggling ‘Freedom Fighters,’ Veterans of the CIA’s Drug Wars, Profile: Luis Posada Carriles,” High Times, December 18, 1998. ↑

6. “Evidence supports that…no CIA!” White, Catch a Fire, pp. 285, 304. ↑

7. “Coming up to the…manager.” White, Catch a Fire, p. 318. ↑

8. Don Taylor, Marley and Me: The Real Bob Marley Story (Fort Lee, NJ): Barricade Books, 1995), pp. 168-69. ↑

9. White, Catch a Fire, pp. 288-93. ↑

10. White, Catch a Fire, p. 291. Carl Colby admitted being part of that film crew in the Netflix movie Who Shot the Sheriff? ↑

11. Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, pp. 135-36. ↑

12. Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, p. 136. On U.S. use of carcinogens for assassination regarding a former KGB spy who died within three weeks of the suspected poisoning, see Alan Cowell, “Planes tested for radioactivity in link to death of the former Russian spy,” The New York Times, November 29, 2006. Also see, H.P. Albarelli Jr., A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009), p. 292. Albarelli cited a “CIA Memorandum for the Record for DD/P through C/SE, Subject: Radiological Warfare, 28 October 1954.” ↑

13. Stated in Who Shot the Sheriff? ↑

14. Who Shot the Sheriff? ↑

15. Idem. ↑

16. Idem. at 35:41. ↑

17. “By 1980, despite dying…Black radio.” On ‘’bigger than Christ” quote, support for Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and WLIB radio support, see White, Catch a Fire, pp. 1-3, 304. On support of lefist struggles in Angola, Mozambique and South Africa, see Marley’s song “War,” in Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, p. 135. ↑

18. “By 1980, Bob…wake.” White, Catch a Fire, pp. 304, 317-18. In his bibliography, White cites Fred Landis, “The CIA and The Media: IAPA and the Jamaican Daily Gleaner.” CovertAction Information Bulletin, no. 7 (December 1979-January 1980), and “CIA Media Operations in Chile, Jamaica and Nicaragua.” CovertAction Information Bulletin, no.16 (December 1981). ↑

19. David Gonsalez, “Violence Subsides in Jamaica, but Wounds Still Fester,” New York Times, July 11, 2001. This article also claims JLP leader Seaga as a victim of PNP police death threats, though in the context of JLP-linked murders of Marley, Tosh and others, the PNP reaction might be better understood. Former Wailer Peter Tosh collaborated with Rolling Stone’s lead singer Mick Jagger after Marley’s 1981 death. Tosh continued his political “message music” until he was murdered, along with two friends, by gunmen in 1987’s JLP-led Jamaica. Tosh’s producer, Wayne Johnson, cited an unnamed government official who told him that one of Tosh’s murderers was a police officer. The government ended up only arresting and convicting one man, who reportedly was not carrying a gun. Tosh’s New York apartment was cleared out by “burglars.” A New York public administrator then gained possession of Tosh’s master tapes and hid them in a warehouse for years. Eric Williams, “Who Kiled Peter Tosh?” High Times, no. 221, January 1994, p. 18, for warehoused tapes. This and other facts cited in Constantine, The Covert War Against Rock, p. 144. ↑

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