Kingsley Tweed had planned a bloodless coup d'etat, in the 1960s, the theatre boycott legend told an audience this week.

Speaking at St. Paul's Centennial Hall on Tuesday, Rev. Tweed said that he had been marked as a dangerous man by the authorities and was detained in the United States for seven months after he had fled the Island.

But he said he and his fellow coup plotters had simply wanted to kidnap a bunch of people in key positions in their fight against racial segregation.

Rev. Tweed - now an African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) Minister in London - took exception to media reports that his exile was voluntary, holding up a copy of an intelligence dossier on him that he said proved his exile was forced.

“I can assure you it was compiled in Bermuda by the Bermuda Special Branch - many of whom, I understand, are still around and perhaps active around Bermuda, perhaps tapping your telephones in a rather intrusive camera (network) peering through all windows, seeing how you get ready for bed at nights and perhaps what you do with your wife in your bedroom.

“That's how intrusive they were and this document was compiled by them,” he said, adding he hoped that Bermudians will get hold of the documents and publicise them.

“Because apparently they haven't come to the attention of The Royal Gazette just now. And that will explain to you why I stayed away so long. It wasn't voluntary at all. After you have read these papers you will then be able to draw your own conclusions as to whether or not I left my family, my mother, my father, my wife and my children without being forced to do so.”

As of press time last night The Royal Gazette was unable to secure a copy of the dossier.

Rev. Tweed was arrested in New York by US Immigration in 1963 after he had fled Bermuda, with “three guns pointed at my head”.

He said he was treated like the “most dangerous human species” on the planet. The arrest was at the “instigation of the then Bermuda Government”.

He said that in 1961 he had planned to “bring about a coup d'etat”, adding: “There was something wrong in Bermuda that I had to simply put right.”

“It wasn't about bloodshed. And it's still not about bloodshed. All I wanted to do was to take some people and put them in the Cathedral up there - people in Government, people who own the lights, people who own the telephones and the newspapers, who monopolise every aspect of business activity in Bermuda.

“We simply wanted to take them into the cathedral, tie them up tightly, give them bread and water and on the third day a hot meal. It wasn't about vengeance. It was simply putting some people on notice that they had gotten too big for their bloody boots. Okay? That's what it was all about. And we had the capacity to do it. We had the keys to the armoury for God's sake.”

The authorities had established that “this is a dangerous communist black man who was about to take control in a coup d'etat - that means taking control of government and all the instruments of government. I'm guilty and make no apologies for having thought that,” he continued. “I'm guilty!”

He continued the tale of his arrest “with the collusion of Her Majesty's Special Branch” operatives who “still are here and if I was a Government Minister I would see quite quickly that they are no longer capable of the kind of dirty work they did back in 1959”.

He added: “They're still here - watching over us like Big Brother, while we sleep, while we eat, while we fornicate. They're still here. They see everything that we do. And this is not paranoia. It is a fact of history and of logic.”

Rev. Tweed said he spent the next seven months after his arrest in “almost complete isolation” being interrogated.

A number of “rather brave people had decided they did not appreciate how I was being treated as a human being” and intervened on his behalf.

“It allowed me to walk out of there after seven months and after some people had paid $3,000 cash security for my presentation in the Immigration court some months later, sometime in 1964.”

He said despite the intervention of some prominent people, the British Government insisted that he be sent back to them because he was a dangerous man.

They told the Americans “what I was and what I wasn't - I was a Trotskyite, I was a Leninist, I was a Marxist, I was a Stalinist, I was a dangerous leader of the lumpenproletariat - I was the most dangerous man (in Bermuda). And I didn't even have a cucumber in my possession to shoot the (inaudible).”

He said he had been demonised in much the same way as other black leaders around the world such as Marcus Garvey, Patrice Lumumba and “my mentor Mazumbo (E.F. Gordon).” And those who did the demonising are “still here”.

“They're still out there sowing their poison oats. I saw one of them in the newspapers coming up to this election.”

He said: “It makes me rather sad to see people so backward in their social and their political attitudes. (They are) still in control. You disagree with me? I don't see you in control. I don't see you owning supermarkets or banks. I don't see you engaging in any solid economic activity.”