The Covert War Against Rock

by Alex Constantine

  And there was the crushing of his vocal chords by thugs in Tanzania. Ochs was drawn to Africa by its music, language, and political potential. While strolling on the beach at Dar es Salaam, Ochs was mugged by three black men. One of them held Ochs with a strangling forearm while another searched his pockets. The forearm compressed his throat so tightly that he was unable to scream or even breathe. He struggled, the arm tightened. Ochs passed out and the thieves beat him before they fled with his cash. The injuries were largely flesh wounds but his vocal chords were permanently damaged.22 The muggers who quashed his career have never been identified.

  His injuries, the pressures of political confrontation, and the death of the movement may have conspired in his retreat to leave him with a right-wing pseudo-personality, “John Train.” Or was he, like his friend loan Baez, the victim of CIA mind control experimentation? What are the odds that two activists in a small circle of friends would develop dissociative identity disorder, multiple personalities? The transformation—into a pathological CIA agent, no less—is one of the most incredible declines of the American Pie mortality chart.

  “On the first day of summer 1975, Phil Ochs was murdered in the Chelsea Hotel by John Train,” he claimed in a taped interview. “For the good of societies, public and secret, he needed to be gotten rid of.”23

  Ochs made allusions to his pseudo-personality in song fragments of an album he planned, but never recorded:

  Phil Ochs checked into the Chelsea Hotel.

  There was blood on his clothes . . .

  Train, Train, Train, the outlaw and his brain . . .

  “He actually believed he was a member of the CIA,” writes biographer Marc Eliot. Ochs, reborn as Train, began compiling mysterious lists: “shellfish toxin, Fort Dietrich, cobra venom, Chantilly Race Track, hollow silver dollars, New York Cornell Hospital . . .”24

  Ochs biographer Michael Schumacher interpreted the transformation as an escape from deep depression to living martyrdom. The singer’s death at the hands of an alter-personality “assured him of the status of having a heroic figure in the mind of the ‘public’ society that admired his activism,” and incidentally ended the harassment by the ‘secret’ societies (the FBI, CIA, Mafia, etc.) that wanted him silenced. “Or so Train hoped.”25

  John Train, a drinking, brawling right-wing thug, boasted in a filmed interview that he had “killed” Phil Ochs. The motive: Ochs was “some kind of genius but he drank too much and was a boring old fart.” But Train hinted that if Ochs had been a commercial success, “they” [the CIA] would have killed his host personality. “Colby and Company would be more than happy to put a slug through his head at that point.”26 Colby did not have Ochs shot for “innocent inventions” but his slow death at the hand of a “CIA agent” alter-ego does raise the specter of mind control.

  Ochs committed suicide on April 9, 1976 by hanging. This was the same year The Control of Candy Jones, by Donald Bain, a case study of CIA mind control experimentation, was published.27 Jones also had a dual personality. Psychiatrists on the Agency payroll, according to Bain, secretly drugged and hypnotized the professional model, transformed her into a civilian Manchurian Candidate, a marionette with an inner-Nazi personality who carried out covert assignments. Any memory of these adventures, some of them hazardous, was erased when the host personality was recalled under hypnosis. Candy Jones worked without her knowledge as a CIA operative for twelve years, throughout the ’60s into the early ’70s. Her final posthypnotic command was suicide, and she might well have gone through with it if not for the intervention of her husband, talk-show host Long John Nebel. This was the same federal “thought control” program that columnist Dorothy Kilgallen had stumbled upon in 1965, shortly before her own murder was misinterpreted as an accidental overdose of barbiturates.

  The body of Phil Ochs was found but a few years after the culmination of the Candy Jones experiment. There was no evidence of foul play. It’s very probable that Ochs did, in fact, end his life and that he, or rather “John Train,” was programmed to kill Ochs, the host personality. The folksinger was left alone but for a few minutes, and clearly took the opportunity to end his own life. There was no evidence of foul play—unless Candy Jones-style, programmed multiplicity is considered and explored.

  NOTES

  1. Kurt Loder, “Joan Baez” (interview), The Rolling Stone Interviews New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, p. 90.

  2. Lyrics to the title track of Baez’s Play Me Backwards, LP, Virgin Records, 1992. The album was nominated for a Grammy. Baez has discussed the trauma-based programming she endured as a child with activists who subsequently contacted me, requesting anonymity.

  Another popular musician with repressed memories of childhood trauma was Who guitarist Pete Townshend. Townshend began “chasing recollections” and “nailing down the truth” himself in 1991, when it occurred to him that certain phrases from the band’s rock opera Tommy were echoes of submerged memories of his childhood. He had broken an arm in a bicycle accident and recuperated at his mother’s house. Biographer Geoffrey Giuliano described the musician’s confrontation with his hidden past: “She had just started work on her autobiography, and Pete asked her about the time frame between the ages of four and six, which, except for a few isolated incidents, was a mystifying blank.” She filled in the two-year maw in his memories. Townshend isn’t specific about the missing years. “It didn’t contain the kind of trauma Tommy went through,” Townshend reported, “seeing his mother’s lover shot by his father, but it was pretty damn close.” The memories surfaced gradually. The culmination of his struggle to remember came while working with Tommy director Des McAnuff on Broadway. It dawned on Townshend in the middle of a script conference, “I hadn’t written a fantasy at all. I’d written my own life story.” McAnuff recalls Townshend “striding around the room, ranting about [his] childhood.” The director used the backdrop of Townshend’s youth, Giuliano notes, “as fodder for [Tommy’s] darkly surreal setting.” Geoffrey Giuliano, Behind Blue Eyes. The Life of Pete Townshend, New York: Plume, 1996, p. 4.

  3. Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With, New York: New American Library, 1987, pp. 182–83.

  4. Kevin Ransom, “Joan Baez brings her life and music into the ’90s,” Detroit News, February 22, 1996.

  5. Baez, p. 22.

  6. Ibid., p. 49.

  7. Ibid., p. 144.

  8. Brian Cabell, AP, “Mississippi segregation spy agency records now public,” CNN, March 17, 1998.

  9. Wayne Hampton, Guerrilla Minstrels, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986, p. 160.

  10. Jeff Pike, The Death of Rock ‘n’ Roll Untimely Demises, Morbid Preoccupations and Premature Forecasts of Doom in Popular Music, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993, pp. 89–90.

  11. Ralph J. Cleason, “The Children’s Crusade,” in Bob Dylan: The Early Years, Craig McGregor, ed., New York: Da Capo, 1972, p. 36.

  12. Ibid., p. 173.

  13. Hampton, pp. 185–89.

  14. Anonymous, “The Genius Who Went Underground,” 1967 Chicago Tribune story, reprinted in McGregor, p. 194.

  15. Mark Edmundson, “Tangled Up In Truth,” Civilization: The Magazine of the Library of Congress, October/November, 1997, p. 50.

  16. Richard Farina, “Baez and Dylan: A Generation Singing Out,” Mademoiselle, August 1964.

  17. Ibid.

  18. John Berendt, “Phil Ochs Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore,” Esquire, vol. 86, October, 1976, p. 132.

  19. Marc Eliot, Death of a Rebel: A Biography of Phil Ochs, New York: Carol, 1995, p. xi–xii.

  20. Ibid., p. 334.

  21. Eliot, pp. 234–35.

  22. Ibid., p. 243.

  23. Michael Schumacher, There But for Justice: The Life of Phil Ochs, New York: Hyperion, 1996, p. 313.

  24. Eliot, pp. 295–96.

  25. Schumacher, p. 314.

  26. Eliot, pp. 179–80.

  27. Donald Bain, The Control of Candy Jones, Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976, p. 267.

&n
bsp; CHAPTER TEN

  Who Killed the Kennedys? (and Sal Mineo?)

  I PLAY RUSSIAN ROULETTE EVERY TIME I GET UP IN THE MORNING. BUT I JUST DON’T CARE. THERE’S NOTHING I COULD DO ABOUT IT ANYWAY. THIS ISN’T REALLY SUCH A HAPPY EXISTENCE. IS IT? ROBERT F. KENNEDY, “KENNEDY EXPECTED TRAGEDY TO STRIKE,” DALLAS TIMES HERALD, JUNE 6, 1968

  Sal Mineo was stabbed to death in the parking garage beneath his apartment complex just below Sunset Strip in West Hollywood on February 12, 1976, a building then owned by divorce attorney Marvin Mitchelson. There was no evidence of a robbery but a great deal of speculation concerning motive. West Hollywood has a sizable gay population. Newsweek reported after the actor’s murder that “long-whispered reports of the actor’s alleged bisexuality and fondness for sadomasochistic ritual quickly surrounded his murder.”1 The press reveled in Mineo’s rumored secret life. Local gay papers were rife with claims of sadomasochistic sex and satanism.2 Fear ripped through the homosexual community. Gay bars in Los Angeles closed and many a Hollywood star took refuge behind locked doors.

  The former teen idol had signed on, according to friends, to play Sirhan Sirhan in a film about the murder of Robert F. Kennedy—in it, CIA assassination and post-hypnotic programming were to be prominently-featured themes. Mineo and a friend, Elliot Mintz— then a talk show host for the local ABC affiliate, later Bob Dylan’s publicist and spokesman for John Lennon and Yoko Ono—had “buried themselves in research, asking questions everywhere about the [Robert Kennedy] killing.” The more they learned, “the more convinced they became that Sirhan was innocent.3 But the producer had disagreed with that interpretation and Mineo pulled out of the picture.”4

  Mineo felt an affinity with the Kennedys. “You know what day they killed me? The same day as Kennedy—November 22.” On this day in motion picture history, Mineo was in Monument Valley for the making of John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn. “Ricardo Montalban shoots me,” Mineo told friends at a party a year later. “I fall down. Ford says, ‘That’s swell,’ and they do something else. A couple of hours later we hear the President’s been murdered and Ford calls a wrap for the rest of the day. Somebody else figured out that at the same time Ricardo was shooting me, Oswald was shooting Kennedy.”5

  Facts emerged in his research concealed by the LAPD’s “Special Unit Senator” (SUS), a CIA-linked police cadré assigned to an “investigation” of the shooting directed by Lieutenant Manuel Pena. On November 13, 1967—seven months before the RFK murder—the San Fernando Valley Times ran a brief on Lt. Pena’s retirement from the Los Angeles police force. A testimonial dinner was held for him at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in Encino, “a rousing and emotion-packed affair.” Pena, we learn, “retired from the police force to advance his career. He has accepted a position with the Agency for International Development (AID) Office of the State Department” (a common front for CIA operations overseas). Pena hired on to AID as a “public safety advisor” to train foreign police forces. “After nine weeks of training and orientation, he will be assigned to his post, possibly a Latin American country, judging by the fact that he speaks Spanish fluently,” the Times reported.

  One month before the Robert Kennedy assassination, Pena returned to the LAPD and directed the SUS investigation away from the CIA and Mafia toward Sirhan, a feat that required mass destruction of evidence, the seizure of photos of the killing, much eyewitness badgering, attempts on the lives of forensic specialists (William H. Harper identified the second gun drawn in Kennedy’s assassination only to be shot at himself the day before he was to testify) and other “clean-up” operations.

  Pena’s colleagues in the SUS unit were a curious lot, as Lisa Pease, a reporter for Probe, discovered in her own examination of the case:

  SUS members predominantly came from military backgrounds. Charles Higbie, who controlled a good portion of the investigation, had been in the Marine Corps for five years and in Intelligence in the Marine Corp Reserve for eight more. Frank Patchett, the man who turned the Kennedy “head bullet” over to DeWayne Wolfer after it had taken a trip to Washington with an FBI man, had spent four years in the Navy, where his specialty was cryptography.

  The Navy and Marines figured prominently in the background of a good many of the SUS investigators. The editor of the SUS Final Report, however, had spent eight years of active duty with the Air Force, as a Squadron Commander and Electronics Officer.

  Two SUS members were in a unique position within the LAPD to control the investigation and the determination of witness credibility: Manuel Pena and Hank Hernandez. Pena had quite the catbird seat. A chart from the LAPD shows that all investigations were funneled through a process whereby all reports came at some point to him. He then had the sole authority for “approving” the interviews, and for deciding whether or not to do a further interview with each and every witness.

  In a similarly powerful position, Sgt. Enrique “Hank” Hernandez was the sole polygraph operator for the SUS unit. In other words, whether a witness was lying or telling the truth was left to the sole discretion of Hernandez.

  Pena’s brother told the TV newsman Stan Bohrman that Manny was proud of his service to the CIA. Pena had gone to a “special training unit” of the CIA’s in Virginia. On some assignments Pena worked with Dan Mitrione, the CIA man assassinated by rebels in Uruguay for his role in teaching torture to the police forces there.6

  No mention of hypnosis or behavior modification appears in the official report, but Michael Ruppert, a former LAPD officer who left the department to expose his CIA trainers, speaks of it: “Sirhan Sirhan was hypno-programmed using hypnosis, drugs and torture by, among others, the Reverend Jerry Owen and CIA mind-control specialist William Bryan at a stable where he worked months before the shooting. Also working there at the same time was Thomas Bremer, the brother of Arthur Bremer, who in 1972 shot Presidential contender George Wallace.”7 Arthur Bremer’s sister, Gail Aiken, was nearly called by the prosecution to testify in the trial of Sirhan—that is, defense attorney Mike Wayland informed the judge that he intended to grill the witness on the stand—but she briskly left town.8“ Ask yourself what you believe about the existence of democracy in this country,” Ruppert suggests, “and what you believe about the fate of ANY Presidential candidate not sanctioned by the powers that be before the ‘race’ is run.”

  Did the LAPD’s concealment of evidence implicating the CIA in the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968 extend to the murder of Sal Mineo eight years later? For evidence linking the murders, look to Robert Duke Hall—a private investigator who tailed Mineo on the day of his death9—but pack a Kevlar vest.

  The subterranean channels of the intelligence world swarmed with crooks and killers. When agents veered over the top and into the headlines, they were sometimes shown the door by the CIA, and many entered the private investigations business. This is the industry that belched forth the late Robert Hall, Robert Vesco’s security chief and a security contractor for Howard Hughes (who died on April 6, 1976, a few months before Hall himself was found dead). Jim Hougan, an investigative reporter and former editor of Harper’s, describes the Burbank private investigator as a “sleaze,” a pathological lowlife, “decidedly larcenous ... a father, a wire-tapper, an informer, a dope peddler and a double agent.”10 He was also a gun-toting paranoiac, nagged by the perennial belief that someone wanted him dead.

  The late Bobby Hall loved his work, but a Jewish pornographer and drug dealer from Shanghai ended all that. Hall was obsessed with intrigue, and, notes Hougan, “unchecked intrigue can certainly get even the most seasoned investigator into situations that quickly become questionable.” Hall blackmailed Robert Vesco and was involved in a burglary at Summa Corporation, the inner sanctum of the Howard Hughes empire.

  He believed that fugitive financier Vesco wanted him dead, but there were scores of L.A. fixers, trigger-men and covert operators, each nursing a grudge, who would have happily disposed of him. Prominent among Angelenos harboring homicidal feelings toward Hall count those hoo
ked on his famous “Happy Shots,” potent methamphetamine mixed with vitamin B-12. L.A. prosecutors suspected that the corrupt private investigator was blackmailing these clients and many others.

  So it came as a complete surprise to no one when, on July 22, 1976, six months after Sal Mineo was murdered, Hall himself was gunned down. Hall’s body was discovered on the floor of his kitchen. A .38 slug had penetrated the back of his skull. Jack Ginsburgs, a Jewish pornographer with well-documented connections to corrupt L.A. police officials, was convicted for the murder.

  Local and federal law enforcement agencies, the Los Angeles Times reported, were “scrutinizing Hall’s dealings with a number of present and former police officers to determine if his death was linked to one such relationship.” Few in his orbit had a kind word for his eulogy, but “even his most ardent detractors are vocal in praise of his talents for wire-tapping and electronic eavesdropping.” 11

  Police searched Hall’s house for clues to his murder. Instead, they stumbled upon Ian Fleming’s techno-dreams: several cases of electronic bugging and debugging equipment, a tranquilizer dart gun, drug-tipped darts, tear-gas canisters, syringes, ampules of narcotics, lock-picking devices, and cartons filled with more than two-hundred audio tapes, an archive of corruption implicating powerful politicians and popular celebrities in drug trafficking, prostitution, blackmail and all varieties of criminal and political shenanigans. Some of Hall’s best friends were interviewed by police—among them crooner Eddie Fisher.

  Hall had once been retained by the managers of seven rock bands to investigate physicians who’d slipped their clients fraudulent prescriptions, mega-potency drugs that altered their personalities, sabotaged public appearances, and hampered their lives and music. Hall reported back that two doctors and a dentist had prescribed the pharmaceuticals. This information was turned over to the authorities. No action was taken.12