Note to readers: This page highlights images and reference materials for the podcast “The Empty Grave of Comrade Bishop,” and will be updated as new episodes are released.
Introduction
Maurice Bishop, the revolutionary leader of Grenada, was executed in 1983 along with seven others. Their remains are unknown. Over the past two years, we have investigated this mystery, including the role of the U.S. government in shaping the fate of the Caribbean nation, in a six-part podcast. We have conducted interviews with over 100 people, studied archival photographs, examined government documents, and visited the sites where events took place. Here, we share some visual artworks and other evidence we discovered, episode by episode.
Episode 1: “Someone Knows”
Our report began where it all started: in the courtyard of the military fort where 39-year-old Maurice Bishop, three cabinet ministers, and four of his closest aides were killed.
Photographer Gabin Pottsford took pictures of the fort as it is today. Formerly known as Fort Rupert, it is now called Fort George.
You can still see the bullet holes in the basketball pole.
When he came to power, Maurice Bishop was a young and charismatic revolutionary leader befriending communist leaders. We found photos of Bishop standing alongside Cuban President Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega, who was then a member of the Sandinista Junta of Nicaragua, at a May Day demonstration in Revolution Square, Cuba, in 1980.
This was the peak of the Cold War. U.S. President Ronald Reagan saw Grenada’s ties with Cuba – and thus the Soviet Union – as a serious threat. He emphasized this in a live television address at the time on March 23, 1983: “We were told that Grenada was a friendly island for tourism. Well, it wasn’t.”
Bishop came to New York a few months later, on June 5, to speak to an enthusiastic crowd. He read from what he called “a secret report from the State Department” and told the audience it revealed the real reason that the U.S. believed Grenada was a threat: “And if we have 95 percent of African ancestry in our country, we could have a dangerous attraction for 30 million Black people in the United States.”
Episode 2: “We All Had High Expectations”
Grenada is an island nation with a population of 125,000 on the edge of the Caribbean Sea. Many of the residents of this former British colony are descendants of enslaved Africans. (And if you heard “Grenada” and thought we were talking about a city in Spain, check out the helpful map below.)
In the 1960s, when Bishop was growing up, Grenada was still a poor country, with many citizens working on farms just like their ancestors.
There were also families like the Bishops. Ellen Bishop Spellman, Maurice’s youngest sister, shared this family photo with us and told us more about her family and her brother.
She said, “We tended to be classist. You couldn’t enter our lives if you were outside our class. If I were to walk home from school and talk to a taxi driver or a servant child, I would be reprimanded. We were somewhat arrogant.”
She said, “Maurice was very kind, and handsome, of course. He was my doll. You know, I remember once he took a nap and I was playing with his hair and I twisted most of his hair up. And he woke up in a hurry for an appointment and couldn’t get it out.”
Episode 3: “We Brought Them to Calivigny”
To understand what happened to the bodies of Maurice Bishop and seven of his allies, we had to track their every movement, starting from the hours following the executions on October 19, 1983. To confirm the chain of custody, we had to speak with the people who were there.
Many witnesses to those moments are no longer alive, but some are still living. One of them, it seems, owned an electrical repair shop in the capital of Grenada, St. George’s.
We headed
to a narrow side street in the city center, searching for the workshop. We found a faded sign for Mr. Brown’s electrical repair services, which says “Only the best is good enough.” The workshop is owned by Mandley Philip.
Before running this workshop, Philip served in the Grenada army, or the People’s Revolutionary Army. Philip was in the fortress on the day Bishop was killed. He said he did not witness the executions, but he saw the aftermath. It is still difficult for him to talk about it.
Episode 4: “The army wants to take a look at some bodies”
Warning: This episode contains detailed descriptions of human remains.
The old university anatomy lab at St. George’s University, the medical school in Grenada, was only hundreds of feet away from the island’s most famous beaches. It is no longer in use; the school built a new lab on a different campus many years ago. We came here with Robert Jordan, a recently retired anatomy professor who worked at the university for 40 years. This was his former office – and also the site of the mysterious forensic examination.
In November 1983, Jordan was asked to open his lab for a team from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. They wanted to perform a forensic examination of the remains recovered from the Calivigny Barracks. Jordan offered his assistance.
According to Jordan’s memory, four body bags were brought in. They were placed on the metal tables that his students used for dissection. But when he looked inside, he found that the bodies were damaged beyond recognition. They were more like body parts.
Episode 5: “A dirty and ugly job”
Stephen Trujillo was an elite army doctor during the U.S. invasion of Grenada. In 2017, he published a memoir that included details about what happened at Calivigny that might provide a new explanation for part of the mystery surrounding the remains of Maurice Bishop and his supporters. This summer, we tracked him down, and he told us his story.
On October 25, 1983, Trujillo and his fellow paratroopers jumped onto the island. He said they quickly took control of the Cuban resistance and seized the airport. They killed many Cubans that day.
But the next day, Trujillo and his team rescued American students from the medical school campus. He said they thought their work was done. But on October 27, they received a new mission.
Episode 6: “I know what I saw”
After hearing the story of the army soldier in Episode 5, we began searching for more Americans who took part in recovering the remains found at Calivigny. We started with the photos taken by the press agency connected to the excavation you saw in Episode 3. We zoomed in on the photos to examine the partial names on the military uniforms and searched newspapers from that time for the names of any soldiers mentioned in the stories. You can hear our attempts to reach out to some of the identified individuals. But one in particular caught our attention.
In the photo, second from the right, wearing a dark beret and carrying a camera around his neck, is an intelligence officer from the Jamaican Defence Forces named Earl Brown. He remained largely unknown until 2000, when a group of Grenadian high school students tracked him down with the help of their teacher via email. As part of a classroom project, the boys were trying to solve the mystery of the missing bodies. Brown wrote back to them. Here’s what he told them:
Brown said he was the only soldier from the Caribbean on the scene when the American soldiers recovered the remains. His message will cast new light on the mystery.
The Calivigny remains were recovered on November 8, 1983. When the body bags were brought to the medical school’s anatomy lab two days later, they contained “charred and disintegrating tissue in advanced stages of decay,” according to the U.S. military forensic report we obtained earlier.
But
Brown told the students that he saw intact corpses with skulls in the pit. This made us wonder: if the corpses were identifiable when exhumed on November 8, why were they in such a different condition two days later? Were they the same remains? We had to find Earl Brown.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/10/23/empty-grave-comrade-bishop-podcast-guide/
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