by Lisa Pease
During World War II, I worked this technique with a vulnerable Marine lieutenant I’ll call Jones. Under the watchful eye of Marine Intelligence I split his personality into Jones A and Jones B. Jones A, once a “normal” working Marine, became entirely different. He talked communist doctrine and meant it. He was welcomed enthusiastically by communist cells, was deliberately given a dishonorable discharge by the Corps (which was in on the plot) and became a card-carrying party member.
The joker was Jones B, the second personality, formerly apparent in the conscious Marine. Under hypnosis, this Jones had been carefully coached by suggestion. Jones B was the deeper personality, knew all the thoughts of Jones A, was a loyal American, and was “imprinted” to say nothing during conscious phases.
All I had to do was hypnotize the whole man, get in touch with Jones B, the loyal American, and I had a pipeline straight into the Communist camp. It worked beautifully for months with this subject, but the technique backfired. While there was no way for an enemy to expose Jones’ dual personality, they suspected it and played the same trick on us later.651
When I read this the first time, I thought immediately of the young Marine Lee Harvey Oswald who attempted to infiltrate Communist groups while secretly working for the CIA. I wondered if Estabrooks’ description could explain both Oswald’s pro- and anti-communism stances exhibited during his time in the Marines and after. In the Marines, at the height of the Cold War, Oswald studied Russian, listened to Russian operas and openly talked about Communism. In the ultraconservative Cold War military establishment, the only way that would have been allowed is if the upper brass knew that Oswald was being prepared in some way for a covert mission to the Soviet Union.
While being transferred by the Dallas police, Oswald was assassinated by Jack Ruby. The famous attorney Melvin Belli represented Ruby at his trial. One of Belli’s friends, an attorney named Leonard Steinman, suggested in a letter to Belli that Jack Ruby had been acting out a post-hypnotic command when he killed Oswald. Ruby’s defense psychiatrist Dr. Louis Jolyon West, who had worked with the CIA on MKULTRA experiments,652 had argued that Ruby had organic brain damage. Other medical experts disagreed with that diagnosis.653 Steinman argued Ruby only appeared to have brain damage and had instead been hypnotized:
Mel—the brain damage picture is not the result of previous concussion and physical trauma, but of hypno-conditioning, of induction by suggestion through deep hypnosis of an artificial psychosis. Unlocking this psychosis, of establishing the identity of the hypno-conditioner, requires a dedicated hypnotherapist with an exhaustive knowledge not only of Freudian but Pavlovian principles. Please believe me also that Ruby’s explanation of what gave rise to his act, of his feelings of depression and overwroughtness at the President’s death, of his feelings for Mrs. Kennedy and the further torment Oswald’s trial would cause her, of his chagrin at the anti-Kennedy ads and hate posters—are all confabulations and rationalizing similar to those found in Korsakoff’s Syndrome [in which people invent events to correspond to missing memories – LP]; all caused by the hypno-conditioning he was subjected to. In all the cases, the hypno-conditioned victim shows the symptoms of an obsessive-compulsive neurotic with psychopathic and schizoid components … all the result of the conditioning process. …
Do you want to know why Ruby shows a brain syndrome picture? Probably because some toxin was used together with the conditioning. Alcohol. Peyote. Mescaline. LSD-25. To lock the post-hypnotic suggestions firmly in, to prevent Ruby from clearing, from being re-hypnotized by anyone other than the Conditioner. Sound like something out of a piece of fantasy-fiction? Then see “The Manipulation of Human Behavior,” 1961, John Wiley & Sons, compiled under the auspices of and sponsored by Uncle Sam’s own USAF…. I tell you, Mel, this case is insidious. The theory isn’t really a second-line defense. It’s what actually happened.654
While it’s not at all clear that’s what happened to Jack Ruby, Bill Turner and Jonn Christian were persuaded that Steinman’s thesis likely applied to Sirhan Sirhan:
The Steinman letter was very much on Christian’s mind after RFK was shot. That Sirhan might have been programmed through hypnosis sounded like science fiction, but the symptoms began to crop up. CBS cameraman James D. Wilson, who was at the Ambassador when Kennedy was shot, told Turner that he and his colleagues covering the court case had observed that Sirhan seemed permanently depressed “with his mind working in separate compartments.”
“I know this sounds silly,” Wilson said, “but I find no explanation for Sirhan as satisfactory as the hypothesis that he has been acting and talking under hypnosis or in posthypnotic suggestion.”655
The presence of Dr. Louis Joylon “Jolly” West in Ruby’s trial is interesting. Dr. West had been a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma at the time of Ruby’s trial. He later moved to Los Angeles, where he headed the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. Dr. West had also been involved in a panel regarding the U.S. airmen captured in Korea which found that sleep deprivation, not brainwashing, along with “the constant fear of harm and the total dependency on their captors, led the airmen into startling and fairly long-lasting personality changes.” Dr. West’s work prevented the airmen from being court-martialed.656 But he also may have covered for the CIA’s biowarfare experiments by doing so.
In later years, Dr. West examined Patty Hearst, who had committed crimes while a captive of the “Symbionese Liberation Army” or SLA. West made a similar argument—that Hearst’s mind had been broken down by her captors. But one of her captors, Donald DeFreeze, had come out of Vacaville, where some of the CIA’s MKULTRA experiments had been conducted. In his book Revolution’s End: The Patty Hearst Kidnapping, Mind Control, and the Secret History of Donald DeFreeze (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), author Brad Schreiber pointed out that DeFreeze’s development of the SLA came about through his association with Colston Westbrook, whose CIA connections had been elucidated briefly in a New York Times article.657 In Revolution’s End, Schreiber argued, as others have before him, that the SLA was a CIA project to discredit the radical left. Another famous criminal “treated” at the Vacaville facility was Charlie Manson:
On March 20, 1974, Manson was transferred from Folsom State Prison to CMF to undergo psychiatric treatment. He was treated for “conceptual disorganization” caused by being locked up continually with little or no human contact. In October 1974, he was shipped back to Folsom, but returned in May 1976 with the same diagnosis.658
Dr. James Hamilton, a San Francisco psychiatrist who had worked with George White in the OSS, was the “West Coast Supervisor” for Sydney Gottlieb’s CIA mind control experiments, including MKSEARCH, the successor program to MKULTRA. MKSEARCH Subproject #3 involved behavioral control experiments on prisoners at Vacaville. As Marks wrote:
By the early 1960s, [Hamilton] had arranged to get access to prisoners at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. Hamilton worked through a nonprofit research institute connected to the Facility to carry out, as a document puts it, “clinical testing of behavioral control materials” on inmates. Hamilton’s job was to provide “answers to specific questions and solutions to specific problems of direct interest to the Agency. In a six-month span in 1967 and 1968, the psychiatrist spent over $10,000 in CIA funds simply to pay volunteers—which at normal rates meant he experimented on between 400 to 1,000 inmates in that time period alone.659
Marks added as a footnote to the passage above, “During the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that every radical on the West Coast was saying that the CIA was up to strange things in behavior modification at Vacaville. Like many of yesterday’s conspiracy theories, this one turned out to be true.”660
During Sirhan’s trial, both the prosecution and defense psychological experts suggested that if Sirhan were not put to death, he should be transferred to Vacaville. Was someone involved in the MKULTRA program nervous about what someone might find in Sirhan’s mind if he were incarcerated elsewhere? Were they eager t
o continue to put a lock on his mind? In most cases, hypnosis wears off after time. Was there a fear that Sirhan might someday remember what had truly happened in the pantry?
Oddly, the Vacaville reference was missing in the trial pages on file at the California State Archives, which had been copied and posted at the online archive site of MaryFerrell.org. I had to ask an archivist to track down this and other pages that referenced Sirhan’s trance state which someone had surreptitiously removed from the trial record. Fortunately, the missing pages were found in the Supreme Court’s records and sent to me. The pages that were missing referred to hypnosis, a trance state, and Vacaville.
Lest anyone think the CIA would not be cruel enough to turn human beings into automatons, be aware that the CIA’s doctors and psychological experts tried all kinds of crazy things on not only humans but animals. In one particularly gruesome experiment, one of the experimenters tried to cut the head off one monkey and transplant it onto another monkey whose head had been cut off to make room. If this had somehow succeeded, would humans have been next? With the exception of the CIA’s asking President Eisenhower for permission to experiment on medical patients and volunteers at the Georgetown University Hospital, a request that was approved in the mid-fifties, the CIA did not ask the president or any other body for permission for its experiments.661 When the CIA’s use of private foundations and nonprofit organizations for funding not just mind control experiments but all sorts of covert activities was exposed in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson forbade the CIA from using these institutions for support. That didn’t affect their programs, however. The CIA just started funneled CIA money through private companies instead, starting with one owned by one of the operatives involved in the experiments.662
Whatever the CIA did in its mind control operations must have been truly heinous, because when President Richard Nixon made Helms Ambassador to Iran, essentially firing him from his role as CIA Director, Helms ordered all documentation on the CIA’s mind control programs destroyed.
Fortunately for history, however, a few documents survived the destruction. These primarily financial documents nonetheless hint at terrifying experiments in brainwashing and mind control. People were subjected to horrific conditions to see if the mind could be reprogrammed through torture, repetitive tapes and recordings, sensory deprivation and other techniques. Some were given combinations of drugs and hypnosis. Tests were conducted on American citizens without their knowledge or consent.
Although the CIA claimed overtly that its mind control operations were meant to help protect U.S. operatives and military personnel from Soviet, Chinese and other countries’ control, clearly this was a weapon with offensive potential, as an Agency officer Marks quoted explained:
Nearly every Agency document stressed goals like “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” On reading one such memo, an Agency officer wrote to his boss: “If this is supposed to be covered up as a defensive feasibility study, it’s pretty damn transparent.”663 [Emphasis added.]
One CIA officer, Morse Allen, used hypnosis on his secretaries to see what he could make them do. In one instance, Allen tried to make a “killer” out of a secretary:
On February 19, 1954, Morse Allen simulated the ultimate experiment in hypnosis: the creation of a “Manchurian Candidate,” or programmed assassin. Allen’s “victim” was a secretary whom he put into a deep trance and told to keep sleeping until he ordered otherwise. He then hypnotized a second secretary and told her that if she could not wake up her friend, “her rage would be so great that she would not hesitate to ‘kill.’” Allen left a pistol nearby, which the secretary had no way of knowing was unloaded. Even though they had earlier expressed a fear of firearms of any kind, she picked up the gun and “shot” her sleeping friend.” After Allen brought the “killer” out of her trance, she had apparent amnesia for the event, denying she would ever shoot anyone.”664
The problem with this experiment, some argue, is that the secretary trusted Allen not to make an assassin out of her and fired the gun in the sure knowledge that she would not have been allowed to fire it if it had been loaded. But if he had loaded the gun, would she have fired anyway? Especially if she trusted him and he had casually mentioned to someone else in front of her that the gun was loaded with blanks (when it wasn’t)? The reason this can’t be scientifically tested, or reported if such tests have already been performed, is that a successful experiment would result in a murder, and no one would dare brag about that on the record. But as you have already seen, there are plenty of hints that such experiments were successfully conducted.
The CIA wasn’t alone in its pursuit of the perfect puppet. The Navy had its own programs, some of which were done in conjunction with the CIA, for years. The Navy’s interest was originally focused on finding the perfect truth serum. But soon their interests followed along the lines of the CIA’s: to create a mind-controlled assassin.
Some of the Navy’s “Manchurian Candidate” programs were revealed by Lt. Commander Thomas Narut at a NATO conference in Oslo, Norway in 1975. Peter Watson, a reporter for the London Times who was also a trained psychologist and working on a book on military psychology, interviewed several of the conference participants, including Narut, about what had been discussed at a 1975 conference. What he reported on Sunday, July 6, 1975 in the Sunday edition of the London Times made headlines all over the United States the following day.
Watson reported that Narut had described how Navy men were being trained to cope with the stress of killing, and were being forced to watch movies, with their heads clamped so they could not look away. They were shown, for example, films of African youth being circumcised to reduce the troops’ qualms about killing Africans. People were being conditioned to think of their enemies as inferior creatures, making them easier to annihilate. Narut describing the programming of soldiers’ minds to kill not so much through hypnosis as by repeated conditioning.
Narut mentioned how criminals had been retrieved on occasion from prisons and trained to be assassins. Narut also mentioned that assassins were then assigned to embassies, such as the one in Athens, and that the training took place either at the Naples hospital or at the Navy’s neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego.
Within 24 hours of Watson’s article appearing, Narut was summoned to London to talk to his superior, Admiral Thomas Engen, the U.S. Naval Chief of Staff in Europe. After talking to Admiral Engen, Narut immediately issued a statement saying “The assertion attributed to me that convicted murderers have been assigned to embassies as assassins is totally and blatantly false and absurd.”665 Watson, however, stood by his reporting, stating he obtained this information in private from three or four conference attendees, and that he had obtained other information directly from Narut in a 90-minute interview in his hotel room. In the recantation, the Navy made it sound like Watson talked only briefly to Narut while Narut was getting dressed for dinner. Watson responded that while it was “true we carried on talking while he got ready for dinner,” the two had also “talked non-stop for one and a half hours.”666
In the weeks leading up to the assassination, Sirhan made frequent trips to Corona. What was in Corona, I wondered? I finally drove out there to see for myself. Besides some beautiful stretches of the Santa Ana River, horse farms, and industrial parks, there is a huge Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) there. NSWC is part of the Naval Sea Systems Command. According to the NSWC’s website:
Together, we engineer, build, buy and maintain ships, submarines and combat systems that meet the Fleet’s current and future operational requirements.
Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) is the largest of the Navy’s five system commands. With a fiscal year budget of nearly $30 billion, NAVSEA accounts for one quarter of the Navy’s entire budget.667
Corona is completely landlocked, but there is a lake there nestled largely out of sight among foothil
ls, where naval weapons are presumably tested. Is it possible some of the navy’s human weapons along the lines Narut described were developed or tested there as well?
Sirhan apparently frequented Corona in the last months leading up to the assassination. According to LAPD records, Sirhan’s name appeared on the roster at the Corona Police Department Firing Range on June 1, 1968 (the Saturday before the California primary election).668 According to Sirhan’s lawyer William Pepper, this was where Sirhan was taught to shoot at human targets.
While privately, the CIA admitted to some successes with their mind control programs, to the public, through its assets, the CIA asserted that no one could be hypnotized to do something against their will. Two frequent media voices on this point included one person who has long been exposed as having been associated with the CIA’s mind control programs: Dr. Martin T. Orne. The other was Dr. William J. Bryan, who told prostitutes he worked for the CIA, and his friends and associates would seem to suggest this as well. In her book Memory, Alison Winter, reached a similar conclusion re Bryan, noting “I have found no solid evidence of government-funded work after the war, but Bryan’s published writings certainly mark out an interest that straddles the forensic and the military range of psychological research.”669 Given that the CIA’s mind control records were largely destroyed, there may no longer be a way to prove that definitively one way or another.
While Sirhan’s defense was being heard by the jury, along with Orne and Bryan, reporter David Shaw quoted Dr. Loyd W. Rowland, who wrote about experiments under hypnosis, including ones where men picked up what they had been told were poisonous snakes, where people had thrown what they had been led to believe was acid in other people’s faces on command, and other such experiments. Rowland said, according to Shaw, “The common conception that a hypnotized person will not perform acts that violate his ideas is badly in need of reexamination.” But Shaw only quoted Rowland in an attempt to dismiss that same idea, noting, “Most hypnotists bridle at this charge. They say a hypnotized individual’s senses are so acute he would realize, subconsciously, that the ‘acid’ was harmless, that the “rattlesnakes” were not poisonous.”670