A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  At this point, there is extremely strong evidence Sirhan was not only hypnotized but set up to be a patsy without his knowledge. How was Sirhan picked? Who knew he was so highly hypnotizable? Where might Sirhan have first been spotted?

  Estabrooks suggested “the hospital as a logical point of contact” when looking for subjects that could be easily hypnotized.725 Estabrooks wrote that in the context of finding foreigners captured as prisoners of war, so the statement is not directly analogous. But by several accounts, after Sirhan had the accident with the racehorse, something happened to change his personality. Was Sirhan first hypnotized after or maybe even during the time he spent in the hospital in Corona?

  When interviewed by Sergeants Sandlin and Strong shortly after the assassination, Sirhan’s brother Sharif described not only how seriously Sirhan’s personality changed after his fall from the horse, but how Sirhan disappeared for two weeks following the accident.726 It was as if someone had kidnapped Sirhan after he was discovered in the hospital to be highly hypnotizable and started programming him to be some sort of covert asset from that point forward.

  When he finally came home, “he had stitches all over on this side here …. Seven or eight stitches,” Sharif said, pointing to his right eye. Sirhan also complained of pain in his chest and his right side and other places “from his stomach and his back and his front head and shoulders.”727 It makes sense he would hurt all over after a fall from a horse. It makes less sense he would have that much pain all over two weeks later, after presumably having been treated. Dr. Richard Nelson, who treated him, made his injuries sound very minor.728 Had he been physically abused or even tortured in some way, without his knowledge?

  During the trial of Charlie Manson, for his role in manipulating his supporters into committing the murders of Sharon Tate and Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, Dr. William J. Bryan, who was helping the counsel of Linda Kasabian, one of Manson’s followers accused with murder, stated that personality changes were not induced through hypnosis but through torture:

  If the defense is going to be hypnotism, I don’t think the defendants have a chance. No one can be forced under hypnosis to commit murder unless that capacity was already in their essential nature.

  But there is another, far more powerful influence which may be seen here—brainwashing. Under long-term confinement, deprivation and brutality, which I understand may have been operative in this case, suggestive influence may be brought to bear which will completely change a personality.729

  If Sirhan received torture in conjunction with hypnosis at any point, he would likely have no memory of that. The hypnotist present would have seen to that. Sharif told the police that “all the times he was seeing the doctor. … He had some medicine.”

  The number of visits Sirhan paid to the doctor related to his fall from the horse seemed excessive compared with the injuries described by Dr. Richard Nelson. According to the LAPD’s progress report on this matter, Dr. Nelson described Sirhan’s condition as noncritical. His face was covered in dirt and Sirhan was unable to see at first due to the foreign matter in his eyes. But there were no broken bones, just some superficial bruises and cuts at the time of his fall. Dr. Nelson cleaned Sirhan’s eyes and treated his wounds and sent him on his way.730

  Why then, do FBI records show that Sirhan visited a doctor 13 more times over the next year specifically in relation to the track accident? The FBI reported Sirhan went to the doctor on September 25 and 28, October 26, November 8, and December 10 in 1966, and on February 21, April 6, September 6, October 6, October 9, October 10, November 6, and December 18 in 1967.731 Either Sirhan was far more seriously hurt during his fall from the horse than any official record has ever stated, or these visits were a cover for some other activity. Was someone using these visits to hypnotically program Sirhan?

  In Donald Bain’s book The CIA’s Control of Candy Jones, John Nebel, a radio personality in New York, described how his wife, the famous model Jessica Wilcox, who used the stage name of Candy Jones, became a hypnotically controlled courier for the CIA. She had an “alter” personality called Arlene Grant. Arlene was aware of Candy, but Candy was not aware of Arlene. The description very much mirrors what Estabrooks had described for splitting people into multiple personalities and programming them separately. Her hypnotist, whom Bain called “Gilbert Jensen,” worked out of Northern California.She visited him regularly and received injections of what she was told were vitamins but were more likely psychotropic drugs to keep her under control.

  Was Sirhan given similar injections? The doctor who treated him after the fall, Dr. Richard Nelson, noted that Sirhan seemed terrified of the medical treatments. Had someone already started to medicate him in some way before the accident?

  In custody, Sirhan had also exhibited a fear that his prison cell was bugged. Most people outside the covert world do not think along these lines. Given Sirhan’s school studies in the top spy languages of German, Russian, and Chinese, and given that he already spoke Arabic and English, Sirhan may have already been on some intelligence agency’s radar even before his accident. Anyone who knew Sirhan before the accident at the track could have simply used the accident as the perfect cover to accelerate his programming.

  Sharif pinpointed the racetrack accident as the point after which Sirhan’s behavior changed dramatically. Sharif was not close to Sirhan. They had barely spoken for the last two years. Sharif emphasized he was not saying any of this to take Sirhan’s side or try to make him look less guilty but simply because it was the truth:

  After he fell, we noticed that something went wrong with him because he started to change gradually. Now, we noticed the change not all at one time. It just became gradually, gradually, gradually, little by little, little by little. The last two or three months we couldn’t even talk to him or say—he was always, you know, avoiding us, and we tried to avoid him just so that we would pretend, if he wants to do something wrong instead of not to do it, because if we keep after him he might get worse and worse and worse. So we thought it better just to leave him the way he is. Not to bother him, to get out of his way.732

  Before the fall, Sirhan would do what he was asked. He was “sincere and honest and wanting to do whatever you want him to do,” Sharif explained. Before the fall from the horse, he kept his room clean, would mow the lawn when asked, and was generally tidy. “After that, he just didn’t care for anything—not his room, not even for himself….”733 He wouldn’t come out to talk to visitors. But he talked to the garbage man. “He stays there and he drinks coffee with them, and whenever they pass by—whoever is at the front door, they say, ‘Sir, where’s Sirhan; how’s Sirhan.’ He was so—everyone like, even the neighbors.” Sharif was trying to explain that people who interacted with Sirhan generally liked him.

  But after the accident, Sirhan had become so obstinate that Sharif said he feared he would hit Sirhan out of frustration so he had stopped speaking to him. Sharif said Saidallah wasn’t talking to Sirhan either, because at one point Sirhan had upset Said, as Sharif called him, and Said had hit Sirhan and the police had been called.

  When Sgt. Sandlin asked him who Sirhan’s closest friend had been in the last year, Sharif responded, “his bedroom and his books.”734

  Walter Rathke, a groom who had been one of Sirhan’s friends when they were working together “at a horse racing farm in Norco,” which abuts Corona, also noticed a dramatic change in Sirhan after the accident. He last saw Sirhan at his home in 1967. According to Rathke, Sirhan’s mother Mary said, “I just can’t talk to that boy anymore.” The LAPD’s report of Rathke’s interview states:

  Rathke states that he too noticed a big difference in Sirhan’s personality after his injury. He seemed to be a different person. Sirhan appeared very serious. He did not laugh anymore and was not his jovial self.735

  But Sirhan was his jovial self at Parker Center, after the shooting. Were Sirhan’s moods the result of hypnotic conditioning? Had A and B personalities been created?

 
; Sirhan had joined the Rosicrucian Order AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis) in June 1966, a few months before his fall from the horse in September 1966. On their website, the Rosicrucians explain they are not a religion, that students can be of any religion, and that they offer teachings designed to lead one to enlightenment. But there is something odd about the role of the Rosicrucians in Sirhan’s life. It was almost as if someone used his association with the Rosicrucians as a cover to hide Sirhan’s trancelike states.

  Curiously, the strange woman who spent the day with John Fahey, who wanted to fake a passport and get out of the country before “they” killed Kennedy “at the winning reception” said something about going up north, near San Francisco, for a conference or convention, and that she was a member of the Rosicrucians. The national Rosicrucian headquarters is in San Jose, California.

  Mrs. Frances Holland, the “Southern California Grand Counsellor of the Rosicrucian Order” told the FBI on June 12, 1968, that Sirhan had attended the Pasadena chapter meeting on June 4, 1968—the night of the California primary. Holland said she had confirmed this with the supervisor of the Pasadena chapter, Sherman Livingston. Holland noted in the same interview that Livingston and the Master of the chapter, Theodore Stevens, were concerned about the negative publicity stemming from Sirhan’s association with the Rosicrucians. So it should surprise no one that when the FBI talked to Livington, he said he had reviewed his notes and found Sirhan appeared at their chapter on May 28, not June 4.736 This may be the truth, but this may also be a lie to distance the organization from any hint of involvement.

  A woman wrote Robert Kennedy in November 1967 saying the Rosicrucian organization “planned to kill off the whole Kennedy family.” The woman, whose name is redacted in the FBI report from which this information was taken, “suggested that everyone in the organization be interrogated and jailed.”737 Things that sounded crazy in advance sounded far less crazy after the fact. One wonders what might have happened had the FBI taken that woman’s threat seriously and done some investigating.

  Oddly enough, there appears to have been a possible Rosicrucian-CIA connection to an assassination that happened in 1948 in Bogotá, Colombia. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was the Bobby Kennedy of his time, a man who was genuinely concerned about the plight of the poor in his country and who took on his own party which was doing too little to help. In April 1948, Gaitán was assassinated in the street. The killing was blamed on a man named Juan Roa Sierra, who was then killed by an angry mob shortly after. The uprising that followed the assassination, called the Bogotazo, is still noted annually.

  But mysteries in the case surfaced nearly immediately. Roa had been interested, like Sirhan, in the occult. Like Sirhan, Sierra was a member of the Rosicrucians. Roa had joined at the recommendation of an older German astrologer friend. Some witnesses, including famous author Gabriel García Márquez, heard and saw evidence that Roa may have been a patsy and that the real shooter—or shooters—had gotten lost in the crowd. In his memoir, García Márquez described seeing a man in a gray suit incite the crowd against Roa, “to have a false assassin killed in order to protect the identity of the real one.”738 Colombia even brought in the world-famous Scotland Yard detectives to try to get to the bottom of the matter, but all they found were more questions.

  At the time, Colombia was about to host the conference the Ninth Pan-American Conference that launched the Organization of American States, an organization designed ostensibly to keep Communism from taking root in Latin America. One could also argue the organization was set up in part to enhance U.S. business interests in the region.

  The assassin was accused of being a Communist at time when America was launching the Cold War, but the people of Colombia rejected that too-easy excuse, as the Communists, post-World War II, had the most to lose from such an action.

  Paul Wolf, an attorney who has looked seriously into this case for years, noted the following:

  Roa’s own motives can barely be understood. Two theories, now discredited, were put forward shortly after Gaitán’s death, which might have made sense if they’d been true. One was that Roa was an illegitimate son of Gaitán’s father, that there had been trouble between the two families, and that Gaitán’s father had made a settlement to Roa’s mother just one month before the assassination. A second theory was that Roa related to the alleged victim of one Gaitán’s clients in his criminal law practice, for whom Gaitán had won an acquittal the day before. Although the first director of the CIA, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, reported this version to a Congressional investigating committee as fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that Roa was related to Gaitán or to any of his clients. Why Admiral Hillenkoetter went with this story, instead of reporting that the CIA was still investigating the matter, is another unsolved mystery.739

  Several writers on the subject believe the nascent CIA was behind Gaitán’s assassination. Gaitán was advocating strongly on behalf of the poor and dispossessed, and a large student movement was backing him. The main reason the CIA overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and tried to overthrow Castro throughout the 1960s and 1970s were because these leaders expropriated land from American corporations. Gaitán had advocated along similar lines, as Paul Wolf wrote: “in one of Gaitán’s best known works, The Problem of Land, he put forth the theory that private land ownership was unnatural—the land itself belonged to everyone.”740

  Greg Parker wrote that a man named John Espirito (or Spirito or Spirrito, depending on the source) confessed to killing Gaitán for the CIA, at the direction of his CIA handler Thomas Elliot, in a documentary:

  Under interrogation following his arrest for counter-revolutionary activities, Espirito made the startling confession that he had played a role in the assassination of Gaitán as part of a CIA operation code-named PANTOMIME. The confession was filmed, and later used as the basis of a documentary made by the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry. …

  The easiest method of removal was always bribery. According to the confession, Thomas Elliot offered Gaitán a chair in Criminal Law at the Sorbonne in Paris, or alternatively at Rome University. … These bribes were confirmed by the politician’s daughter, Gloria ….741

  Is it possible someone in the Rosicrucian organization between from the late 1940s through the late 1960s served as a spotter for people who might be susceptible to hypnotic programming? Regardless, Sirhan’s doings in Corona and his time with the Rosicrucians seem to be areas that should have been much more thoroughly investigated.

  If Sirhan were being programmed from late 1966 forward, to what purpose? In 1966, it was not clear that Robert Kennedy would be running for president in 1968. He had denied that he wanted to run and had just been elected Senator of New York. Was Sirhan originally being programmed to be a courier? An assassin? A patsy? The clues may lie in Sirhan’s notebook when juxtaposed with world history at that point in time. Understand that the strangely repetitive items in Sirhan’s notebook appear to be “automatic writing,” writing produced during a hypnotic session, and not the kind of writing Sirhan did in his waking state. When Dr. Diamond hypnotized Sirhan and asked him to write, Sirhan wrote similar, repetitive phrases. Out of hypnosis, the writing scared Sirhan, as they looked like the ramblings of someone mentally ill. But it seems likely those writings were never the product of Sirhan’s own mind, but rather the result of someone else’s suggestions.

  There were numerous references to Nasser in Sirhan’s notebooks. On one strange page Sirhan had written “Long live Nasser” over and over. When Gamel Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt, he had three goals: “to rid Egypt of foreign influence, and especially of the British; to unite the Arabs; and to bring his people out of feudal backwardness into twentieth century life.”742 But nationalism was regarded, economically, as Communism to the Cold Warriors of the previous century, so both British intelligence and the CIA came up with plots to kill him. One plot involving poisoning a box of chocolates that Nasser was fond of. Although
the official version states Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970, some researchers into that case believe there is evidence that Nasser was poisoned or killed. Bud Culligan, the CIA man who claimed to have shot down U.N. Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane in 1961 at the CIA’s behest, wrote in a letter that made its way to the Church Committee files that he had gone to confession after Nasser died, implying he may have killed Nasser as well.743 Positioning Sirhan as a pro-Nasser, pro-Communist supporter—as some of Sirhan’s notebook pages indicate—might have made it easier for him to get close to Nasser, had such a plot progressed.

  Another page filled with Nasser references has more disturbing text on it. Along with references to AMORC (the Rosicrucians) and “Di Salvo Die S Salvo” we find, scribbled at the top right, “help me please.”744 Perhaps this is meaningless in the original context, whatever that was. But without other information, it’s impossible to avoid the suggestion that some part of Sirhan was aware he was being programmed to do something he didn’t want to do, so he begged for help.

  On another page we find repetitive entries that say “Ambassador Goldberg must die.” Ambassador Arthur Goldberg had been an attorney with the United Steelworkers when President John Kennedy tapped him to be his Secretary of Labor. In October 1962, Arthur Goldberg became Supreme Court Justice Goldberg. He served only two short years and a few months. After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Lyndon B. Johnson convinced Goldberg to take over the UN Ambassador role after Adlai Stevenson died. It is very unusual for someone to voluntarily leave the life-long Supreme Court Justice position, but evidently Johnson convinced Goldberg he might be able, from his position in the UN, to help end the Vietnam War. In 1967, Goldberg tried to do just that as well as broker a peace agreement in the Middle East. Either of those could have been a reason for someone to target Goldberg for assassination. War and conflict are extremely lucrative financial propositions that also provide the CIA tremendous power and freedom of movement.