With less than three weeks before Election Day and the coronavirus pandemic still raging, Donald Trump wants voters to consider some very important things.
Like did Osama bin Laden survive the 2011 Navy SEAL raid on his compound by using a body double, and did former Vice President Joe Biden then order the murder of Navy SEALs to cover that fact up? Did Biden then order the murder of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya to cover that up?
Trump boosted that convoluted conspiracy theory twice on Twitter this week, in one case retweeting a QAnon believer and in another retweeting a fictitious persona run by a militant group opposed to the Iranian government. Trump’s posts infuriated Robert O’Neill, the pro-Trump former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed bin Laden, who accused conspiracy theorists of “trampling on the graves” of soldiers. Pressed on those retweets at an NBC town hall Thursday, Trump said that he didn’t know if the claim that Biden murdered SEALs was true, but that he wanted to “put it out there” for people to consider.
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“That was a retweet, and I do a lot of retweets,” Trump said.
The bin Laden conspiracy theory is the creation of falconer Alan Parrot, who claims he discovered the truth about bin Laden and the Navy SEAL murders through his work as a falconer for Middle Eastern monarchs. Now Parrot promises to release “terabytes” of evidence that Biden hid the 9/11 mastermind in Iran and murdered American soldiers, raising the prospect that his conspiracy theories will continue to percolate on the right-wing internet up to the election.
Thanks to a viral video of his claims about Biden, Parrot has risen in the course of just one week from being a controversial falconer little-known outside of ornithology circles to appearing on the president’s Twitter feed.
It’s a story that’s strange even by the standards of 2020 conspiracy theories: one about falcon smuggling, the violent “falcon mafia,” federal informants, and radio tracking devices. It’s also a story about how social media and the overheated politics of 2020 made it possible for a falconer with a history of making outlandish claims to find a mouthpiece in the president.
Parrot has been obsessed with falcons since he was a teenager. The son of a well-known Maine doctor, Parrot flew to Iran after graduating from high school to pursue his falconry sometime in the 1970s, without even owning a picture of a falcon.
In just a few short years, Parrot claims, he rose from falcon neophyte to become a falconer to the shah of Iran shortly before the shah’s ouster.
In Feathered Cocaine, a 2010 documentary about Parrot’s life and his bin Laden theories that Parrot co-produced, Parrot says he was hired in 1974 “to train the falcons for the shah at the age of 18.”
“This was the royal falconry center for the shah of Iran,” Parrot says, describing the place he claims to have worked.
Parrot has been described by both Fox News and in The Australian newspaper as the shah’s “chief falconer.” In a 1999 profile by The Scotsman newspaper, Parrot is described as “working with the Shah of Iran's collection of falcons when he was 20.”
This supposed work as a falconer for the shah and other power players in the Middle East is key to his claims that falconry gives him insight into terrorist intrigues. But two experts on the court of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi say the shah didn’t keep falcons in the 1970s, the time period when Parrot worked in Iran, and that there was no court position for a “chief falconer.”
"There were no falcons or falconers at the Pahlavi Court," Dr. Andrew Scott Cooper, the author of Pahlavi biography The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, told The Daily Beast in an email. "By the 1970s, the Shah had long since given up hunting and embraced wildlife conservation and the environment.”
Cooper provided The Daily Beast with a statement from Kambiz Atabai, the private secretary to the shah’s widow, Empress Farah Pahlavi. Atabai, who managed the shah’s animal reserve in the 1970s, also said the shah didn’t own falcons.
"We did not have a chief falconer at the Imperial court," Atabai said in the statement provided by Cooper. "His late Majesty did not have a falcon, nor did he ever hunt with falcons.”
Parrot, who pronounces his last name like “peh-roh,” rather than like the bird, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At 22, Parrot converted to Sikhism, adopting the Sikh turban and beard and going by the name Hari Har Singh Khalsa. Eventually, Parrot claims, he left the shah’s court to improve his falconry.
In the early 1980s, Parrot was involved in the then-heady world of Canadian falconry. As part of a massive smuggling investigation dubbed “Operation Falcon,” wildlife officials in the United States and Canada were infiltrating the falconry scene in both countries. Some falconers were chasing both big scores and the opportunity to take out their rivals with a well-placed tip to law enforcement.
“Who is paranoid?” the Los Angeles Times asked in 1990. “Everybody in falconry?”
Parrot convinced the Canadian government to let him legally capture the largest species of falcon, Arctic gyrfalcons, and sell them to an Arab sheikh. But the scheme was spoiled after two trappers failed in icy conditions for more than a week to catch a single gyrfalcon, according to Canada’s Whig Standard Magazine.
“Bright, cocky, very knowledgeable about falcons and Arabic culture and loyal only to himself and a silent partner in Texas who supplies him with startling amounts of cash, Khalsa is also widely disliked in the falconry world,” Paul McKay, an investigative reporter for the Whig Standard, wrote in 1987.
By 1983, according to McKay’s reporting, Parrot was an informant for U.S. wildlife investigators. Parrot also began informing for Canadian law enforcement, even as he became the target of an unsuccessful sting from a rival falconer working for U.S. officials and tempting him with what McKay called “illegal birds at rock bottom prices.” Eventually, Parrot’s work for law enforcement resulted in charges against two falconers.
He began to accuse rival falcon enthusiasts of being involved in criminal bird smuggling.
In a book chronicling Operation Falcon, McKay describes Parrot as “universally loathed” in the world of falconry, a reputation he reportedly earned through “treacherous ethics” and “double-crosses.”
“I have worked very hard to put my competition out of business,” Parrot, then known as Khalsa, told the Los Angeles Times. “Every one of my competitors is terrified of me. I am ruthless. I don’t care if they hate me.”
By the late 1990s, Parrot was living in Mongolia and waging yet another internecine feud with rival falcon experts. Seeing the interest Arab sheikhs were taking in hunting with Mongolian birds, Parrot had proposed a deal to the Mongolian government to rent out their falcons for six months for $20,000 each before freeing them, with Parrot and the government splitting the proceeds.
That deal fell through, and Parrot began accusing government officials and other falconers in Mongolia of being involved in falcon smuggling. He became a notorious figure in the Mongolian media and government, where the tabloids referred to the controversial bird-lover as “A. Parrot.”
Journalist Michael Kohn chronicled Parrot’s time in Mongolia in his memoir, Dateline Mongolia. For making his allegations of bird smuggling, Parrot claimed to Kohn he had been attacked by the “falcon mafia,” whose thugs he insisted smashed a kitchen sink over his chest.
“I was knocked unconscious and woke up the next day in my own excrement,” Parrot said, according to Kohn’s book.
Parrot also claimed that falcons were so highly prized, they were the equivalent of “feathered cocaine”—a phrase he would often deploy for years later to drum up intrigue for the international falcon trade.
In an echo of his tumultuous past in Canada, Parrot became involved in more cloak-and-dagger falcon work, alleging that a rival British ornithologist in Mongolia was running secret falcon-breeding farms. Parrot began planting radio tracking devices on the cars of people connected to the possibly fictitious falcon farms so he could track them, according to Kohn, and racing around the city in a taxi looking for supposed falcon criminals.
"The guy is actually mad," one ornithologist attacked by Parrot told the Wall Street Journal in 1999, while another quipped that “most people in Mongolia hate Alan Parrot.”
Parrot was eventually banned from entering Mongolia, according to Kohn. In the epilogue to his 2006 memoir about Mongolia, Kohn wrote that Parrot had all but vanished from the world of falconry, and that he was rumored to be dead.
But Parrot wouldn’t be out of the public eye for long.
After the 9/11 attacks, Parrot began to make claims that blurred the lines between his position as a falconer and his self-image as a kind of international man of mystery. In 2006, as the prospect of a state-run business in the United Arab Emirates taking over some port terminal functions at some American ports became a hot topic on Fox News, Parrot appeared, falcon in hand, on Fox News host John Gibson’s show to claim he had seen bin Laden consorting with Emirati leaders at a falconry camp.
The segment earned a mocking discussion on The Colbert Report, where Stephen Colbert jokingly warned that al Qaeda was “after our field mice.”
“By the way, did you notice the guy's name is Parrot?” Colbert said, to laughter. “Very suspicious.”
A few years after his Fox News appearance, Parrot claims to have learned from a Tajik smuggler that bin Laden was hiding out in Iran under the protection of the Iranian government and with the tacit approval of the Barack Obama administration.
As laid out in Feathered Cocaine, the smuggler was a part of Parrot’s network of informants investigating falcon poaching. But the smuggler had befriended the fugitive mass murderer after seeing the bin Laden hunting falcons with a small entourage in northeast Iran.
From there, Parrot lays out a tale of high-tech intrigue worthy of Mission Impossible. The smuggler noticed that bin Laden’s birds were tracked with radio transmitters. According to an anonymous interview in Feathered Cocaine, which the purported smuggler sat for with his entire face covered in a balaclava and sunglasses, the smuggler copied down the transmitter numbers. That way, Parrot claims, U.S. intelligence officials with the hawks’ numbers could easily find bin Laden when he was hunting.
Parrot claims he hatched a plot to bring bin Laden to justice, with or without help from the United States government. According to a 2011 account written by Florida attorney and Parrot associate John Loftus, after getting his tips ignored by U.S. officials, Parrot had planned to infiltrate Iran with a film crew, posing as documentarians. Then, he would murder his Iranian minders, track bin Laden via his falcons’ transmitters, and kidnap the terrorist mastermind.
“When Alan picked up bin Laden’s signal, he planned to kill the bodyguards, kidnap bin Laden, and drag him over the mountains into Tajikistan,” Loftus wrote. “We would collect the reward for bin Laden without government help.”
But that never happened. Parrot claimed in Feathered Cocaine that U.S. officials threatened to reveal his plans to the Iranian government while he was in that country.
Instead, Parrot made Feathered Cocaine with a film crew, the same crew Loftus claims was involved in the bin Laden kidnapping plot. The documentary’s first half covers Parrot’s love of falcons and his efforts to deter falcon smugglers, but reviewers were baffled by its second half, when it veers into his efforts to capture bin Laden in Iran.
Parrot’s claims in the documentary even reached ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos, who asked then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about them in an interview.
“Your question is laughable,” Ahmadinejad said, mocking Stephanopoulos by claiming that he had heard bin Laden was actually hiding in Washington, D.C.
In his movie, Parrot complained that his warnings about bin Laden were ignored by American officials.
“Why is it no one will listen to me?” Parrot asked.
The answer to that question became clear a year later, when members of Navy SEAL Team 6 killed bin Laden—not on a falcon-hunting trip in Iran, but in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The fact that bin Laden was found in Pakistan, not Iran, might have suggested that Parrot had no idea what he was talking about in Feathered Cocaine. Nine years later, Parrot has emerged with his explanation: it’s because Iran planted bin Laden in Pakistan, with the connivance of Biden and Hillary Clinton.
In a video broadcast publicly for the first time last weekend at the pro-Trump American Priority Conference at Trump’s Miami resort, Parrot claimed bin Laden had been set up in Pakistan for a “trophy kill” arranged by Iranians, Clinton, and Biden. But Iran betrayed the treacherous United States officials, Parrot claims, and swapped bin Laden out with a body double.
“Clinton and Biden outsourced the imprisonment of al Qaeda leaders to Iran,” Parrot says in the video to Benghazi conspiracy theorist Nick Noe and Charles Woods, whose son died in the 2012 Benghazi attack.
From there, Parrot spins an even more convoluted version of the bin Laden story he’s been pushing since 2006. Parrot claims Biden arranged a real attack in Afghanistan in 2011 that killed 25 SEALs and 13 other people.
“Vice President Biden paid with the blood of Seal Team 6,” Parrot said in the video. “He spent their blood like currency.”
Noe chimes in on the video, claiming that the Benghazi attack was then staged to cover up the plotting behind the attack on the SEALs.
O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL involved in the bin Laden raid, has pushed back on Parrot’s cover-up theory, saying that all of the SEALs involved in the operation are still alive.
Still, Parrot’s claims went moderately viral on the right, racking up 200,000 views on YouTube and inspiring articles on conservative blogs. Video of his American Priority talk was first posted on Oct. 11 on alternative social media platform PureSocialTV, but it truly picked up speed when it was embraced by right-wing personality and former Survivor contestant Anna Khait, who posted it on YouTube.
So far, Parrot has shown little evidence to back up his outlandish theory, despite promising to share “terabytes” of proof with Trump. His promoters have cited flimsy bits of evidence, including an envelope Parrot addressed to Biden in 2011, as “proof” that Biden knew about Parrot’s Iran theory.
Parrot has vowed to release more evidence about Biden—and the president has shown no regret about amplifying Parrot’s conspiracy theories.
Parrot, for his part, made clear in the video laying out his conspiracy theory that he’s eager for his claims to find an audience with the president of the United States: “It would be my pleasure and my honor to bring this material to president Trump.”
