Part 5 Operation Mind Control....A School For Assassins...Four Faces of a Zombie...The Lone Nuts

Operation Mind Control
By Walter Bowart


Chapter Eleven 

A SCHOOL FOR ASSASSINS 

The cryptocracy recruited their assassins from among people who had already demonstrated a violent nature, people who had few reservations about taking human life. No homicidal maniacs were recruited because they could not be controlled. The cryptocracy needed killers who would not murder on impulse, but only upon command. 

Once selected, the assassin candidates were turned over to the military, where, under the guise of "combat readiness" training, they underwent a complete program of conditioning. Graduates of the program would forever after act with ruthless efficiency. They would eliminate local political leaders in a foreign country, or undertake "search and destroy" missions in violation of national and international laws. They would be given the cover that would allow them to enter the Foreign Service; or they would pose as embassy marine guards. 

In July, 1975, the Sunday Times in London quoted a U.S. Navy psychologist who admitted that U.S. Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, conditioned them as political assassins, and then placed them in American embassies around the world. This admission came shortly after the Senate Intelligence Committee had scolded the CIA for plotting a number of political assassinations around the world. From the congressional reports, however, one got the feeling that the cryptocracy was being chastised not for the assassinations it had successfully accomplished, but for those which it had attempted, but failed. The attempts on the life of Fidel Castro drew the greatest notice from the congressional committees and the press. 

According to the Sunday Times story, naval psychologist Lt. Comdr. Thomas Narut was assigned to the U.S. Regional Medical Center at Naples, Italy. When he first made public the navy's part in programming assassins, he was attending a NATO conference in Oslo on "Dimensions of Stress and Anxiety." In attendance at that conference were 120 psychologists of all descriptions and from many countries. Many of them were involved in research on how to improve man's ability to cope with stress, but none of them felt compelled, as Thomas Narut did, to discuss their work so fully or so frankly. 

The stated objective of the conference was to exchange information on how soldiers and people in difficult jobs could cope with stress. Dr. Narut's talk was on "The Use of a Symbolic Model and Verbal Intervention in Inducing and Reducing Stress." His speech began with a plug for the navy. He knew, he said, that many of the scientists present had often encountered problems in their purely scientific research because of the military's inclination to research that would yield quick and useful results. He sympathized with those who had trouble getting subjects, funds, or both, out of the military for their purely scientific research. But things were different in the navy he said. 

In the navy, Thomas Narut bragged, there were plenty of captive personnel who could be used as guinea pigs. In the navy there was a computerized record of each man's background and psychological profile, so that a quick selection of men with suitable psychological inclinations for experiments could be made. Navy psychologists not only had access to computerized records, but also to psychological tests and background data on a large number of people. In the navy, Narut said, funds were plentiful, and there were no problems with transporting subjects for study to nearly any place in the world. Narut stated proudly that the U.S. Navy provided scientists with the most advanced research facilities in the world. 

A Canadian psychologist at the conference later remarked, "Narut's message was loud and clear—'Join the navy and study the world.'" 

In his brief discourse, Dr. Narut did no more than hint at the work he had been doing in teaching "combat readiness units" to cope with the stress of killing. Later, however, during private questioning with a small group of listeners (reporter Peter Watson of the Sunday Times, a former psychologist, among them), Narut unfolded the amazing story of the navy's programming of assassins on an assembly-line basis. 

In his mid-thirties, Dr. Narut had just completed his doctoral dissertation on the question of whether certain films provoke anxiety, and whether forcing a man to do irrelevant tasks while watching violent films would help him cope with the anxiety they produced. 

When pressed by Watson to explain the details of this kind of conditioning, Narut said that he had worked with "combat readiness units" which included men being programmed for commando-type operations and for undercover placement at U.S. embassies. These, Narut said, were "hit men and assassins" (Narut's words) made ready to kill in selected countries should the need arise. Dr. Alfred Zitani, an American delegate to the conference, was very surprised by Narut's disclosure. "Do you think Dr. Narut realizes what he has just said?" Zitani asked. "That kind of information must be classified." 

The conditioning of Narut's assassins was accomplished by audio-visual desensitization, a standard behavior modification process. These men were "desensitized" to mayhem by being shown films of people being killed or injured in a number of different ways. At first the films would show only mild forms of bloodshed. As the men became acclimated to the scenes of carnage, they would see progressively more violent scenes. The assassin candidates, Narut explained, would eventually be able to dissociate any feelings they might have from even the goriest scenes they viewed. 

Narut said that of course U.S. naval psychologists would have first selected the candidates for training by their psychological makeup. Those selected for assassination assignments were often from submarine crews and paratroops. Others were convicted murderers from military prisons who had already shown a proclivity for violence. 

Still others were men who had been given awards for valor. World War II Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy was a subject of extensive research. 

The best killers, according to Narut, were men whom psychologists would classify as "passive-aggressive" personalities. These were people with strong drives that were usually kept under tight control. Such types were usually calm, but from time to time would exhibit outbursts of temper during which they could literally kill without remorse. Narut said that through psychological testing, he and his colleagues were looking for more such men, for further conditioning. 

Among the tests used by the navy to determine violent natures was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which is used widely by educators and businessmen to determine psychological qualities of students and employees. The tests consist of hundreds of questions designed to measure such personality traits as hostility, depression, and psychopathy. 

According to Narut, the men selected by the tests, or by evidence of past violence, were taken for programming to the navy's neuropsychiatric laboratory in San Diego, California, or to the Naples medical center which employed Dr. Narut. 

Audio-visual desensitization was the major technique used in programming the assassins. Psychological indoctrination completed the programming by instilling the desired prejudicial attitudes. 

The audio-visual desensitization began with the subject strapped into a chair with his head clamped so that he could not look away from the screen. A special mechanism prevented the subject's eyelids from closing. 

The candidate was then shown a film of an African youth being crudely circumcised by fellow members of his tribe. The youth was circumcised with a blunt knife, painfully and without anesthetic. This well-known film is used widely in psychological experiments to create stress. Afterwards the candidate was asked about details of what he had seen. He was asked, for example, to describe the color of the belt on the doctor's trousers, or the motif on the handle of the knife that cut off the foreskin. 

The next film showed a man in a sawmill, where planks were sliced from huge logs. In the operation of the saw the man slipped and cut off his fingers. 

As the films progressed in gruesomeness, the reactions of the candidate were measured by sensing devices. Heartbeat, breathing rate, and brain waves were recorded, very much Operation Mind Control 165 as on a polygraph. If the physiological responses, which might have been great in the beginning, slowed down and resumed normal patterns as the more bloodthirsty scenes were viewed, the candidates were judged to have completed this stage of conditioning. 

The last phase of conditioning, Narut said, was to indoctrinate the candidates to think of their potential enemies as inferior forms of life. By this stage, the candidates would have already been selected for assignment to particular countries. They would be shown films and given lectures which portrayed the customs and cultural habits of the foreign countries in a biased fashion. The people of those countries would be portrayed as enemies of the United States and were always spoken of in demeaning terms. They were often presented as if they were "less than human." Their customs were ridiculed, and local leaders were presented as evil demagogues, even if they were legitimate political figures. 

According to Dr. Narut it took only a few weeks to indoctrinate susceptible candidates by this process. Those who were not susceptible to the conditioning were dropped earlier in the program and returned to other assignments. Narut admitted that he did not have the necessary "need to know" as to where all the programmed men were sent, although at one point in his conversation with Peter Watson, Narut specified that programmed assassins have been installed in the Athens embassy. He said that his busiest time was when a large group of men went through such training towards the end of 1973, at the time of the Yom Kippur War. 

After the Oslo conference interview, Watson returned to London to file his story. Writing up the details, he found a few points which needed clarification but he could not reach Narut either at his home or in his laboratory in Naples. Watson then asked the U.S. embassy in London to comment on the information Narut had volunteered. The embassy passed the buck to the U.S. Navy. 

Within a few days the Pentagon issued a categorical denial that the U.S. Navy had ever "engaged in psychological training or other types of training of personnel as assassins." They also denied that any such training had ever taken place either in San Diego or in Naples. They said they too had been unable to contact Lieutenant Commander Narut, but they did confirm that he was on the staff of the U.S. Regional Medical Center in Naples as a psychologist. But Dr. Zitani later offered to testify about what Narut had told him to "appropriate authorities." Watson was also approached later by a psychologist in Los Angeles who said he had seen the Pentagon denials so thought Watson would like to know that he had lent the San Diego psychologists a copy of his film on circumcision which was used in the desensitization conditioning. 

A few days later Narut was located. He flew to London to discuss the matter ostensibly with Watson's paper, the Sunday Times, but instead he held a press conference saying only that he had been talking in "theoretical and not practical terms." He then flew back to the Naples base. 

After his return to Naples, U.S. naval headquarters in London offered the official explanation for Narut's statement: Narut had "personal problems." A few days later Watson was able to contact Narut at the U.S. hospital in Naples, but he refused to elaborate on his disclosure. 

During the Oslo conference interview, Narut had said several times that what he was saying about the assassins was "coming out anyway." He was referring to the congressional disclosures about CIA assassination plots. But the fact that the navy had been operating along lines similar to the CIA was not known to the public nor has it subsequently been admitted. The details of the story that Lieutenant Commander Narut related have been strongly and categorically denied in all subsequent queries of the navy. 

It came as no surprise to many that the navy had been interested in psychological research to help its men cope with "stress." Several years before, one of the organizers of the Oslo conference, Dr. Irwin Sarason, had been approached by the navy to work on projects similar to Narut's. At the time, the navy had said nothing to him about programming assassins; it said it wanted him to adapt his work for applications to "spies." 

In response to that request, Sarason devised a film which showed how successful students asked questions in school. The film was shown to a group of juvenile delinquents for a period of time until they, too, learned how to pose the right questions. As a result, over the next two years they did much better in their studies and got in trouble less. The control group who had not seen the films did just as poorly in school as they'd always done and were just as delinquent. 

Since his "symbolic modeling" study had been successful, Sarason wanted to continue his research and applied to the Office of Naval Research for more funding. A few weeks after his application was received, Sarason was called by a navy official who asked him if he would object to having his work classified. Sarason wondered why, and the navy official told him his research would be most valuable to the navy's neuropsychiatric laboratory in California, as spies were being trained there to resist interrogation. The naval official said that if Sarason would allow his work to be classified, he'd get all the funds he needed. 

But Sarason was interested in the peaceful scientific nature of his work, not its military applications, so he refused to have the project classified. His goal was the exception rather than the rule. 

The federal government supports most scientific research in the United States. Enough psychologists and other social scientists haven't asked questions about what their research is to be used for; their main objective has been to get the grant, so they could support themselves and their scientific curiosity. Since too many of them have been politically disinterested or naive, they have been easy prey for the cryptocracy. Lieutenant Commander Narut was therefore but one in a long line of psychologists being employed for psychological warfare and illegal clandestine operations. 

Another such operation was the training of security officers at the Washington-based International Police Academy by psychologists and sociologists. The officers were supposedly being taught interrogation techniques for Third World countries; actually it was a highly sensitive clandestine operation organized for the training of U.S. spies. Congress closed the Academy on January 1, 1974, after its real purpose was disclosed to the press. 

Another, uncovered in the late 1960s, was "Project CAMELOT," purportedly a sociopolitical analysis of Chile, but actually designed to keep Chile free of Communist leaders by discrediting them. Project CAMELOT played an important role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende and his democratically elected leftist government. 

In 1975 Congress questioned the navy about its development of a questionnaire to survey attitudes toward death. Congressmen had learned that psychologists were eagerly working on such a questionnaire, known as the "Value of Life" study, that would allow the navy to assess a recruit's willingness and ability to kill from the very first day he entered the service. 

In still another government-funded experiment, psychologists working for the Human Resources Research Organization in Alexandria, Virginia, had conducted a brutal series of "stress-training" experiments in the early 1960's. 

In one experiment army "volunteers" were taken on an airplane flight. Suddenly, the airplane's engines failed and the plane was forced to land abruptly on a rough airstrip. The soldiers were later tested to see if this incident had caused a fear of flying. In another experiment soldiers were taken out and "lost" in a forest. Suddenly, a huge forest fire engulfed them, so that the men found themselves "off course" and surrounded by fire. These men were tested to see if that experience had given them a fear of fire. 

In yet another experiment, soldiers were allowed to "stray" into an artillery target area. Shells were exploding all around them, and they had to get out of the area by keeping cool and following orders. Since artillery shells fired from a distance of twenty-five miles away are hard to control, the explosions were created by detonating underground charges triggered by remote control from a lookout point. After the realistic shelling was over the men were tested to see if they suffered any discernible "shell shock." 

During all these experiments the men were under visual observation. In some, they also wore telemetry devices which allowed scientists to measure their pulse rate, respiration, and other vital signs to determine the level of stress they were experiencing at the time they were exposed to the dangers. 

As this battery of experiments became known to the outside world, public opinion and congressional pressure brought a stop to them. The military was not deterred, however, from other kinds of cruel and dangerous experimentation; it continued its stress research in spite of the bad publicity. 

While military "stress testing" may have developed useful insights into the psychology of warriors, its primary goal, as Lieutenant Commander Narut pointed out, was the programming of assassins. These experiments were most useful in programming those men who were already inclined to kill. Hypnosis was still the only effective tool for motivating those who were not inclined to kill, then for erasing the memory of their crimes or eliciting false confessions. 

Alarmed by evidence found in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Dr. Joseph L. Bernd of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1968 questioned leading authorities on hypnosis about the possible use of hypnosis to motivate assassins. 

Bernd wanted to know if political influences could be induced by hypnosis; could people be hypno-programmed to operate unconsciously and take what seemed to be independent action? Could people be influenced to commit political assassination as a consequence of hypnotic influence? 

In his query Bernd asked authorities to assume that a skilled hypnotist found a subject who was both a good hypnotic subject and highly capable in the use of weapons. They were to assume that the subject also had a deep hatred for some political personality prominent in the news. Bernd's first question to the authorities was: "Could the hypnotist use hypnotic suggestion to persuade the weapons expert to kill the hated political personality at a time and under conditions suggested by the hypnotist?" 

His second question was: "Could the hypnotic suggestion of this action be achieved in a way which could leave the subject assassin unconscious of and unable to recall to consciousness the fact that his violent act was made as a consequence of hypnotic suggestion?" The authorities who responded to Bernd's questions stated that they did think it possible to induce a subject to kill. One expert said, ".. . I would say that a highly skilled hypnotist, working with a highly susceptible subject, could possibly persuade the subject to kill another human ... " Another expert went further, saying that it was possible through posthypnotic suggestion to make a subject unable to recall his act. "There could be a conspiracy," one expert wrote, "but a conspiracy of which the principal was unaware." 

It may well be that Bernd hit a nerve in the cryptocracy. His report, "Assassination and Hypnosis: Political Influence or Conspiracy," was never published. 

But despite all the efforts of the cryptocracy, slowly, the secrets of mind control began to emerge. Soon there surfaced other evidence that there were indeed such things as programmed assassins. One such assassin made bold headlines on the front page of a newspaper in the Philippines.

Chapter Twelve 

THE FOUR FACES OF A ZOMBIE 

On March 2, 1967, twenty-four-year-old Luis Angel Castillo was arrested by the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) on suspicion of conspiring to assassinate President Ferdinand Marcos in Manila.- In a series of interrogation sessions, the NBI and Philippine Army investigators gave him truth serum (at his request) and put him under hypnosis. During one of these sessions, Castillo revealed that he had been involved in an assassination four years earlier. 

Castillo told the NBI, both under hypnosis and truth serum and also in a normal state, that he had been hypno-programmed to kill a man riding in an open car. Although Castillo did not know the identity of his target, the scene of his supposed "hit" was in Dallas, Texas. The date was November 22, 1963. 

After revealing this information, Castillo asked for political asylum in Manila. He was quoted in the Manila Times as saying, "I am afraid to go anywhere anyway. I am as good as dead now." 

"I don't know how I got into Dallas and how I got out," Castillo told reporters, "but I am sure I did not carry a gun." 

The Manila Times story reported that Castillo had arrived in Manila carrying a Philippine passport which identified him as Antonio Reyes Eloriaga, a returning resident who had been expelled from America for overstaying his visa and stealing a car. While in the U.S. Castillo had traveled under the aliases Angelo Rodriguez, Razo Hernandez,Mario Rodriguez, Ignacio Gonzales Grajeda, and Antonio Eloriaga. 

Castillo told investigators that a woman had given him his initial instructions in Dallas. According to Castillo, she was just one of many individuals who worked on him to place him in a deep hypnotic trance for the Kennedy job. Castillo said that he had been a private in the Cuban militia, the Segunda Organization Defensiva in Santiago, Cuba, when he was initially chosen for training in espionage work. He was subsequently trained by the Defensiva at a camp located about fifteen miles from the Bay of Pigs. Among the members of the training cadre, Castillo said, were a communications expert, along with some other Cubans and a handful of Americans. 

Three years later, on October 2, 1966, Castillo was arrested in New Mexico and charged with driving without a proper auto registration. His arrest was made under the Eloriaga identity. Castillo was brought before New Mexico Justice of the Peace Elmer Bassett and sentenced to four days in jail. "The reason I gave him a jail sentence," Bassett said, "was, I figured when a fellow has a hard time remembering what his name is, there's something wrong with him." After serving his sentence Castillo was turned over to U.S. immigration authorities because he had no proof of U.S. citizenship. 

Bassett reported that "Castillo said he was from Madison, Wisconsin, but was born in the Philippines. He couldn't show that he was from the Philippines or that he wasn't." 

Bassett also revealed that someone had called him a few hours after Castillo had appeared before him and asked that the man be released. "I don't know who it was," Bassett said, "I just told them I couldn't do that." 

According to the NBI, Castillo had Antonio Eloriaga's Philippine passport on his person when he was arrested in Manila. Based on information provided by the intelligence service of the Philippine armed forces, the NBI had been searching for him since February. They had evidence that Castillo, in the guise of Eloriaga, had made contact with a guerrilla group that was constantly plotting to assassinate Marcos and overthrow the Philippine government. 

The NBI set to work grilling their captured suspect. They knew something of his criminal past. They knew, for example, that he had been arrested in 1962 for carrying a concealed weapon; they also knew that two years later he had been sentenced to a state reformatory in Bordentown, New Jersey, for larceny. But nothing prepared them for the shocking story implicating him in the events of Dallas. 

They asked Castillo to submit to a lie detector test and were surprised when he said that he preferred truth serum. Suspicious of both his strange story and his behavior, NBI officials called in a psychiatrist to examine him. But even after the psychiatrist judged Castillo normal, the NBI investigators still refused to take Castillo's bizarre and contradictory story at face value. 

Later, reporters connected with the Manila Times were equally dumbfounded by Castillo's strange behavior. 

One reporter described him as a "now-talkative, now reticent cloak-and-dagger man." He clammed up when he was asked whether he was in the Philippines to help implement an assassination plot against President Marcos. In his truth serum statement, he claimed he had worked with a "cell of Reds" to end someone's life. But during his interview with the press he said, "neither do I admit or deny it." When quizzed about Lee Harvey Oswald, he drew a blank. 

As a member of the Warren Commission, Gerald Ford was queried by the Philippine authorities about Castillo's revelations concerning the JFK assassination. Ford said that he would not comment on the Castillo story until he had more information. A spokesman for the Dallas Police Department said that they had no record on Castillo. 

Nevertheless, the U.S. embassy did agree to a closed door meeting between embassy officials and NBI Director Serafin Fausto on the subject of Castillo. After the meeting, Fausto refused to comment further on the story, but he did tell reporters that, "although publication of the story has prejudiced investigation of the case, one good thing has come out of it; needed information is coming in from the United States to shed light on the case." 

Fausto also made it clear that leads obtained from the U.S. embassy justified continuing the investigation of Castillo's link to the assassination of President Kennedy. After making an official request for assistance from the FBI, the NBI clamped a news blackout on the story, and nothing further was published in the press. Private investigations later revealed that Castillo was spirited out of the Philippines, but not before a series of hypnotic sessions had taken place, at the request of the FBI. 

The FBI wanted to have Castillo, while under hypnosis, place the time of the Kennedy assassination. They wanted to know when Castillo had come to Dallas, what time he arrived at the building, and from what location he was supposed to shoot. They wanted to know the time he left the building, the names of any people involved, and any information which might indicate how the plot was hatched, and by whom. 

It came as a surprise to the NBI that the FBI also wanted Castillo questioned about the Boyeros airport, eight miles south of Havana, Cuba. The FBI requested that the tightest possible security be kept on any testimony obtained from the hypnotic sessions. 

In the last of three sessions requested by the FBI, Castillo was induced into deep hypnotic trance by the ordinary talking method in an NBI interrogation room in Manila. While in that trance state he was questioned for more than three and one-half hours. 

The hypnotist's report stated, "Initially, the subject indicated an admixture of desired susceptibility to hypnosynthesis but deep-seated resistance due to the presence of a posthypnotic block. The total removal of this block may pave the way for maximum results." 

The hypnotist reported that during the pre-trance warm up he examined Castillo and found little scars on his forehead, chest, stomach, and fingers. Castillo told him that the scars were the result of a car accident in the U.S., which happened when some men were chasing him while he was trying to deliver "an envelope of some kind." Castillo mentioned that after the crash he'd awakened in bandages in a hospital bed. 

Names which were presented to Castillo in the pretrance interview were repeated while he was under hypnosis. He recognized the names of several individuals who were then gaining notoriety in connection with New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's JFK assassination investigation. But Castillo revealed that he knew some of the people by other names. 

Throughout his recollections Castillo suffered stomach cramps, said he felt a "weight on his legs," and cried out in pain a number of times. Through the manipulations of the hypnotist, he was able to recall that on many different occasions he had been taken to a factory. He had always driven to the factory in a woman's car, and they had always entered through the front door. Castillo could not remember the exact location of the factory, other than that it was located "way outside Chicago." He spoke of a romantic relationship with the woman, but while one moment he spoke of her as "nice" and "kind," in the next breath he said that he hated her. 

According to the hypnotist's report one thing was certain. Whoever the woman was, she "controlled the subject's activities and consciousness like a nightmare." 

Eliciting information from Castillo was no easy task. Over the course of many interrogations, the hypnotist discovered that Castillo could be taken to four different hypnotic levels. It appeared to the hypnotist that each level came closer to the truth. He labeled these states "Zombie I, Zombie II, Zombie III, and Zombie IV." Depending upon which "Zombie" state Castillo was in, his mannerisms and identity changed. 

In the first state, "Zombie I," Castillo believed he was Eloriaga, and he told tales of anti-American espionage. During "Zombie II," he took on the identity of a tough talking CIA agent in trouble. While in "Zombie III," again Castillo emerged as an agent whose cover had been blown. At this level, however, he experienced a compulsion to kill himself. On the day he was to have assassinated Marcos, Castillo responded to a program he had revealed in an earlier interrogation. He attempted suicide in his jail cell by swallowing a bottle of epoxy glue. 

The "Zombie IV" state revealed that "Castillo's" true name was Manuel Angel Ramirez, a twenty-nine-year-old native of the Bronx, New York. In this state he had no recollection of his youth, except for a hazy memory of his father, who "Ramirez" believed was a highly placed official at "the Agency." 

As "Ramirez," Castillo said that most of his life had been spent in training with, or on missions for, the Special Operations Group of the CIA. He remembered one training camp where he learned clandestine and martial arts Throughout the interrogations the theme of "programmed agent" emerged. Castillo's testimony under hypnosis was that of an individual whose identity had been completely erased and reconstructed several times over. 

On May 30, 1967, Castillo spontaneously went from his normal state into a "Zombie" state. In answering Castillo's question about transfer from the hospital to jail, the hypnotist unknowingly said, "That depends entirely on the big chief, you know." Upon hearing these words, a blank look came over Castillo's eyes and all efforts to wake him were at first unsuccessful. The hypnotist then called out a series of phrases from Castillo's notebooks and found that the phrases "I will win if I don't lose my nerve" and "I must believe myself or no one else will believe me" awakened him. 

The next day was Castillo's birthday. The NBI planned to give him a birthday party as an excuse to get him drunk to see if his behavior changed. Castillo, it seemed, had a huge capacity for liquor. Drunk to the eyeballs, he saluted one of the NBI agents and called him "Colonel." "Where do we fly tonight, Colonel?" he asked. 

The agent quickly told him that he was to fly the same mission as the last one. Castillo said, "Haiphong," then drunkenly fell into bed. He dug his fingers into his throat and vomited. He cried out for a doctor and between vomit spasms, rattled out his mission to the hypnotist. 

He said his real name was Manuel Angel Ramirez, his rank was sergeant, and he was assigned to the Strategic Air Tactical Command in South Vietnam. 

He was in Saigon in January, 1966, he related, and had flown B-26 missions over Haiphong and Hanoi. He came to Manila, he said, to kill President Marcos in June, when the president would make a public speech. If his assassination attempt failed someone else would get Marcos before the end of 1968, Castillo added. 

"I am dying," he groaned, and pleaded again for a doctor. He thought he was dying from a heart attack. "If I die today," he warned, "my secrets die with me." 

When the NBI doctor arrived, he examined Castillo and pronounced him fit, except for his obviously drunken state. He tried to give him a shot to calm him down, but Castillo  protested violently. The doctor then asked him to take a pill, which he did without resistance. 

Two days later, Castillo was given another medical examination by Dr. Alexis Guerrero of the NBI. A series of tests were given to measure his breathing rate, pulse rate, sweat production, and other functions. All of these tests were performed in "Zombie" states I, II, and III. The doctor noted that in each state there was a vast difference in pulse rate, and assumed, because of what Castillo said, and the reactions of his heart and respiration, that he was experiencing some emotional agitation. 

Sodium amytal was administered while he was in the "Zombie III" state. According to the hypnotist, Castillo did not even notice he'd been given the injection. Soon he began to talk as he'd done previously while in the drunken state. "I'm Sergeant Manuel Ramirez of the Tactical Air Command," he said. When asked to reveal his base he said, "You'll never know," adding, "I am a pilot. I've flown a B-26." 

"The NBI are suckers," he said a little while later. "They thought they arrested me. But there I was, waiting for them to get me. I know of a great plot. I am supposed to expose it, after I'm arrested. I know I will eventually return to my country [the U.S.]. I'll go through the motions of a trial, conviction, and jail as a criminal. After a couple of months, I will be released for my next assignment." 

Awakened from the "Zombie" state, Castillo was told all about these various states and his strange behavior while in them. The hypnotist explained how he thought Castillo had been programmed. Castillo seemed baffled by this news. He said that he was not told by anybody about being programmed. He said that "Papa" didn't even know about the "Zombie" state. He grew agitated, saying that if he were in the "Zombie" state he might even kill "Papa," and then "the Agency would go to blazes. Hell will break loose on the guy responsible for the Zombie." 

Asked in a trance to identify "Papa," Castillo said that he was not just a "guy," but was his real father. He described him as having a moustache and smoking a pipe. He said he was the only one who could send the Agency to "blazes" if he, Castillo, was killed on this mission. He said that he would personally tell "Papa" about the "Zombie" when he got back.[sounds like Alan Dulles DC] 

After more than forty hypnotic sessions lasting from one to five hours each, covering the period from April 3 to June 25, 1967, the hypnotist reviewed the data and summarized it for the Chief of the Defense Intelligence Division of the National Bureau of Investigation. The summary report not only involved Castillo in the assassination of John F. Kennedy; it disclosed that Castillo was a hypno-programmed "Zombie" who would kill on cue. 

The summary report stated: "The Zombie phenomenon referred to here is a somnambulistic behavior displayed by the subject in a conditioned response to a series of words, phrases, and statements, apparently unknown to the subject during his normal waking state. While under the influence of such a Zombie state, the subject closed his eyes, rose bodily, walked, triggered a pistol, stared blankly, and fell to the floor with no apparent sense of physical pain. As far as could be determined experimentally, the Zombie behavior had for its objective the assassination of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Republic of the Philippines." 

The report also added: "Neither the presence nor the discovery of the Zombie states in our subject should be regarded as noble or unique. If anything, the only remarkable character of the Zombie state in our subject is its deeply ingrained and systematic presentation, indicating a certain disturbing degree of conditioning." 

In a lengthy summary, the NBI hypnotist and deprogrammer of Castillo recounted the details of exactly how he had uncovered the key that unlocked the programmed assassin's mind. 

The letters "XBGUMIDUTYBX" were found scribbled on the white surface of a cigarette package which was in Castillo's possession at the time of his arrest. The paper had been folded carefully and tucked into the back of his watch. Castillo had told investigators that this piece of paper was given him by a man named Luis Mauricio. Castillo said that Mauricio also gave him money. Mauricio was known to the NBI as a member of the Huk guerillas. 

Placing Castillo in a trance, the hypnotist called out the series of letters on the cigarette package. Castillo did not react. He then tried calling out the letters, pausing at different places He found that when he paused between the G and the U, saying "XBG,UMIDUTYBX," Castillo would reply with "I am myself to kill." 

The hypnotist then tried the letters one at a time, and then in different combinations. While many of the combinations produced no response, the following were significant: 

When the hypnotist said "X," Castillo quickly answered, "Mauricio." 

When the hypnotist said "BGU," Castillo slowly said, "I am myself." 

When the hypnotist said "MI," Castillo answered, "to kill." 

In another session the hypnotist experimented with saying "Luis Castillo" as a command. The hypnotist reported, "A pathetic sight takes place after this. The subject turns his pistol to his own temple and squeezes the trigger, as many times as his name is repeated." 

Whenever the hypnotist would say, "June 12, 1967, 12 o'clock," "June 22, 1967," "July 4, 1967," or "January 1, 1968," Castillo would invariably aim the pistol and squeeze the trigger. 

The hypnotist found that after the preparatory command to put him in a trance, if Castillo's eyes were open and he saw a photograph of President Marcos, he would, with no verbal instructions, aim and repeatedly squeeze the trigger of his pistol, following the photo wherever it was taken around the room. If the hypnotist said the word "kill" while Castillo was following this program, he would drop heavily to the floor and remain motionless. 

The hypnotist's report also includes Castillo's amazing story about his participation in yet another organized assassination attempt. Under hypnosis, Castillo said that the assassination had happened "before noon." He remembered being with a tall man, weighing about 190 pounds, with a hawk like nose, black hair, and Oriental eyes set in a long face. He spoke with a foreign accent which Castillo could not identify. He said that he remembered meeting the man along with four or five other men in an airport. They then drove together in a black car to a building. Castillo said that he thought the group included both Americans and foreigners, and he thought one man was Spanish.

When the group arrived at the building, Castillo said they climbed to a second-floor room which he described after some uncertainty as brown. The room contained packing crates, a short brown table, a typewriter, and two "lift-up glass windows overlooking a street." 

The first man opened a black suitcase, which Castillo described as a bowling bag with a zipper and lock. It contained a scope and pieces of a rifle, which he assembled. He set the scope at 500 yards and gave the rifle to Castillo. Castillo did not seem certain about the make or caliber of the rifle, but finally said that he thought it was Russian. 

The man told him to shoot a man in the back seat of an open car in the middle of the caravan. He said that the man would be seated with a lady or another man. A mirror was to be flashed twice from a building across the street, so that Castillo would know when he was to shoot. When he saw the two flashes he was supposed to shoot at the next car coming into view. When he was questioned about the identity of the man riding in the open car, Castillo said that he did not know who the victim was. 

After the man had assembled the rifle and had given Castillo his instructions, he went downstairs. Later he rushed into the room. "They got him already," he told Castillo. "Let's get out of here." He then grabbed the rifle away from Castillo, dismantled it, and stuffed it and the scope into the black bag. 

Castillo and the man rushed downstairs, got into a car with two other men, and drove away from the building. They picked up a bald-headed, skinny man after they turned the first corner. Three or four blocks later the car stopped and picked up another man. 

Castillo said he was riding in the back seat between the first man and the man who had joined them at the second stop. As the car drove away from the scene of the crime, this second man gave Castillo an injection while he wasn't looking. He went immediately to sleep and woke up in a Chicago hotel room with the woman hypnotist. 

He and the woman got into a blue car and drove to Milwaukee, Castillo said. While driving there, they heard the news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on the car radio. 

Within a few days after the hypnotist submitted his final report, Castillo was out of the NBI jail and had left the Philippines for parts unknown. It was later uncovered that Castillo was returned to the United States in 1967 and questioned by the FBI, whose spokesman said, "We talked to Castillo and he told us that he'd fabricated his story about the Kennedy assassination. Said he'd made it up in Manila." 

The official record says that Castillo was sentenced to six years in the Missouri Penitentiary for robbery in June, 1971. On August 1, 1974, he was released after serving thirty-seven months. Castillo's last known contact was with his mother shortly after his release from prison. Since then he has disappeared, from both his family and those researchers who would like to question him further. 

If Castillo had indeed "made it up in Manila," as the FBI spokesman claimed, then he would have had to have had a phenomenal memory, an incredibly high tolerance to sodium amytal and alcohol, and virtuoso acting ability. Neither the psychological profile nor the life history of Luis Angel Castillo supports the conclusion that he possessed any of these talents.

Chapter Thirteen 

THE LONE NUTS 

MKULTRA was fully operational when Luis Castillo was programmed. It was active that same decade when events blamed on three "lone assassins" changed the course of history. 

In a well-executed, mass indoctrination campaign employing all the honor, prestige, and power of the U.S. government, Americans were told over and over again that the lives of John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy were all taken by lone assassins—men operating without political motivation. These three assassins—Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan—conveniently left diaries, underlinings in various books, and other self-incriminating clues to establish their guilt. 

The evidence gathered on the assassinations remains fragmented and incomplete. Any event of such magnitude as political assassination is bound to invite a large number of interpretations. While there has not as yet surfaced any single, conclusive proof of a conspiracy, more than eighty percent of the American public believe there was a conspiracy. A string of circumstantial evidence, and a knowledge of the fundamentals of mind control invites further speculation. 

In each case the method was the same—death by the bullet. In each case the circumstances were the same— murder in a public place in view of many witnesses. All three assassins were men whose personal histories can be interpreted to indicate that they were mentally unstable.Evidence suggests that all three had been hypnotized at one time or another. 

But the similarity in their psychological profiles, and the "coincidence" of each having left a trail of evidence, did not seem suspicious to the government investigators of the assassination. That three assassins, from three different parts of the country, with three different ethnic backgrounds (and three different victims in three different cities), could all have had the same modus operandi did not seem improbable to the investigators. Those "coincidences" did not even warrant their notice. 

A good detective would immediately have suspected that the M.O. of each assassin was a cover laid down by a professional hit team. The cryptocracy which grew up after World War II was composed of a cadre of professionals, trained during the war. Professional intelligence agents in both the KGB and the CIA are trained to stick to the cover story that works, and use it as long as it does work. Even if the cover story is blown, the agent is supposed to stick to it and, if necessary, die with sealed lips. The "lone nut" theory—that the assassins of King and the Kennedys had acted alone—and the evidence planted to support that theory, stands out as a typical professional intelligence "cover." 

The modus operandi or method of a murder is the first of two major clues detectives use to solve crimes. The second clue is the motive. 

Those who support the "lone nut" theory point to the fact that no clear political motive could be attributed to any of the three assassins. Yet even to a casual student of history each of the three murders was of obvious political benefit to the extreme right: John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were all independent thinkers who could not be bought off. They worked for expanded civil rights in a manner the right wing interpreted as being Communist, e.g., it involved government legislation of civil rights. J. Edgar Hoover is known to have had a personal vendetta against Dr. King, and it has been reported that he lost no love for the Kennedy brothers. The Kennedys were not only on the wrong side of Hoover's FBI, they were on the wrong side of the CIA as well. JFK fired several top intelligence officers (he asked for Allen Dulles' resignation) and at the time of his death he was privately talking about reorganizing the entire U.S. intelligence service. 

Robert Kennedy, as attorney general, was waging a tireless campaign against organized crime. His campaign cut across the alliance the CIA had formed with gangsters who had lost their gambling and drug concessions in Cuba. Robert Kennedy was a close friend of Dr. King, and one rumor persists that the assassins had issued a dire warning that RFK not run for president, and that King was sacrificed to show that the group meant business. A similar threat was issued against Ted Kennedy when he was entertaining presidential thoughts. Robert Kennedy's knowledge of the CIA-Mafia link and the CIA assassination teams might have been a motive behind the motive, assuming that fanatical rightwing operators were "contracted" for the "Executive actions" against the three. 

The obvious results of all three assassinations would indicate that the extreme right wing, known to be widespread in the cryptocracy, had the most to gain. By their deaths, the civil rights movement was severely crippled, the conflict in Vietnam escalated, and the corrupt leaders of the cryptocracy stayed in power. 

More recently a rumor has been put forth by CBS News and others that Castro and/or the KGB were behind the assassinations. That theory smells like more disinformation from the cryptocracy. The motives of the Communists seem much less clear than the motives of misguided patriotic right-thinking Americans. The cryptocracy was in a better position to benefit from the deaths of the three charismatic and humanitarian leaders than were the Communists. 

Following the assassination of President Kennedy, his successor appointed a now notorious commission to investigate the crime. Headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, it included Sen. John Sherman Cooper (R., Kentucky), Sen. Richard B. Russell (D., Georgia), Rep. Hale Boggs (D., Louisiana), Rep. Gerald R. Ford (R., Michigan), former CIA Director Allen Dulles, and John J. McCloy. 

After nine months of deliberation, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, had shot President Kennedy. Although Oswald was in turn assassinated by Dallas thug Jack Ruby, and although Ruby's connections with organized crime and the anti-Castro movement were well known, the Commission found no evidence of a conspiracy. 

The twenty-six volumes of evidence which made up the commission's final report left so many questions unasked that by December, 1976, a Harris Survey concluded that 80 percent of the U.S. population did not believe the commission's conclusion. 

From the beginning, the investigation was slanted towards proving that Oswald was guilty and that he had acted alone. The commission had proceeded with haste to put to rest forever the question: Was there a conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination? In its haste it had overlooked key facts and ignored witnesses who did not support the foregone conclusion that there was no conspiracy—that Oswald was just a "lone nut." 

Throughout the Warren Commission hearings there was conflicting testimony about Oswald. There was testimony that Oswald did not drive a car. There was other testimony that he did drive, and very well. Some of his acquaintances said he was a poor shot, too poor to have accomplished the feat of marksmanship in Dealy Plaza. Others said that he was a fine marksman. Some said, by turns, that he was a Communist, a pro-Castro and an anti-Castro sympathizer. His own mother said that he performed undercover work for the U.S. government. Out of this mass of conflicting evidence, the Warren Commission simply took what was needed to support its foregone conclusion, and relegated the rest to published transcripts or to top-secret files in the National Archives. 

There were so many conflicting descriptions of Oswald that many independent assassination investigators subsequently concluded that there must have been at least two Oswalds—the "real" one and an intelligence double. If, however, one considers that Oswald might have been controlled in the same way as Candy Jones or Luis Castillo— split into multiple personalities—another explanation for the conflicting descriptions of the assassin becomes credible. He might have been an excellent shot in one zombie state, and in another he might have been blocked so that he could not even aim a rifle. In one state he might have had the ability to drive a car, while in another state he might have had a posthypnotic block so that he could not drive. 

Oswald said that he didn't kill anybody. His statement was recorded in the basement of the Dallas Police Station on the day after the assassination. Captured on film by a local CBS film crew, Oswald told reporters, "I positively know nothing about this situation here. I would like to have legal representation." In answer to an inaudible question from one reporter Oswald said, "Well, I was questioned by a judge. However, I protested at that time that I was not allowed legal representation during that very short and sweet hearing. I really don't know what this situation is about. Nobody has told me anything, except that I'm accused of murdering a policeman. I know nothing more than that. I do request someone to come forward to give me legal assistance." 

"Did you kill the President?" another reporter asked. 

"No," Oswald answered, "I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question." 

Ten years after Oswald made that statement, George O'Toole applied a newly developed "truth detector," the Psychological Stress Evaluator (PSE), to the soundtrack of the film which recorded Oswald's protestation of innocence. The PSE, unlike the polygraph, does not have to be connected to the body to measure stress. It measures subaudible micro-tremors in the human voice which occur whenever an individual experiences even mild anxiety or stress. The micro-tremors form a distinct pattern on the PSE chart and can then be compared to stress patterns in other parts of the statement. A deliberate lie, especially one which involves personal jeopardy, stands out clearly from the other stress patterns that might represent situational stress or vague anxiety. 

Oswald was in a situation of high stress that day. He had been grilled for hours by police. He had been manhandled and accused of killing not only a ponce officer but also the President of the United States. 

Yet the PSE analysis of Oswald's statement showed that he exhibited far more stress when he was talking about not being represented by a lawyer than he did when he denied murdering the President or the police officer. George O'Toole concluded, as have many other investigators, that Oswald was innocent. He could not have been consciously involved in the assassination as a fall guy—a patsy—or he would have shown stress in his answers to these key questions on the PSE.* 
* Posing as a Look reporter, former CIA employee OToole conducted and recorded interviews with local police officials and FBI men who were the original investigators in the Kennedy case. Too many of their PSE patterns showed levels of stress which could only be interpreted as having been the result of willful deception. In his book The Assassination Tapes, O'Toole offers the details of his PSE analysis, and concludes, not surprisingly, that there was a conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 
But what if he had been hypno-programmed so that he could remember nothing of his involvement in the assassination plot? Then every lie-detector test in the world would prove him innocent, since consciously he would believe that he was innocent. Hypnosis is the only reliable way to defeat a lie detector, whether it be a polygraph or the more advanced PSE. 

Among evidence concealed from the commission was a CIA document obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in 1976, which quoted an unidentified CIA officer reporting to his superiors on Oswald. According to that memo, which had been written only three days after JFK's assassination, Agency officials had discussed interviewing Oswald for intelligence purposes in the early 1960s. The same document revealed that Allen Dulles had secretly coached the CIA on how the Agency should deny having any connection with Oswald. According to one of the memos, Dulles strongly recommended that CIA Director Helms deny under oath that the CIA had any material in its files which suggested an Agency relationship with Oswald. Later disclosures revealed that Oswald did indeed have a CIA "201 file." 

In sworn testimony before the Warren Commission in 1964, Richard Helms applied the artful deception which came from a lifetime of CIA training; he testified that the Agency had "never even contemplated" making any contact with Oswald prior to the assassination. That the CIA did make contact with him was never disclosed to the commission. 

Despite the attempts of Allen Dulles to steer commission investigators away from other information which linked Oswald to both the FBI and the CIA, the rumor that Oswald had been sent to Russia as an intelligence agent persisted. 

In an attempt to scotch that rumor, Dulles told the commission that it would be impossible for anyone to prove or disprove that Oswald had or had not been an agent or informer. He said, astonishingly, that Oswald could have been a CIA agent without anyone ever knowing about it! 

During one meeting of the commission, Senator Russell asked Dulles, "If Oswald never had assassinated the President, and had been in the employ of the FBI, and somebody had gone to the FBI, would they have denied he was an agent?" 

"Oh yes," the ex-CIA chief replied. "They would be the first to deny it." 

"Your agents would have done the same thing?" Senator Russell asked incredulously. 

"Exactly," Dulles answered. 

At another juncture, John J. McCloy said that he had received several inquiries about the Oswald-agent rumor. He asked Dulles point blank, "What is there to this story?" 

Dulles went in circles: "This is a terribly hard thing to disprove, you know. How do you disprove a fellow was not your agent?" 

"You could disprove it, couldn't you?" Congressman Boggs asked. 

Dulles replied, simply, "No." 

"So I will ask you," Boggs continued, "did you have agents about whom you had no record whatsoever?" 

"The record might not be on paper," Dulles said. "But on paper would have been hieroglyphics that only two people knew what they meant, and anybody outside the agency would not know and you could say this meant the agent, and somebody else could say it meant another agent." 

The discussion then turned to U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. Dulles explained that Powers was a different kind of agent. He had signed a contract with the CIA. 

Alluding to the Oswald-CIA relationship, Boggs asked Dulles, "Let's say Powers did not have a signed contract but was recruited by someone in CIA. The man who recruited him would know, wouldn't he?" 

"Yes," Dulles replied, "but he wouldn't tell." 

"Would he tell it under oath?" Chief Justice Warren wondered.

"I wouldn't think he would tell it under oath, no," Dulles replied matter of factly. 

"Why?" asked Warren. 

"He ought not to tell it under oath," Dulles said, offering Warren a lesson which years of legal training made him incapable of learning: the cryptocracy operates completely outside of the law and, because of the power of the "national security" rationale, it operates completely above the law. 

Dulles admitted later, while responding to a question from McCloy, that a CIA operative might not tell the truth even to his own superior. 

"What you do," Boggs indignantly said, "is you make our problem, if this be true, utterly impossible because you say this rumor [that Oswald was a CIA agent] can't be dissipated under any circumstances." 

"I don't think it can," Dulles admitted, "unless you believe Mr. Hoover, and so forth and so on, which probably most of the people will." 

Hoover, of course, had written a carefully worded response to a Commission inquiry about Oswald's FBI connections. He denied all association between Oswald and the FBI. 

Also ignored by the Warren Commission was information about the cryptocracy's attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Dulles presumably knew about the plots which took place during his tenure with the Agency, but he remained mute. Richard Helms was the only CIA official on active duty to have direct contact with the Warren Commission, and although he provided them with information on a number of things, he volunteered nothing about the unsuccessful plots against Castro—plots which would have been within the commission's "need to know" since they showed that the cryptocracy had practical experience in assassination planning. 

Testifying before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Helms revealed how the cryptocracy evaded and withheld information from the Warren Commission. His testimony illustrated the cryptocracy contempt for the helpless commission, the American people, and above all the truth. 

During the Church Committee's investigation of the CIA's involvement in assassinations, Senator Church asked Helms: "Since you had knowledge of the CIA involvement in these assassination plots against Castro, and knew it at the time .. . I would have thought . . . that ought to have been related to the Commission, because it does bear on the motives, whatever else." 

Helms: ".. . Mr. Allen Dulles was a member of the Warren Commission. And the first assassination plot happened during his time as director. What he said to the Warren Commission about this .. . I don't know. But at least he was sitting right there in [the commission's] deliberations and knew about this, and I am sure that the same thought that occurred to you must have occurred to him." 

Senator Morgan: "You were charged with furnishing the Warren Commission information from the CIA, information that you thought was relevant?" 

Helms: "No sir, I was instructed to reply to inquiries from the Warren Commission for information from the Agency. I was not asked to initiate any particular thing." 

Morgan: ". . . In other words if you weren't asked for it, you didn't give it?" 

Helms: "That's right sir."

Nevertheless, despite the denials of Dulles and Hoover, the rumor persisted that Oswald had defected to Russia on a clandestine mission for the CIA. Some believed he had been uncovered by the KGB and subsequently programmed like the Manchurian Candidate to return to the U.S. and act as an unconscious "sleeper agent," a programmed assassin. 

Following up on this rumor, J. Lee Rankin, General Counsel to the Warren Commission, wrote a letter to CIA Director Helms requesting all information the CIA had on Russian "brainwashing" capabilities. 

In response, Helms claimed that there were "two major methods of altering or controlling behavior," and the Soviets were interested in both. He said the first was psychological and the second was pharmacological. "The two may be used as individual methods or for mutual reinforcement," Helms wrote. "For long-term control of large numbers of people the former method is more promising than the latter. 

"In dealing with individuals, the U.S. experience suggests the pharmacological approach (assisted by psychological techniques) would be the only effective method." 

Helms told the Warren Commission that while Soviet drug research was extensive, it had consistently lagged about five years behind Western research. That was an interesting admission, for in the MKULTRA files which were declassified over a decade later the CIA was using the Soviet success in mind control to motivate our own scientific program. 

Helms's memorandum told the commission that the Soviets had adopted a multidisciplinary approach to mind control, integrating biological, social, and what he called "physical-mathematical research" in attempts to control human behavior in a "manner consonant with national plans." 

But while attempting to tell the Warren Commission what the Soviets were up to, Helms was, at the same time, revealing the cryptocracy own intentions. His conclusions stated that "there is no evidence that the Soviets have any techniques or agents capable of producing particular behavioral patterns which are not available in the West." Appended to the memorandum (Commission Document 1113, reproduced here as Appendix A) were several hundred pages of reports on Soviet mind-control techniques and an extensive bibliography on brainwashing, which for some reason remained classified even after the main body of the memorandum was declassified. 

The question of whether Oswald had been hypno-programmed was raised in another context when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his independent investigations of the Kennedy assassination. 

Garrison told an anxious press he was going to crack the Kennedy case wide open: "The plain fact is that our federal intelligence agencies are implacably determined to do whatever is necessary to block any further inquiry into the facts of the assassination. 

"The arrogant totalitarian efforts of these federal agencies to obstruct the discovery of the truth is a matter which I intend to bring to light when we have finished doing the job they should have done." 

One of the central targets of Garrison's investigation was David William Ferrie, who was both a hypnotist and a CIA Operation Mind Control 193 operative. Coincidentally, Ferrie had been in a New Orleans Civil Air Patrol group in the fifties with Lee Harvey Oswald. One witness said that Ferrie had been the man who had instructed Oswald in marksmanship. 

When New Orleans police raided Feme's apartment, they confiscated a number of weapons, various drugs, and three blank U.S. passports—things that any good CIA operative would keep at his elbow. Much later researchers realized the importance of some of the evidence obtained in the raid—several voluminous abstracts on posthypnotic suggestion and a library on hypnotism. 

A salesman for the Equitable Life Insurance Company, Perry Raymond Russo, told a New Orleans grand jury that Ferrie's apartment had been the scene of many "parties" where hypnosis had been used as "entertainment." One evening, Russo said, Ferrie hypnotized a young man to whom he apparently had a strong homosexual attraction. Another evening, Russo said, he himself hypnotized a young woman and made her immobile. He struck pins in her hand and burned her arms just to demonstrate the extent of the control he had over her. 

At Russo's request, his story was tested by Garrison's investigators. Under both sodium pentothal and hypnosis, Russo told the identical story he had told to the grand jury. He testified that he had been with Ferrie, a man named Leon Oswald, and a third man named Clem Bertrand in Feme's apartment during the summer of 1963. The three had discussed an assassination attempt in which diversionary tactics were to be used. 

Russo quoted Ferrie as saying that "there would have to be a minimum of three people involved. Two of the persons would shoot diversionary shots and the third . . . shoot the 'good' shot." Ferrie said that one of the three would have to be the "scapegoat." He also said that Ferrie discoursed on the "availability of exit," saying that the sacrificed man would give the other two time to escape. 

On February 23, 1967, a few days before Luis Castillo Was arrested by the NBI in the Philippines, Garrison subpoenaed David Ferrie. That evening George Lardner of the Washington Post went to Ferrie's apartment for an interview. Ferrie, in remarkably good spirits, told Lardner, "A President is no better than anyone else .. . If I were killed, I'd expect my death to be investigated just as thoroughly." 

Lardner left Ferrie at 4:00 A.M. Seven hours and forty minutes later Ferrie was found in bed with a sheet pulled over his head. He had been dead for several hours. 

On the dining room table was a note which read in part: "To leave this life is for me a sweet prospect. I find nothing in it that is desirable and on the other hand, everything that is loathsome." Fifteen empty medicine bottles Uttered the apartment. The medicine bottles had contained a prescription drug for a vascular disorder. 

Garrison immediately jumped to the conclusion that Ferrie had committed suicide because of the subpoena. The autopsy, however, revealed that Ferrie had not died from an overdose of drugs, but from a ruptured blood vessel at the base of his brain. 

Dr. Ronald A. Walsh, Louisiana State University School of Medicine pathologist, stated in his autopsy report that David Ferrie died of a "berry aneurysm." Several forensic pathologists later concluded that such an aneurysm could have been caused by a karate expert inflicting a blow to the back of the head in such a manner that no external damage would be discernible. 

A number of Ferrie's friends began to fear for their lives. One, Jack Martin, came out of hiding long enough to suggest that Oswald had been programmed by Ferrie to go to Dallas and kill the President. Immediately following the assassination, Martin had reported to Assistant District Attorney Herman S. Kohlman that Ferrie and Oswald had been friends, and that Ferrie had instructed Oswald in the use of a telescope sight on a rifle. But in 1963 no one followed up on Martin's story. 

Another of Ferrie's friends was a Reverend Raymond Broshears, who had roomed with Ferrie three years before Feme's death. Broshears stated in a television interview: "David admitted being involved with the assassins. There's no question about that." 

The Warren Commission must have had some suspicions about Ferrie, for in Volume 24, Exhibit 2038, of the Warren Commission Report, NBC cameraman Gene Barnes is quoted as saying, "Bob Mulholland, NBC News, Chicago, talked in Dallas to one Fairy [sic]. . . . Fairy said that Oswald had been under hypnosis from a man doing a Operation Mind Control 195 mind-reading act at Ruby's 'Carousel.' Fairy was said to be a private detective and the owner of an airplane who took young boys on flights 'just for kicks' . . ."* 
* Ferrie did own an airplane, and he is alleged to have worked for Guy Bannister, the New Orleans private eye and CIA contract agent
Bob Mulholland later came forward to say that he had been misquoted by the Warren Report. What he had actually overheard were FBI agents saying that Ferrie might have been involved in the assassination with Oswald; he had merely relayed that information to his reporters in Dallas. 

In any event, there was enough substance to the David Ferrie angle to cause both the FBI and the Secret Service to have interviewed him immediately following the assassination. Yet there were no reports, official or otherwise, as to the outcome of that interview. 

Those not disposed to believe in conspiracies against the American people by its own government might well ask, "If there is a conspiracy by a cryptocracy, why wouldn't we, by now, have proof of it? Why wouldn't there have been at least one deathbed confession by one of the conspirators?" 

Two such confessions to the JFK assassination conspiracy may well have been made—and overlooked. 

next
THE IGNORED CONFESSIONS