A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  Beyond the Hardrup case, I found one publicly reported case where someone killed someone else in direct response to a hypnotic suggestion. In December 1923, a policeman was hypnotized during a stage show in Sebenico, Yugoslavia. He was put through various antics before the audience that amused the crowd. Then, the hypnotist gave the policeman a block of wood and told him to shoot the crowd. The policeman tried to shoot the crowd with the block of wood, but when that didn’t work, he pulled out his actual gun and fired into the crowd, killing three people and wounding others. “When he learned what he had done, he went mad,” said one article.631 Another article stated that the policeman arrested a few members of the crowd and took them to the police station. The hypnotist had a difficult time removing the hypnotic suggestion from the policeman’s mind, noting “it took hours to bring him to his senses.”632 The hypnotist was jailed. The policeman had to be put in an insane asylum.633 The latter article contained this appropriate warning:

  Fortunately professional exhibitions of hypnotism are not so common in this country [America] as they used to be. They should not be permitted anywhere. Hypnotism is a dangerous power to fool with, and should never be utilized except by a skilled and reputable physician or alienist, for a curative purpose. So used, it may be valuable, though there is always some question about the propriety of putting one’s own mind under the control of another person.634

  Many of the biggest believers in the power of hypnosis have worked for the U.S. Government. The CIA, Army and Navy have all spent large sums of money trying to find ways to completely control another human being, under project names like Often, Chatter, Chickwit, QKHILLTOP, MKDELTA and the more well-known programs of Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA and MKNAOMI. These programs were uncovered in the wake of the Watergate hearings, which precipitated the Rockefeller Commission, the Church and Pike Committees, and ultimately, a Senate investigation into the CIA’s mind control programs.

  It’s important to note that the CIA’s mind control programs began with a lie. The CIA had been conducting biological warfare in Korea during the Korean War in the 1950s. When captured soldiers confessed to this, to hide this war crime, the CIA told the media the men had been “brainwashed” to make untrue accusations against the U.S. government. And then the CIA sent Col. Boris Pash, who led an assassination unit, to ensure the soldiers recanted.635

  During the Senate’s introduction to their report on the CIA’s MKULTRA projects, Senator Edward Kennedy, who perhaps had the most personal interest in this matter, said at the conclusion of these efforts:

  The intelligence community of this Nation, which requires a shroud of secrecy in order to operate, has a very sacred trust from the American people. The CIA’s program of human experimentation of the fifties and sixties violated that trust. It was violated again on the day the bulk of the agency’s records were destroyed in 1973. It is violated again each time a responsible official refuses to recollect the details of the program. The best safeguard against abuses in the future is a complete public accounting of the abuses of the past.636

  The CIA’s awful experiments, one of which famously resulted in the death of government employee Frank Olson, were the result of a decades-long mindset that in the world of spying, anything was justifiable. President Harry S. Truman commissioned a study of government and appointed former president Herbert Hoover to what became known as the Hoover Commission. The Hoover Commission Report foreshadowed the mentality of the CIA in such operations:

  It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable longstanding American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us.637

  The CIA would use blackmail, sex, drugs and mind control in their efforts to spy on other countries, recruit people into becoming spies or double agents, and ultimately, to convince “unwitting” assets to participate in covert operations. Various accounts hint at a more sinister use of these programs as well: to blackmail American politicians, celebrities, journalists and other opinion leaders who threatened the CIA’s hegemony.638

  George White, one of the CIA’s most documented assets in its efforts to use sex, drugs and hypnosis to control others, expressed the feeling of a lot of operatives in this era in a letter he wrote his CIA officer in this projects, Sid Gottlieb:

  I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?639

  Such is the mindset of the people involved in such operations. So if anyone thinks no one associated with a government agency would be cruel enough to take a traumatized Christian Palestinian immigrant who was struggling to make it in America and use his own tortured background against him, think of George White.

  The best part about using hypnosis in covert operations, from the CIA’s point of view, was the ability to guarantee the secrecy of an operation even from the direct participants. As Richard Helms, the director of “plans” in the CIA, i.e., conspiracy plots, told the Church Committee:

  [T]he clandestine operator, the intelligence operator, is trained to believe that you really can’t count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul; in other words, unless you have control, is the word of art, over that man, which is so strong that you know darn well he’s your fellow. [Emphasis added.]640

  In an effort to gain this complete control over the actions of another, these institutions tried everything they could think of, including sex, blackmail, drugs, hypnosis, and even torture, often in combination. The advantage hypnosis had over all other forms is that the subject would not remember he had been manipulated by someone else.

  Richard Helms was particularly involved in the mind control programs, which had been started by his good friend and CIA mentor Allen Dulles. In December 1963, Helms—then the Deputy Director of Plans—wrote an impassioned plea to the current deputy director of the CIA at the time, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, arguing that the CIA not only needed to conduct “psychochemical” tests on “unwitting” subjects abroad, which the CIA was already doing, but also needed to conduct covert experiments on unwitting subjects in the U.S.:

  In the circumstances of potential operational use of this technique, it is virtually certain that the target will be unwitting. … Contacts between the Agency and the police departments in [redacted], for example, could be exploited.641

  General Carter had previous expressed moral qualms about testing drugs on “unwitting subjects.”642 Helms then said the problem with using prisoners was how many people in law enforcement and the Justice Department would have to be made witting of the agency’s role. He suggested instead using the Bureau of Narcotics as “the most practical and secure method available,” the implication being that the CIA had a close relationship with that Bureau and that no one would care what was done to a drug addict. In a separate document, which appears to be a follow-up document to this memo, Helms wrote:

  We have been unable to devise a better method of pursuing such a program than the one we have with the Narcotics Bureau which [sic] has been completely secure for over eight years and we have no answer to the moral issue [of testing drugs and other mind control methods on unwitting subjects].643

  Helms’ document is carefully worded, but strongly suggests the CIA had already achieved operational success with drugs and hypnosis for more than eight years because the first document referenced states the need to “maintain” as opposed to create or develop “an offensive capability.”644

  When John Marks interviewed a veteran of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind contro
l programs, the veteran said the CIA did not believe in using mind-controlled assassins and for good reason:

  The MKULTRA veteran maintains that he and his colleagues were not interested in a programmed assassin because they knew in general it would not work and, specifically, that they could not exert total control. “If you have one hundred percent control, you have one hundred percent dependency,” he says. “If something happens and you haven’t programmed it in, you’ve got a problem. If you try to put flexibility in, you lose control. To the extent you let the agent choose, you don’t have control.” He admits that he and his colleagues spent hours running the arguments on the Manchurian Candidate back and forth. “Castro was naturally our discussion point,” he declares. “Could you get somebody gung-ho enough that they would go in and get him?” In the end, he states, they decided there were more reliable ways to kill people. “You can get exactly the same thing from people who are hypnotizable by many other ways, and you can’t get anything out of people who are not hypnotizable, so it has no use,” says Gittinger.645

  Even so, in June 1960, the Technical Services Staff (TSS) of the CIA, in conjunction with the CIA’s Counterintelligence unit, then headed by the notorious James Angleton,646 launched a joint program of “operational experiments” in hypnosis. “Operational experiments” meant actual counterintelligence operations in the field as opposed to a laboratory or controlled test situation. At the time, according to Marks, “Counterintelligence officials wrote that the hypnosis program could provide a ‘potential breakthrough in clandestine technology.’”647

  James Angleton has been heavily fingered in the story of Lee Harvey Oswald. Angleton had a pre-assassination file on Oswald that was opened—officially, although dates on documents in Oswald’s file suggest otherwise—only after the State Department queried CIA about American “defectors” to the Soviet Union. Oswald never actually defected, and after decades of file releases, it now seems Oswald was likely sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA as a false defector as part of a hunt for a mole in the U-2 program. Oswald had intimate knowledge of the U-2, having been a U-2 radar operator. The CIA believed if the Soviets cozied up to Oswald and asked him about the U-2 program, then there was no leak, but if the Soviets ignored Oswald, as they did, then the Soviets already had a better source of information, a mole in the program.

  That would explain why Oswald had right-wing friends but was busy espousing a Communist sensibility in staged street altercations and on the radio prior to the assassination of President Kennedy. It would explain why, having announced an intention to “defect” and give up secrets of “special interest” to the Soviets, he believed he would be able to return to the U.S. via a “military hop,” something that would have been off-limits to an actual traitor or defector.

  Angleton, like his close friend Allen Dulles, had a keen operational interest in the use of hypnosis for counterintelligence (CI) operations. In fact, in July 1963, Angleton’s CI staff tried to do an experiment in Mexico City with a “hypnotic consultant” from California. According to John Marks in his book The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”:

  In October 1960 the MKULTRA program invested $9,000 in an outside consultant to develop a way of quickly hypnotizing an unwitting subject. John Gittinger says the process consisted of surprising “somebody sitting in a chair, putting your hands on his forehead, and telling the guy to go to sleep.” The method worked “fantastically” on certain people, including some on whom no other technique was effective, and not on others. “It wasn’t that predictable,” notes Gittinger, who states he knows nothing about the field testing.

  The test … did not take place until July 1963—a full three years after the Counterintelligence experimental program began, during which interval the Agency is claiming that no other field experiments took place. According to a CIA man who participated in this test, the Counterintelligence Staff in Washington asked the CIA station in Mexico City to find a suitable candidate for a rapid induction experiment. The station proposed a low-level agent, whom the Soviets had apparently doubled. A Counterintelligence man flew in from Washington and a hypnotic consultant arrived from California. Our source and a fellow case officer brought the agent to a motel room on a pretext. “I puffed him up with his importance,” says the Agency man. “I said the bosses wanted to see him and of course give him more money.” Waiting in an adjoining room was the hypnotic consultant. At a prearranged time, the two case officers gently grabbed hold of the agent and tipped his chair over until the back was touching the floor. The consultant was supposed to rush in at that precise moment and apply the technique. Nothing happened. The consultant froze, unable to do the deed. “You can imagine what we had to do to cover-up,” says the official, who was literally left holding the agent. “We explained we had heard a noise, got excited, and tipped him down to protect him. He was so grubby for money he would have believed any excuse.”648

  The codename for this project (and other counterintelligence field operations using hypnosis) was ZRALERT. The ZR digraph indicated operations, including the Castro assassination plot ZRRIFLE, that were run by “Staff D” in the CIA, the group that interfaced with the NSA. I once worked with a former NSA staffer who told me the NSA had assassination teams. This would make sense, based on something former CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith described in his book Portrait of a Cold Warrior. He wrote that anyone who was involved in coup plotting had to talk to Staff D, which he said was a unit within the CIA’s counterintelligence unit. If the NSA had assassins, Staff D would be the group that would need them most, for coups. Because the NSA’s official stance is that it is entirely an electronic eavesdropping intelligence gathering agency, no Congressional investigation has ever subpoenaed their records in connection with possible other activities, which is unfortunate. For a time, the NSA’s budget was larger than the CIA’s, but the agency was even more secretive. When it was initially formed, the joke was that “NSA” stood for “No Such Agency.”

  And who was the hypnotic consultant from California? Did he hypnotize Sirhan? It would not surprise me if there had been a hidden ZR project targeting GPFOCUS, the CIA’s codename for Senator Robert Kennedy. (The codename for JFK was GPIDEAL, and the codename for Lee Harvey Oswald was GPFLOOR. No investigation ever sought files from the CIA relative to the Robert Kennedy assassination.)

  Angleton kept copies of photographs from Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, Carl McNabb, a former CIA operative, told me years ago. Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley also noted the same in his book on Win Scott. In a private email, Morley told me that Angleton had believed the Mafia had likely killed Robert Kennedy. But my own research on Angleton showed him to be a skilled disinformationist. This “belief” was likely designed to throw the curious off the scent of the CIA’s own role in the killing of Robert Kennedy.

  I have found no evidence linking Angleton to the plot, but given Angleton’s interest in hypnosis, his contacts in California, and his overall mentality that the CIA should not have to follow the laws of the country, it would not surprise me if he had foreknowledge or were more directly involved.

  Estabrooks described in his book Hypnosis how he could create multiple personality states in an individual through hypnosis. He’d then program the two states such that one personality wouldn’t know what the other one was doing. Estabrooks asked in his book if it was unethical to split personalities in this manner and answered his own question “perhaps,” but he felt that anything was justified in war.

  Did someone split Sirhan’s personality through hypnosis? At the trial, when questioned about a passage in one of Sirhan’s notebooks by Grant Cooper, Sirhan’s response showed some rudimentary awareness of what some call an “alter,” short for “alternate personality,” within:

  “That is what you said, isn’t it?”

  “That is what I said, but it’s not me, sir. It’s not Sirhan sitting right here who wrote that.”

  “Well, who wrote it?”

  “It’s not
Sirhan sitting right here who wrote that.”

  “Well, who wrote it?”

  “I did.”

  “What do you mean it isn’t Sirhan writing this?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  But Estabrooks could have explained this, and the reasons for this, had anyone called him to the stand. In his chapter “Hypnotism and Warfare,” Estabrooks described how one could create a “Super Spy” using hypnosis:

  We start with an excellent subject and he must be just that, one of those rare individuals who accepts and who carries through every suggestion without hesitation. … Then we start to develop a case of multiple personality through the use of hypnotism. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to authorities. Note that he will be acting in good faith. He is a communist, or rather his PA is a communist and will behave as such.

  Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality, if you wish, although this is somewhat of a contradiction in terms. This personality is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by PA, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage. …

  The proper training of a person for this role would be long and tedious, but once he was trained, you would have a super spy compared to which any creation in a mystery story is just plain weak.

  My super spy plays his role as a communist in his waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge those memories.…649

  Did this actually work? At the time of the book’s first publication in 1943, Estabrooks stated he did not know if this were possible, adding that Milton H. Erickson, a respected hypnotist of the time, “has done excellent work proving to his satisfaction that such uses of hypnotism would be quite impossible,” but that other hypnotists “have done excellent work proving the opposite.”650 By 1971, however, Estabrooks asserted that he had succeeded in doing this, describing nearly the identical scenario: