The CIA Doctors

by Colin A. Ross, M. D.

  A man came into the room. He introduced himself as a doctor. Right behind him was the man who had given me the drink in his coffee. The doctor told me I looked terrible. I must have because my hair was soaking wet. I said I thought something had been put into my drink, and the man became very offended. The man introduced to me as a doctor took my pulse. He seemed very professional, and he looked into my eyes. He told the other man that I was going to sleep and that I needed rest. The doctor had a much heavier Chinese accent than the other man.

  I asked them what had happened to me. The doctor said he didn’t know but asked if I had ever had malaria. I agreed that I had, but said that this was not malaria and I knew that it wasn’t. He assured me that I would shake and get chills, just like malaria. I asked him for my pocketbook, and told them that I had to get the plane back to the United States. They brought my pocketbook to me, and when I looked into it I knew someone had gone through it. I began to become very frightened.

  The doctor asked if I felt sick to my stomach. I said that I did, and he began to pull the covers off me to examine my stomach. I told him not to. My sheets and pillowcase were soaking wet, and the doctor suggested I get into another bed so that they could change this one. I refused to move. A woman entered the room and grabbed my arms and literally dragged me out of one bed and into the other. I was embarrassed at only having my bra and pants under the gown. Someone asked me what was wrong with my foot, and I told them that I had tripped.

  The man who had given me the drink asked me who I had seen while I was in Taiwan. I could barely answer because I was so sleepy. Suddenly, the doctor gave me a shot in the arm. He tried to roll me over on the bed, and although I tried to fight him, I was too weak to resist. He told the woman to pull me over, which she did. I suddenly was afraid I was going to be murdered right there. They had me on my stomach and examined my buttocks, and the doctor commented that I hadn’t received any injections there.

  My voice was growing very weak. The man told the doctor to let me sleep it off, and said he didn’t think I knew anything. He then asked me where the papers were. I told him that I didn’t have any papers. He asked me who I had given the papers to. I didn’t answer, and the men left the room. The woman asked me if I wanted to sit up, but I was so weak I couldn’t manage it, and my muscles felt like jelly. The woman tried to pull me up by my arms, and although I wanted to hit the woman, I couldn’t muster the strength.

  The woman pinched me, and asked me where the papers were. She kept pinching me all over my body. She eventually began to pinch my breasts, and I fell back on the bed from the pain. She kept pulling me up, and every time she did, she continued to pinch me viciously. I felt myself passing out, and I believe I actually did black out. The woman left the room and I tried to get up, but I simply fell on the floor. I tried to reach up to pull the sheet down over me but I couldn’t raise my arm. The last thing I remember was trying to crawl underneath the bed.

  I must have been out for a long time, and when I woke up I was again in the bed. The doctor came in and gave me a shot in my other arm. I stopped perspiring, and I feel into a deep, deep sleep, waking up the next day. My clothes were in the room and had all been cleaned. I never saw that woman again. A younger girl came into the room, asked me how I felt and gave me some orange juice. I was afraid to drink anything, but asked the girl for some water. When she brought the water, I made her drink some first before I would take it. She also brought me coffee, which I had her taste first. The girl told me I better hurry if I was going to make my flight home. She could barely speak English. The girl said I’d had a bad dream and had been very sick. I pulled up the sleeve on my gown and looked at my arms. There was injection mark on each one.

  The girl left the room, and when I tried to get up, I had to grab a chair to support myself on my wobbly legs. I used the chair like a crutch to move across the room. I locked the door, got dressed, rinsed out my mouth in the bathroom, washed my face and looked in the mirror. I don’t think I’d ever seen myself look quite so terrible. I realized that I was not wearing the black wig any longer, and discovered it lying on the other bed.

  After I was cleaned up and dressed, I unlocked the door and went to the staircase. I looked down and saw there were people having drinks at small tables. They didn’t pay any attention to me as I started to come down, but then I tripped and tumbled down the entire staircase. People ran over and picked me up and put me in a chair. I told them I was all right and had just had a fainting spell.

  Someone drove me to the airport and I flew home. I immediately went to see Gilbert Jensen and told him about the incident. He seemed very concerned and wanted to see my arms. My breasts were all black and blue from being pinched, but I refused to show them to him.

  This account by Candy Jones is the only published description of an ARTICHOKE interrogation. Whether it was conducted by the CIA or a foreign intelligence service, is unknown. Whether it is fact or fiction is unknown. It is possible that there was another personality behind Arlene Grant who was carrying classified information, and it could be that the purpose of the interrogation was to contact that level of her personality system. Whatever the historical facts, the account provides the subjective flavor of such interrogations.

  The last intelligence contact reported in The Control of Candy Jones occurred on July 3, 1973. Candy and Long John Nebel received a message from Japan Airlines that a ticket was being held for her on Japan Airlines flight 5, for the sixth of July, leaving Kennedy Airport for Tokyo, with an open ticket on to Taipei. She never made the trip. The message said that the booking had been made by “Cynthia.” Cynthia was the code name of an actual female OSS operative, whose real name was Amy Elizabeth Thorpe139, but Thorpe died on December 1, 1963, so could not have been involved in the Japan Airlines booking. The Cynthia who made that booking in 1973 could have been an individual or an operation using the code name Cynthia.

  During their hypnotic work, Candy Jones and Long John Nebel uncovered suicide programming implanted by Dr. Jensen. Candy was to have gone to the Paradise Beach Hotel in the Bahamas and jumped off a cliff there. The trip was canceled because of their wedding on December 31, 1972.

  The book closes with the impression that Arlene Grant was still involved in intelligence activities on a limited scale at the time of writing, in 1976. If Candy Jones actually was a CIA Manchurian Candidate courier, documentation of that fact must be on file somewhere in intelligence archives. The mind control techniques she describes are similar to those used by the ARTICHOKE team, Bjorn Neilsen, leaders of destructive cults, and interrogators around the world.

  21

  SIRHAN SIRHAN

  Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab refugee, shot Robert Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at 12:15 A.M. on June 5, 1968. Kennedy was at the hotel as part of his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He had just won the California primary that evening. The shooting was observed by many witnesses, and Sirhan was wrestled to the ground and disarmed immediately. He was found guilty of first-degree murder at trial.

  The opinion of expert witness Dr. Bernard L. Diamond is that Sirhan acted alone while in a self-induced trance state. In an interview with Dr. Diamond, the following exchange occurred114:

  Harris: Is there a clear division in him between two states of consciousness, a controlled cool state and a dissociated state of violence, fear and rage?

  Diamond: Yes, in the hypnotic state he can relive childhood horrors; he can remember writing in the notebook and he can reproduce the automatic writing; he remembers the killing and also remembers his experiences under hypnosis. He can remember none of these things when he is not in hypnosis.

  His mind is truly split, with part of his life on one side and part on the other.

  For this book, the assumption is that Sirhan Sirhan was a self-created Manchurian Candidate at the dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS) level. The dissociated assassin state did not have a fully formed separate identity,
and therefore the clinical diagnosis would be DDNOS instead of multiple personality disorder. Sirhan Sirhan corresponds to the auto-hypnotic sub-pathway of the factitious pathway to dissociative identity disorder I describe in the second edition of my textbook258. He was a self-created assassin, but not consciously so.

  For this book, I will ignore conspiracy evidence concerning the girl in the polka dot dress, the number of entry holes in Robert Kennedy and the surrounding walls and door jambs, possible contact between Sirhan Sirhan and William Jennings Bryan, technical consultant on the movie The Manchurian Candidate, and other reasons to suspect that Sirhan Sirhan may have been controlled by someone303. Roger LaJeunesse, the FBI agent in charge of the Sirhan investigation, is quoted143 as saying, “The case is still open. I’m not rejecting the Manchurian Candidate aspect of it.”

  When he was a child in Jerusalem, Sirhan Sirhan was traumatized by the war and especially by several bombings. On one occasion a soldier was blasted to pieces near the Sirhan home. Young Sirhan Sirhan saw the soldier’s foot hanging from a church steeple. His mother described him as going pale, being unable to move for a while, and fainting in response.

  On another occasion a bomb went off across the street from the Sirhan home (it might have been a mortar shell). Bystanders thought Sirhan had been hit. When his mother brought him into their home, Sirhan was, in his mother’s words, in a trance state: “When we got in, he was just - gone - blacked out.” He was very pale, his fists were clenched, and he had not fainted.

  Another time when he was seven, Sirhan saw a nine-year old girl who was bleeding profusely from the knee from shrapnel. He fainted. These “faints” were actually dissociative episodes because his body would not go limp. During some of the spells his eyes would be open. Some days he would “faint” twice, especially if he ever saw any blood on the street after a bombing.

  Mrs. Sirhan said of her son, “One night, living in Old Jerusalem, I felt him and he was cold like stick. More than any of his brothers, he had less blood and more fear.”

  In the spring of 1948, when Sirhan was four, a group of Zionist commandos attacked a British radio station located above the Sirhan home. They dynamited the upper floor and converted the family bathroom into a machine-gun nest, while the family retreated to the basement. Another time, Sirhan was found screaming because a bucket of water he was carrying had a hand floating in it. Besides describing the trauma of being in a refugee camp, Sirhan’s mother also recounted serious beatings of him by his father. Six months after the family emigrated to America, Sirhan’s father, Bishara Sirhan, returned to Jerusalem alone, taking with him the money that had been earned by Sirhan’s mother and brothers since they arrived on January 12, 1957. The physical abuse of Sirhan by his father was corroborated by an independent witness, Ziad Hasheimeh, who knew the family.

  Mrs. Sirhan is quoted as saying143 (pp. 204):

  In the street the boys shout and kick away a stuffed soccer ball. The ball squirts away from the pack. They chase it and leave Sirhan standing in a kind of trance. Later they return and Sirhan is still standing and staring. They take him home where he remains for several days.

  Sirhan Sirhan experienced severe war trauma, physical abuse, abandonment by his father, and the stress of refugee camp and moving to America as a child. His mother describes frequent dissociative states occurring prior to age ten. He was highly hypnotizable when examined by Dr. Diamond.

  Sirhan Sirhan initially admired Robert Kennedy and saw him as a defender of the politically oppressed and poor, with whom he undoubtedly identified. This changed when Kennedy became identified with the Israeli enemy who bombed and killed the Arabs. Kennedy stated his intent to send fifty jet bombers to Israel in late May, 1968. Although Sirhan may not have known about the fifty bombers until after the assassination, Kennedy became aligned with the Jewish enemy in his mind, and probably with the father who abandoned and betrayed him, and returned to Jerusalem. Robert Kennedy died on the anniversary of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, which ended with an Israeli attack on Egyptian airstrips on June 5, 1967.

  Sirhan learned self-hypnosis from mail order materials he obtained from the Rosicrucians. He attended a meeting of the Akhvaton Chapter of the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosae Crucis in Pasadena on May 28, 1968 and signed their guest book. He had been studying their materials for some time before that. From these materials Sirhan learned techniques for self-hypnosis and automatic writing that he practiced for hours.

  Sirhan’s notebooks were introduced as evidence at trial. They contained many pages of trance writing that are obviously disturbed. Single pages include many different hand writing styles and repetitions of dissociated fragments of language. In the notebooks he writes repeatedly about shooting Robert Kennedy. One page includes numerous repetitions of, “R.F.K. must die,” “Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated,” and “Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68.” These are followed by references to, “please pay to the order of” and cash payments to Sirhan.

  The assassination was definitely premeditated, but only within a dissociated state. My expert opinion, if I were testifying in such a case, would be that the self-induced dissociative state is irrelevant. It is not grounds for diminished criminal capacity. Just as clinical patients with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) are held responsible for the actions of all their alter personalities, being a self-created Manchurian Candidate should not diminish one’s criminal responsibility. This is so despite the real amnesia in such cases.

  Dr. Diamond demonstrated Sirhan’s high hypnotizability many times in audio taped sessions with a variety of witnesses. On one occasion, he introduced a post-hypnotic suggestion that on his signal Sirhan would start climbing on his cell bars like a monkey. Sirhan did that in response to the post-hypnotic signal, then explained his behavior with the rationalization that he was getting some exercise. When confronted with an audiotape of Dr. Diamond’s implantation of the post-hypnotic instruction, for which Sirhan was amnesic, Sirhan stated that Dr. Diamond was trying to trick him. He insisted that he had decided on his own to climb the bars for exercise.

  This kind of rationalization for obedience to post-hypnotic suggestion is typical of the highly hypnotizable individual. Kaiser143 presents evidence that the political motivation Sirhan claimed for the assassination was a post-hypnotic rationalization, one that occurred after the shooting.

  The major trance technique Sirhan used was staring at candles and mirrors for long periods of time. This is an important detail because there were lights and mirrors in the area of the Ambassador Hotel where Sirhan stood immediately before shooting Robert Kennedy. In combination with four Tom Collins drinks, the lights and mirrors probably helped trigger Sirhan into his dissociated assassin state.

  At about 10:30 P.M. on June 4, 1968, Mrs. Mary Grohs, a teletype operator for Western Union was working in the Colonial Room of the Ambassador Hotel when she saw Sirhan “stare fixedly” at her teletype machine. Kaiser143 (pp. 531) quotes her as saying:

  Well, he came over to my machine and started staring at it. Just staring. I’ll never forget his eyes. I asked him what he wanted.

  He didn’t answer. He just kept staring. I asked him again. No answer. I said that if he wanted the latest figures on Senator Kennedy he’d have to check the other machines. He still didn’t answer. He just kept staring.

  Mrs. Grohs did not testify at trial and told Kaiser that the police had instructed her not to say anything about the incident. This would be expected of investigators and prosecutors who feared that such information would support an insanity defense. It is only necessary to reject, suppress or discredit such information if one assumes that amnesia is grounds for diminished criminal responsibility or an insanity defense.

  Dr. Martin Schorr, an expert witness for the prosecution, stated at trial that Sirhan had two distinct personalities, which dissociated under stress. He compared Sirhan to “Jekyll-Hyde” and Eve White-Eve Black of The Three Faces of Eve300.
Dr. Schorr said that Sirhan was “unaware of the killer in himself, but is aware of his own ambivalence.”

  Dr. Simson-Kallas, who examined Sirhan at San Quentin prison after his conviction, concluded that Sirhan had multiple personality and had been programmed by someone else, but his grounds for this conclusion are unclear. Although he never interviewed Sirhan directly, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who interviewed Candy Jones, reviewed extensive case material provided to him by assassination researchers William Turner and John Christian303. Dr. Spiegel concluded that Sirhan was highly hypnotizable and not suffering from schizophrenia. On this point, he agreed with Dr. Simson-Kallas.