Operation Mind Control
By Walter Bowart
Chapter Fourteen
By Walter Bowart
Chapter Fourteen
THE IGNORED CONFESSIONS
Only an understanding of the techniques and applications of mind control could begin to bring meaning to the
fragmented ramblings of Jack Ruby.
On June 7, 1964, Jack Ruby was questioned in jail in
Dallas, Texas, by Earl Warren and Gerald Ford. In that
session Ruby continually pleaded for a lie-detector test or
for sodium pentothal. He desperately wanted to prove his
honesty so that Warren and the commission would know he
was telling the truth.
Said Ruby: "I would like to be able to get a lie-detector
test or truth serum of what motivated me to do what I did
at that particular time, and it seems as you get further into
something, even though you know what you did, it operates against you somehow, brainwashes you, that you are
weak in what you want to tell the truth about, and what
you want to say which is the truth."
"As I started to trial," Ruby continued, "I don't know if
you realize my reasoning, how I happened to be involved—
I was carried away tremendously emotionally, and all the
tune I tried to ask Mr. Belli [Melvin Belli, Ruby's first
lawyer], I wanted to get up and say the truth regarding the
steps that led me to do what I have got involved in, but
since I have a spotty background in the nightclub business,
I should have been the last person to ever want to do something that I had been involved in. In other words, I was
carried away tremendously. You want to ask me questions?"
Warren asked Ruby to just "tell us what you want, and
then we will ask you some questions."
"Am I boring you?" Ruby replied.
He pleaded with Warren to be taken to Washington
where he could be questioned in safety. Possibly either his
control agent was in the room, or Ruby felt that he was, for
again and again he hinted to Warren that he had something
quite important to say but could not say it at that moment
in Dallas.
"Gentlemen, unless you get me to Washington, you can't
get a fair shake out of me. If you understand my way of
talking, you have to bring me to Washington to get the
tests. Do I sound dramatic? Off the beam?"
"No, you are speaking very, very rationally," Warren replied, "and I am really surprised that you can remember as
much as you have remembered up to the present time. You
have given it to us in great detail."
Again Ruby pleaded with Warren: "Unless you can get
me to Washington, and I am not a crackpot, I have all my
senses—I don't want to evade any crime I am guilty of."
Then Ruby asked that the sheriff and the law enforcement
officers leave the room, and after they were gone he said,
"Gentlemen, if you want to hear any further testimony, you
will have to get me to Washington soon, because it has
something to do with you, Chief Warren. Do I sound sober
enough to tell you this?"
"Yes, go right ahead," Warren said.
"I would like to talk to you in private," Ruby told him.
Warren seemed to miss the import of Ruby's statement.
"You may do that when you finish your story. You may
tell me that phase of it."
"I bet you haven't had a witness like me in your whole
investigation, is that correct?" Ruby asked.
"There are many witnesses whose memory has not been
as good as yours. I tell you that honestly," Warren replied.
"My reluctance to talk," Ruby went on, "you haven't
had any witnesses in telling the story, in finding so many
problems."
"You have a greater problem than any witness we have
had," Warren retorted.
"I have a lot of reasons for having those problems,"
Ruby explained. Then after another exchange about going
immediately to Washington, Ruby said, "Gentlemen, my
life is in danger here. Not with my guilty plea of execution.
Do I sound sober enough to you as I say this?"
Warren assured him that he did sound sober. "From the
moment I started my testimony, haven't I sounded as
though, with the exception of becoming emotional, haven't
I sounded as though I made sense, what I was speaking
about?" Ruby asked.
"You have indeed," Warren again assured him. "I understand everything you have said. If I haven't, it is my
fault."
"Then I follow this up," Ruby blurted out. "I may not
live tomorrow to give any further testimony. The reason
why I add this to this, since you assure me that I have been
speaking sense, then I might be speaking sense by following
what I have said, and the only thing I want to get out to
the public, and I can't say it here, is, with authenticity,
with sincerity of the truth, of everything, and why my act
was committed, but it can't be said here.
"It can be said, it's got to be said amongst people of the
highest authority that would give me the benefit of the
doubt. And following that, immediately give me the lie detector test after I do make the statement.
"Chairman Warren, if you felt that your life was in danger at the moment, how would you feel? Wouldn't you be
reluctant to go on speaking, even though you request me to
do so?"
Warren again reassured Ruby that he was making perfect sense. "I wish that our beloved President, Lyndon
Johnson, would have delved deeper into the situation, hear
me, not to accept just circumstantial facts about my guilt
or innocence, and would have questioned to find out the
truth about me before he relinquished certain powers to
these certain people . . . Consequently, a whole new form
of government is going to take over our country [emphasis
added], and I know I won't live to see you another time.
Do I sound sort of screwy in telling you these things?"
"No," Warren said, "I think that is what you believe or
you wouldn't tell it under oath."
"But it is a very serious situation," Ruby said, "I guess it
is too late to stop it, isn't it? Now maybe something can be saved. It may not be too late, whatever happens, if our President, Lyndon Johnson, knew the truth from me . .
But if I am eliminated, there won't be any way of knowing,
"Right now, when I leave your presence now, I am the
only one that can bring out the truth to our President, who
believes in righteousness and justice. But he has been told,
I am certain, that I was part of a plot to assassinate the
President. I know your hands are tied; you are helpless."
Earl Warren said, "Mr. Ruby, I think I can say this to you, that if he has been told any such thing, there is no indication of any kind that he believes it."
When it became apparent that Warren did not realize Ruby had intended to confess to being a part of the plot to kill President Kennedy, Ruby exploded. "I am sorry, Chief Justice Warren, I thought I would be very effective in telling you what I have said here. But in all fairness to everyone, maybe all I want to do is beg that if they found out I was telling the truth, maybe they can succeed in what their motives are, but maybe my people won't be tortured and mutilated . . ."
Warren could find no meaning in Ruby's testimony. He merely assured him that neither he nor his family would be tortured or mutilated by anyone. "You may be sure of that," the Chief Justice added.
"No," Ruby answered. "The only way you can do it is if he knows the truth, that I am telling the truth, and why I was down in that basement Sunday morning, and maybe some sense of decency will come out and they can still fulfill their plan, as I stated before, without my people going through torture and mutilation."
Warren assured Ruby that the President would know everything he had said. "But I won't be around, Chief Justice," Ruby said. "I won't be around to tell the President."
Then one of the aides asked the first intelligent question of the day, "Who do you think is going to eliminate you, Jack?"
Ruby replied, "I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done . . ."
Jack Ruby was subsequently given a polygraph test which proved to be inconclusive due to high levels of stress.
In 1965 syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen interviewed Ruby in bis Dallas cell. She was the only major journalist allowed to interview him. She told a few friends that from what Ruby had told her, she was able to obtain evidence that would "blow the JFK case sky high." Within a few days, Dorothy Kilgallen died of a massive overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol. Her apartment was found in shambles. The transcripts of her interview with Ruby were missing. Her death was ruled a suicide.
In early 1967 Ruby complained that he was being poisoned. He was diagnosed as having cancer, but a few weeks after complaining of being poisoned, he died not of the cancer, but of a "stroke" similar to the one that had killed David Ferrie.
Another deathbed confession supports what Jack Ruby was trying to tell the Warren Commission. That confession was made by Professor George de Mohrenschildt, a former intelligence agent who was also a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald.
De Mohrenschildt was born in 1911 in the Ukraine. Following the revolution, in 1921 he and his parents fled Russia for Poland. He attended a Polish military academy for a year, and later, in 1938, received a doctorate in international commerce. He emigrated to the United States soon thereafter and, in 1949, became a citizen.
After becoming interested in the exploration and generation of oil, de Mohrenschildt received his master's degree in petroleum geology and petroleum engineering. Sometime thereafter he became acquainted with right-wing oil magnate H. L. Hunt. Although the basis of their relationship is unknown, de Mohrenschildt, in a recent interview with Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans, stated, "I knew Hunt, now the late Mr. Hunt, intimately. For some twenty years I was invited to his parties."
FBI disclosures in 1976 suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald was also acquainted with Hunt. And de Mohrenschildt knew Oswald. Apparently he had introduced himself to Oswald after hearing about him through a Russian speaking group in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Marina Oswald told the Warren Commission: "Lee did not have any close friends, but at least he had—here in America—he had a great deal of respect for de Mohrenschildt .. . he considered him to be smart, to be full of joy of living, a very energetic and very sympathetic person . . ."
It was the conclusion of the Warren Commission, after extensive investigation, that de Mohrenschildt had exhibited no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct. The Warren Report stated: "Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witness contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking de Mohrenschildt to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy."
It was subsequently revealed, however, that de Mohrenschildt had indeed been associated with various intelligence operations over the years. He was connected with French intelligence during World War II and was also linked to the CIA Bay of Pigs operation.
In late March, 1977, de Mohrenschildt's name was brought before the newly formed House Select Committee on Assassinations. Willem Oltmans told the committee that de Mohrenschildt held the key to the Kennedy assassination; that de Mohrenschildt had privately confessed to him that prior to the assassination he was aware of a conspiracy to murder the President in Dallas. According to Oltmans de Mohrenschildt was about to have a book published which would reveal the details of his knowledge of the assassination.
After Oltmans' testimony, a spokesman for the House Committee on Assassinations said that the committee would investigate his claims and would, if warranted, track down de Mohrenschildt for questioning. He was located a week later in Palm Beach, Florida, but he could not be called to testify. George de Mohrenschildt was found dead, the victim of a gunshot wound in the head. Local officials termed his death a suicide.
Following de Mohrenschildt's death, his Dallas attorney) Pat Russell, supported Oltmans' claims to the Commission. He verified the fact that before his death, de Mohrenschildt had insisted that persons other than Lee Harvey Oswald had participated in the slaying of President Kennedy. The attorney revealed that he had in his possession tapes, a book-length manuscript, and a photograph which de Mohrenschildt had turned over to him earlier. He said the tapes consisted of ten reels of interviews with de Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination, which, he claimed, were firsthand accounts of the late professor's recollections of Oswald.
Russell said that although he did not know if the tapes or the book contained any new evidence, the photograph should be of particular interest to assassination investigators. He claimed that although the photo was similar to a well-known picture obtained by the Dallas police which showed Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle and wearing a pistol, what made the photograph interesting was that it was autographed on the back by Oswald and dated May 4, 1963, approximately six months prior to the assassination.
After de Mohrenschildt's death Willem Oltmans released a portion of his interview with the deceased. Oltmans described him as "Oswald's most intimate friend," and, without offering an explanation, said that he had been ultimate with Oswald during "the years when Oswald's brain was being programmed toward the murder of the century."
In the interview dated February 23, 1977, de Mohrenschildt told Oltmans "In June, 1976, I completed a manuscript. That's when disaster struck. You see, in that book I played the devil's advocate. Without directly implicating myself as an accomplice in the JFK assassination I still mentioned a number of names, particularly of FBI and CIA officials who apparently may not be exposed under any circumstances. I was drugged surreptitiously. As a result I was committed to a mental hospital. I was there eight weeks and was given electric shocks and as a consequence I sometimes forget certain details temporarily . . ."
De Mohrenschildt went on to say that as a result of the drugs and shocks, he could take no more. "I tried to commit suicide five times . . . One of these days I will put a revolver to my head . . ."
According to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt left Dallas in the middle of the night on March 3, 1977, telling him, "I don't want anybody to see me." Oltmans reported that at that time de Mohrenschildt was in a state of panic, constantly worried whether "they" would let him leave the country. "He always felt watched and followed," Oltmans said. "I really cannot see how somebody who does not have anything to hide would develop such behavior."1
On the day he died, George de Mohrenschildt was being interviewed by author Edward Jay Epstein for his book The Legend of Lee Harvey Oswald. They broke for lunch at one o'clock and Epstein walked de Mohrenschildt to his car. They were supposed to resume the interview at three P.M., and when de Mohrenschildt didn't return, Epstein called his room and heard a distraught maid tell him that de Mohrenschildt had taken his own life. De Mohrenschildt's daughter, Alexandra, told Epstein that she believes her father took his own life after having had a post-hypnotic suggestion triggered by a voice over the telephone in his room.
The last days of George de Mohrenschildt sound strikingly similar to those of the victims of mind control. Could it have been that when drugs and "electric shock" failed to erase his memory, the final solution was prescribed? Or was he programmed to self-destruct?
The FBI should have had an easy job. There was an abundance of evidence left behind on the second floor of a rooming house a block from the Lorraine Motel. There were fingerprints on the window ledge of a bathroom next to a room which had been rented to an "Eric S. Galt." On the sidewalk in front of the house was a weapon, a high powered rifle with telescopic sight. Neighbors said they had seen a white Mustang roar away moments after the shooting.
Nevertheless, the killer got away.
A ham radio operator broadcasting from a fixed station posed as a CB operator in a mobile unit. He broadcast a convincing account of a high-speed chase between a white Mustang and a blue Pontiac. He reported that the two cars Were shooting at each other. While police concentrated their search in the area described by the ham operator, the white Mustang they were seeking sped away from MemPhis in the other direction. The ham operator's actions were explained away by authorities as a hoax. Within a few days local police and federal authorities forgot the incident. While the use of a high-powered ham radio on the eleven meter CB band and the broadcasting of false emergency information are two clear violations of the Federal Communications Code, the identity and fate of that ham "prankster" are not known.
The FBI soon discovered that the fingerprints left at the scene of the crime belonged to the man who had rented the room, Eric S. Gait. Through a computer search they later found that Galt's real name was James Earl Ray.
The day after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, James Earl Ray was captured in London. He was apprehended by British customs inspectors while attempting to leave the country on a passport issued to a Canadian constable.
Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee for trial. The lengthy search and investigation, billed as "the most complete manhunt in history," was followed by one of the shortest trials in history. On March 10, 1969, less than one year after the assassination, Ray had his day in court, literally. By most standards his was not a trial but a deal. The deal had been arranged by Ray's attorneys, who had urged him to plead guilty so that he would get ninety-nine years instead of the death penalty.
Under Tennessee law, even if a defendant enters a guilty plea, a jury is required to attend the plea and to "ratify" the plea and the sentence. In a courtroom sealed by the tightest possible security, twelve jurors heard the prosecutor, State Attorney General Phil Canale, explain to Ray his rights to a trial by jury. They heard Ray plead guilty to murder in exchange for the ninety-nine-year sentence. They heard prosecutor Canale say that, as required by law, he would outline the evidence which would have been presented had the case gone to formal trial. Canale then asked the jury if they each could sit as jurors and accept the guilty plea from the defendant. They nodded in unison.
Canale told the jury: ".. . There have been rumors going all around—perhaps some of you have heard them— that Mr. James Earl Ray was a dupe in this thing, or a fall guy or a member of a conspiracy to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I want to state to you, as your Attorney General, that we have no proof other than that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by James Earl Ray, and James Earl Ray alone, not in concert with anyone else. Our office has examined over five thousand printed pages of investigation work done by local police, by national police organizations, and by international law enforcement agencies. We have examined over three hundred physical bits of evidence physical exhibits. Three men in my office, Mr. Dwyer, Mr. Beasly and Mr. John Carlisle, the Chief Investigator of the Attorney General's Office. . . have traveled thousands of miles all over this country and to many cities in foreign countries on this investigation, our own independent investigation, and I just state to you frankly that we have no evidence that there was any conspiracy involved in this. . ."
The state had not charged Ray with conspiracy; it had charged him with murder in the first degree. Nevertheless the prosecutor felt compelled to deny that Ray had collaborators.*
* Though it was not presented at the "trial," Ray's version of the story had already been published. In a series of magazine articles written by William Bradford Huie, Ray had confessed that he had been the unwitting pawn in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King.
Stranger still was the reaction of defense attorney Percy Foreman, a man who had never lost a case, to the remarks of the prosecuting attorney. As soon as Canale had finished issuing his disclaimer of conspiracy, Foreman rose and faced the jury. "It is an honor to appear in this Court for this case. I never expected or had any idea when I entered this case that I would be able to accomplish anything except perhaps save the defendant's life .. . It took me a month to convince myself of that fact which the Attorney General of these United States, and J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last July, that is, what Mr. Canale has told you—that there was not a conspiracy."
Just as the jury was about to rubber stamp "the deal," Ray rose to his feet. "Your Honor," he said, "I would like to say something. . . I don't want to change anything that I have said, but I just want to enter one other thing. The only thing that I have to say is that I can't agree with Mr. Clark."
"Ramsey Clark?" Foreman asked.
The judge said, "Mr. who?"
"Mr. J. Edgar Hoover," Ray said. "I agree with all these stipulations, and I am not trying to change anything."
The judge said, "You don't agree with whose theories?"
". . . Mr. Canale's, Mr. Clark's, and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover's about the conspiracy. I don't want to add something that I haven't agreed to in the past," Ray answered, making sure he didn't blow the deal.
Foreman tried to explain. "I think that what he said is that he doesn't agree that Ramsey Clark is right, or that J. Edgar Hoover is right. I didn't argue that as evidence in this case, I simply stated that, underwriting the statement of General Canale [sic] that they had made the same statement. You are not required to agree with it all."
The judge wanted nothing to sidetrack the smooth proceedings. "You still . . . your answers to these questions that I asked you would still be the same? Is that correct?"
"Yes, sir," Ray answered.
And so the proceedings continued with Canale's presentation of a report of what would have been the evidence had this been a real trial.
After hearing from eyewitnesses that Dr. King had been killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Canale called experts from the Memphis Police Department and the FBI to testify on how they had accumulated physical evidence that linked Ray to the scene of the crime.
In the boarding house room that Ray (a/k/a Eric Starvo Galt) had rented, the FBI and police found a green bedspread, a pair of pliers and a hammer, some shaving articles, binoculars, beer cans, a newspaper, a T-shirt, shorts, a transistor radio, and two leather straps for binoculars. The testimony established that the white Mustang was found in Atlanta, Georgia. It had a sticker on it that indicated it had crossed the border into Mexico. The pliers had been obtained in Los Angeles, California, as had the T-shirt and shorts. In the bathroom from where the shot was supposed to have been fired, the investigators found scuff marks in the bottom of the tub. They found the window of the bathroom opened and the screen forced off.
"This [window] sill was ordered removed, was cut away and was subsequently sent to the FBI for comparison," Canale said, "and the proof would show through expert testimony that the markings on this sill were consistent with the machine markings as reflected on the barrel of the 30-06 rifle which has heretofore been introduced to you."
If this were a trial Canale said, eyewitnesses would be called to testify that Ray had purchased the rifle in Birmingham, Alabama, that he'd stayed at a motel in that city and had checked out on the nineteenth of December and Operation Mind Control 209 had returned to Los Angeles. Also Dr. Russel C. Hadley of Hollywood, California, would be called by the state to testify that "in his capacity as a plastic surgeon, he did perform an operation on the nose of the defendant under the name of Eric Galt on March 5, 1968."
Canale placed in evidence a photo he said was of James Earl Ray, a photo of a graduating class from the International School of Bartending.
Other evidence Canale said would have been presented in a trial was the expert testimony of FBI fingerprint analyst George Bornebreke. The fingerprint expert would testify that he found "a print of sufficient clarity on the rifle . . . another print of sufficient clarity for identification on the scope mounted on the rifle .. . a print on one of the Schlitz beer cans .. . a print on the binoculars .. . a print on the front page of the April 4th issue of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. . ." and "prints of sufficient clarity" on maps of Atlanta, Birmingham, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, all of which, it could be proved, were the fingerprints of James Earl Ray.
The entire presentation of the case took just under three hours. There was a recess for lunch, after which Ray was ordered jailed for ninety-nine years.
As soon as Ray began to serve his sentence he renewed his protestations of innocence and began working for a new trial. He fired attorneys Percy Foreman and Arthur Hanes, alleging that he had not had a fair trial. He said that he'd been "set up to take the rap" for a crime he didn't commit. At Ray's hearing on a new trial, he stated, under oath, "I Personally did not shoot Dr. King, but I may have been partly responsible without knowing it."
If Ray's psychological profile made him a likely victim for anyone who might need a fall guy in a murder, he was equally well suited to be a victim of mind control. The crimes for which he had previously been tried and convicted were all robberies in which no one was harmed. They were all remarkable for one thing—the chase that followed.
Each time Ray committed a crime he left a trail of evidence. Each time he left the scene in either a footrace or a hair-raising car chase, with outraged citizens or police or both in hot pursuit. In each crime, Ray behaved like a little boy who'd just stolen money from his father's pockets and was then daring him to catch and punish him. He was from a deprived family, the eldest of eight children. Many individuals who were once emotionally deprived children learn to seek negative attention since positive attention was unavailable to them in their formative years. James Earl Ray fit that pattern. In the opinion of a psychologist he may have committed his daring daylight robberies not out of a need for money, but out of a subconscious desire to receive love.
The only evidence which cast light on Ray's possible motive for the assassination was an eyewitness report that he had spoken passionately of his hatred of blacks in a Los Angeles bar.
A few years' after Ray's sentencing, other evidence came to light which suggested that the FBI had a stronger motivation to kill Martin Luther King than Ray had. On November 19, 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made public the fact that the FBI had sent a compromising tape recording with an anonymous letter to Dr. King in late 1964 in a crude attempt to blackmail him into silence. Dr. King had thought the tape and letter were an effort to drive him to suicide.
King received the package thirty-four days before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The tape was allegedly of a sexual encounter of Dr. King and a young woman. It was accompanied by an unsigned note that read, "King there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just thirty-four days in which to do it. (This exact number has been selected for a specific reason.) It has definite practical significance. You are done. There is but one way out for you."
A month after Dr. King received his copy of the tape, a duplicate was sent to his wife. Mrs. King said publicly that she and her husband had listened to the tape together and had concluded that it had nothing on it that would discredit King.
The Senate subcommittee said that at about the same time Mrs. King had received her copy of the tape, a copy was submitted to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Accompanying that tape was a memorandum written by the FBI Chief of Counter-intelligence William Sullivan. The memo suggested that the FBI discredit King by "knocking him off his pedestal."
The Senate committee disclosed further that the FBI had kept tabs on Dr. King for six years prior to his death. It had instituted sixteen different wiretap operations and had planted eight room bugs in its attempts to catch him in some compromising situation which could be used for blackmail or public discreditation. The shocked Senate select committee members discovered that the tapes and bugs had produced "thousands of hours of tapes."
In addition, it was discovered that Hoover had ordered some of his men to rewrite reports that had originally indicated King was not a threat to the country. Those officials who were ordered to change their reports readily did so, the committee said, because they feared for their jobs.
After the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made these facts known, Mrs. Coretta King said what she had feared to say before. She said she believed that her husband had been killed by a government conspiracy.
"The way he was documented and followed around by Hoover and the CIA, when he was abroad, it [his assassination] would have to have been attached to the forces of our government that felt he was a threat to the system as it existed," said Mrs. King.
A few days after Mrs. King issued that statement, Maryland private investigator Harold Weisberg used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain previously classified FBI reports. These reports revealed that directly contrary to claims made by Canale at Ray's "trial," the FBI had been unable to find any physical evidence that a rifle had been fired from the window in Ray's rooming house, either on the weapon or in the room from which the assassin had allegedly fired. This was a crucial discovery, in that it was the rifle alone which linked Ray to the killing.
If the rifle was not fired from the second-story room, then, no matter how Ray's fingerprints got on the weapon, reasonable doubt existed that Ray was the assassin. No ballistics evidence links the rifle to the bullets in King's body, The FBI's evidence, which was kept secret, had all the while pointed to the conclusion that the rifle could have been planted in front of the rooming house to implicate Ray while the real assassin had fired from a location outside the rooming house.
A few months after Weisberg's find, Newsday published a copyrighted story reporting that a top law-enforcement official in Memphis had removed one particular black detective who had been assigned to protect Dr. King just hours before he was assassinated. The Newsday article suggested that Detective Ed Redditt had been pulled from his post because he had developed a contingency plan to apprehend any assassin who might make an attempt on King's life. Redditt's plan was to seal off a four-block area in the event a shot was fired.
Earlier the same week, Newsday had revealed that the Memphis Police Department had assigned "provocateurs" to protect King. The paper charged that men who had previously participated in anti-King riots were "protecting" the civil rights leader at the moment he was shot.
The activities of James Earl Ray during the year preceding the assassination could be interpreted to suggest the possibility that Ray was a patsy in the mold of Oswald. Ray had been to Mexico, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, places which had figured prominently in the activities of Oswald and the others who were indicted by Jim Garrison.
Facts which were not presented at Ray's quick "trial" included the following: Ray had escaped from prison, one year before the King assassination. Evidence indicated that he had been helped by someone in his escape. During the year he was "on the lam," he received an estimated $12,000 from a source he identified only as "Raoul." He had no difficulty in obtaining a car and several complete sets of identification. Each set belonged to a living individual, something an intelligence agent would prefer if he were to set up a false identity. Ray had no difficulty traveling all over the United States, Canada, and Mexico with his fake papers.
The contradictory history of Ray's activities in Los Angeles led private investigators to consider, as they had in the Oswald case, that there may have been two James Earl Rays. One, the James Earl Ray who had been in prison, was a painfully shy fellow who seldom opened his mouth and hardly ever raised his voice. Fellow inmates found they had a hard time describing him, since he maintained such a low profile. He had been raised dirt-poor, had never graduated from a school of any kind, and there is no record of his ever having expressed a political idea about anyone. In Los Angeles, the "other" James Earl Ray was described as an outgoing fellow. He enrolled in and graduated from bartending school; he became involved in an altercation with a girl in a bar who objected to his making slurs about the black race; he was very conscientious about his appearance and was an impeccable dresser, who even wore expensive alligator shoes; and he was a right-wing politician who conspicuously campaigned for George Wallace.
One other bit of evidence gives unity to the contradictions—Ray had been hypnotized while in Los Angeles.
It was not mentioned in Ray's "trial," but at the time of his arrest in London, he had in his possession three books on hypnotism: Self-Hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living by Leslie M. LeCron, How to Cash In on Your Hidden Memory Power by William D. Hersey, and Psychocybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Ray had told William Bradford Huie, "I took a course in hypnosis while in L.A. I had read a lot about it in prison on how it was used in dentistry and medicine."
On November 27, 1967, Ray appeared in the office of Dr. Mark Freeman, a psychologist who practiced in Beverly Hills. Dr. Freeman remembered that Ray, who'd given his real name, asked to be hypnotized because he wanted to sleep better and remember things better.
"This fellow really wanted to improve his mind," Dr. Freeman said. "He had an awe of learning. He had a bent for reading. He didn't fight hypnosis. He learned something."
Dr. Freeman told George McMillan, author of The Making of an Assassin, "You've got to keep in mind that I get a lot of angry people around here. A lot of people who come to me want to teach me how to do it. I get a lot of rough stuff around here. I mean psychotic, that stuff. But I couldn't pick up on any of that with Ray. He made a favorable impression on me. He was a good pupil. I'd show him how to go under, and pretty soon he'd be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him lots of positive feelings of confidence."
It may have been that Freeman found Ray so suggestible because he had been hypnotized before. His contact with freeman and other hypnotists (he told Huie he'd been to as many as eight) may have been prompted by an unconscious urge to undo what had already been done to him—a hypnotically induced split personality, one which was programmed to kill upon command, or merely one which was programmed to run away, following his normal pattern, but this time on command. It's easy to program someone to do under posthypnotic cue what he normally does. And it's a lot easier to program a patsy than it is to program a hit man.
The Los Angeles police immediately took Sirhan into custody. At first they appeared to be taking every precaution so that they wouldn't make the same mistakes the Dallas police had. They taped every interrogation session with the suspect and kept him under surveillance through a closed-circuit TV camera in his cell. They took every measure to protect the life of this man, the second "lone nut" to gun down a Kennedy.
Trying to avoid anything which would be an infringement on the rights of the alleged assassin, the police carefully informed Sirhan of his legal rights before trying to interrogate him.
Through the first hours of questioning, Sirhan chose to remain silent. For some time, no one knew who the curly haired, swarthy man in custody was.
It wasn't until the police found a truck in the parking lot of the hotel, and traced it to Sirhan Beshara Sirhan, that they were certain of his identity. Police immediately went to his house and searched his bedroom. On the floor next to Sirhan's bed was a large spiral notebook. On the desk was another notebook. There was a third small notebook, a good deal of occult literature, a brochure advertising a 216 Walter Bowart book on mental projection, and a large brown envelope from the Internal Revenue Service on which someone had written, "RFK must be disposed of like his brother was." At the bottom of the envelope was scrawled "Reactionary."
In one of the notebooks there was a page which was used later in the trial to prove premeditation: "May 18 9:45 A.M.—68. My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession . . RFK must die—RFK must be killed Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated . . . Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of of of of of this or that please pay to the order of . . ." Also drawn on the page were spirals, diamonds, and doodies.
While Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty ignorantly told the press Sirhan was "a member of numerous Communist organizations, including the Rosicrucians," Sirhan's neighbors told a different story. One said he was "very religious." Another reported that he was "just a normal kid. He took cars and bikes apart and put them back together again." Neighborhood kids said he was "nice." When asked if Sirhan was the angry type, a black girl in his neighborhood said, "He didn't show it." Arthur Bean, another neighbor said, "Someone talked that kid into gunning down Kennedy."
When Irwin Garfinkel, a deputy attorney in the public defender's office, asked Sirhan about the shooting, he said, "I don't remember much about the shooting, sir. Did I do it? Well, yes, I am told I did it. I remember being at the Ambassador. I was drinking tom collinses. I got dizzy. I went back to my car so I could go home. But I was too drunk to drive. I thought I'd better find some coffee. The next thing I remember I was being choked and a guy was twisting my knee."
George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, was in the hotel pantry when Kennedy was shot. He was one of the men who wrestled Sirhan down. According to Newsweek, Plimpton "offered some eloquent testimony that appeared to some to support the defense's contention that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan had, in fact, been in a 'trance' during the shooting. 'He was enormously composed', recalled Plimpton. 'Right in the midst of this hurricane of sound and feeling. he seemed to be almost the eye of the hurricane. He seemed purged.'"
The chief counsel for the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, A. L. Wirin, went to Sirhan's defense within hours of his arrest. On his second meeting with the accused, Wirin brought the local papers with him. Sirhan read the headline "KENNEDY'S DEAD," then he dropped his head in grief. After fighting to control his emotions, he looked at Wirin through tearfilled eyes and said, "Mr. Wirin, I'm a failure. I believe in love and instead of showing love. . . ." Then, Wirin recalled, "he muttered something about having betrayed his own primary beliefs."
That night, Sirhan complained of being sick. He became very dizzy and had severe stomach cramps, just as had Castillo and Candy Jones. For several weeks Sirhan was given a half grain of phenobarbital at night to help him sleep.
The Los Angeles police went through the motions of looking into the possibility that a conspiracy was behind the RFK assassination. They looked for the girl in the polka-dot dress who witnesses said had been standing next to Sirhan, smiling and talking to him just before he began shooting in the pantry. Sirhan also said he'd been talking to the girl after he'd drunk several torn Collinses. The girl in the polka-dot dress was not found, and conflicting statements cast doubt on whether there had ever been such a girl. Forty-five "top men" from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) were assigned the job of tracking down all leads to a conspiracy, but incredibly, they came up empty-handed.
A bag of women's clothing, which included a polka-dot dress and new undergarments, was found by the LAPD in an alley, but police could not find out who'd bought them or who'd worn them. According to Sirhan's biographer Robert Blair Kaiser, ". . . The police and FBI hardly did all they could [to find the owner of the polka-dot dress]. They used faulty logic and browbeat witnesses to eliminate the girl in the polka-dot dress."1
To penetrate Sirhan's amnesia, the defense decided to call in an expert hypnotist, Dr. Bernard L. Diamond of the University of California. Diamond was the associate dean UCLA's School of Criminology and a professor of both law and psychiatry. No one knew more about law, psychiatry, and hypnosis than Diamond.
In a pre-hypnosis interview, Diamond asked Sirhan to tell him about his notebooks, and Sirhan said he couldn't recall writing them.
Diamond asked if he thought that what he had done helped things, and Sirhan said, "I'm not proud of what I did."
"What do you mean, you're not proud of it?" Diamond asked him. "You believe in your cause, don't you?" (Sirhan had been contacted by Arab sympathizers and others who insisted that the reason he'd killed Kennedy was out of sympathy for the PLO.)
"I have no exact knowledge, sir, that this happened yet. I'm all, it's all in my mind, but goddamn it, when my body played with it .. . I couldn't understand it. I still don't believe it. My body outsmarted my brain, I guess."
"What did your body do?" Diamond asked.
"Pulled that trigger," Sirhan said.
"Does your body remember it, even if your mind doesn't?"
"I don't give a damn, sir, in a way. Now I don't even care," Sirhan said.
Diamond asked Sirhan if he'd thought about suicide. "Hell, no," Sirhan said, "I couldn't do that."
Then Diamond expressed a thought which contained a significant "Freudian slip." "Why didn't you turn the gas on yourself, ah, why didn't you turn the gun on yourself after you killed Kennedy?"
Sirhan waved his hand in front of his face. "It was all mixed up. Like a dream."
Diamond hypnotized Sirhan on six of eight visits. At one point, reliving the killing, Sirhan grabbed at his belt on the left side. Until then police had no idea where he'd carried the weapon. Under hypnosis Sirhan also created writings similar to those in his notebooks.
In one session Diamond had Sirhan climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. After he'd been brought out of trance, Sirhan explained the reason for his climb. He said he was only getting exercise. Then Diamond played the tape to prove to Sirhan that he, Diamond, had given the instructions to Sirhan to climb the cage. But Sirhan denied that he'd done it because he'd been hypnotized.
At the trial Dr. Diamond, acting as the director of Sirhan's defense, testified that Sirhan was a paranoid schizophrenic. His testimony was supported by several other doctors who had examined the psychiatric "evidence" obtained from tests, interviews, and hypno-interviews conducted by Diamond.
Dr. Diamond did not consider that Sirhan had been other than self-programmed. Having worked for the Army Medical Corps in World War II, he did not realize that the U.S. cryptocracy could develop mind control and use it to control the political destiny of the nation.
Sirhan was given yet another battery of tests by Dr. Eric Marcus, a court-appointed psychiatrist for the defense. Among the tests was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which contains more than 500 questions requiring true-false answers. Psychologists interpret the answers to the MMPI according to a set of statistical norms. Two of Sirhan's non-responses were significant, since usually non-responses are considered to be more important than the "yes-no" responses. The questions Sirhan did not respond to were: "291. At one or more times in my life, I felt that someone was making me do things by hypnotizing me . . ." and "293. Someone has been trying to influence my mind."
By the second visit, Dr. Marcus had had time enough to familiarize himself thoroughly with Sirhan's notebooks. On one page of the notebooks Sirhan had written: "I advocate the overthrow of the current President of the fucken United States of America. I have no absolute plans yet, but soon will compose some. I am poor—this country's propaganda says that she is the best country in the world—I have not experienced this yet—the U.S.—says that life in Russia is bad .. . I believe that the U.S. is ready to start declining, not that it hasn't—it began in November 23, '63, but it should decline at a faster rate so that the real Utopia will not be too far from being realized during the early seventies in this country."
In one of the notebooks the name "Peggy Osterkamp" was written over and over. "I love you, Peggy," in one place and in another, "Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Sirhan."
When Dr. Marcus asked Sirhan who Peggy Osterkamp was, he said that she was just a girl he'd met a few times at the ranch where he'd worked as an exerciser of horses. Dr. Marcus asked Sirhan if he'd ever dated her, and Sirhan told Marcus the story he'd told the public defender about the night of the assassination.
That night, Sirhan said, he had gone to a shooting range and practiced with his pistol until the range closed. Then he went with a friend, a foreign student named Mistri, to get a hamburger at Bob's Big Boy Restaurant. While eating, they talked about horses. For some reason Sirhan showed his friend a pocketful of bullets. He then was given a current newspaper and in it he read a news item about a Zionist rally in Hollywood. He became very angry over this and made up his mind to go to the rally. When he could not find that rally, he wandered into the campaign headquarters of Senator Kuchel and there heard that there would be a party at the Ambassador Hotel nearby.
When he got to the hotel he was fascinated by the television lights. He went to the bar and ordered two tom collinses. He got dizzy and said to himself that he'd better go home. He was reluctant to drive in his drunken condition, and the next thing he remembered was being choked in the Ambassador pantry.
Dr. Marcus didn't buy Sirhan's amnesia. He thought that it was only a convenient cover-up, and that Sirhan was a paranoid. In his testimony at Sirhan's trial, Dr. Marcus selected another page from Sirhan's notebook to illustrate his psychological evaluation. On June 2, 1967, Sirhan had written:
A Declaration of War Against American Humanity . . . when in the course of human events it has become necessary for me to equalize and seek revenge for all the inhuman treatment committed against me by the American people. The manifestation of this Declaration will be executed by its supporter(s) as soon as he is able to command a sum of money (2,000) and to acquire some firearms—the specification of which have not been established yet.
The victims of the party in favor of this declaration will be or are now—the President, vice, etc.—down the ladder. The time will be chosen by the author at the convenience of the accused. The method of assault is immaterial—however, the type of weapon used should influence it somehow. The author believes that many in fact multitudes of people are in harmony with his thoughts and feelings.
The conflict and violence in the world subsequent to the enforcement of this decree shall not be considered likely by the author of this memoranda, rather he hopes that they be the initiatory military steps to WW III—the author expresses his wishes very bluntly that he wants to be recorded by history as the man who triggered off the last war. . .
In mid-August Sirhan's notebooks were analyzed by the FBI crime lab in Washington. The pages were subjected to photo and chemical analysis to establish when each had been written and in what order. The FBI experts concluded that Sirhan had penned the notes in a haphazard fashion, skipping around in the books. The two pages dated June 2, 1967, and May 18, 1968, the lab said, had actually been written on those dates.
An overview of the notes shows that Sirhan had been concerned with three things that appeared over and over in the writing: money, the girl Peggy Osterkamp, and a new Mustang, in that order of importance—as determined by the number of times each was mentioned.
Several times he had written, "please pay to the order of. . . ," but when asked about this he could not remember what it meant. He had written, "Today I must resolve to come home in a new Mustang. Today I must resolve to come home in a new Mustang. Mustang. Mustang."
The FBI and the LAPD located Peggy Osterkamp. She was a tall, willowy blonde, the attractive daughter of an affluent dairyman. A horse lover, she had once worked at the ranch where Sirhan worked. She said she knew him only slightly and had been introduced to him at the Pomona Fair in 1966. She said she had never dated him.
On one page of the notebooks Sirhan had written, "Tom, my wannest salutations. I do not know what has prompted you to write to me. . ." And on another page he'd written, "Hello Tom perhaps you could use the enclosed $Sol perhaps you could use the enclosed $." On yet another page Sirhan had written: "11 o'clock Sirhan 11 o'clock Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan 11 o'clock Sirhan Livermore Sirhan Sirhan Pleasanton . . . Hello Tom racetrack perhaps you could use the enclosed $."
The FBI guessed that Sirhan had been writing about Walter Thomas Rathke, his first employer at the racetrack. The FBI found him working as a groom at the Pleasanton Race Stables, just east of Oakland.
Rathke told investigators that he had known Sirhan, and that they'd compared notes on the occult. He said he'd written Sirhan twice and had asked him if he needed any money. Later it was discovered that Rathke had far more influence over Sirhan than he cared to admit, but the LAPD and FBI dropped him as uninteresting.
In addition to examining the bizarre notebooks, investigators also made note of Sirhan's unusual behavior after the assassination. Sirhan, like Candy Jones, had a "thing" about mirrors. In his cell he'd stare into a little mirror for hours on end. He also practiced concentrating on candle flames, trying to turn them from red to blue to green. And he was apprehensive about drugs.
When asked by his biographer Robert Blair Kaiser if he thought he'd get the death penalty, Sirhan shrugged and said, "A death penalty would only be vengeance. What would it gain?" After another pause he added, "I know I've killed a man. At least, I'm told of it. I have nothing in my conscience about it, but . . . I'm told I killed a man, so I deserve some punishment, but maybe I could serve humanity by working ten years in a hospital, to pay my debt you might say." Later Sirhan said flatly, "I don't regard myself as a criminal."
Kaiser reported, "Sirhan talked about Gandhi, and the black revolution." He identified with both. "The Negroes," he said, "can see everything, but they can't eat it. Their only solution is to dig in and eat it." Immediately Sirhan added: "I wanted a new car. I always wanted a Mustang. I said, 'All I need is money and how am I gonna get it?' They're not giving Mustangs away."2 Was Sirhan implying that he killed Kennedy for money?
The court ordered that Sirhan be fully tested psychologically to see what his mental state really was. They gave him an electroencephalogram to see if by chance his brain had been damaged by a fall he'd taken from a horse two years earlier. The EEG showed that Sirhan had a normal brain-wave pattern. Then, just to determine if alcohol had any effect on the pattern, the doctor, who'd obtained the recipe for the Ambassador Hotel's torn collins, gave Sirhan the equivalent of four drinks and measured his brain patterns again. Still there was nothing unusual in them.
But even though the EEG showed no unusual brain activity, Sirhan got very drunk and shivered violently for ten minutes. He became irrational, agitated, and restless. He screamed out curses.
When someone told him, "Dr. Marcus is here," Sirhan screamed, "Get that bastard out of here!" The doctor ordered Sirhan taken back to his inner cell, and Sirhan seemed confused. "What the hell is going on here?" he asked, then grabbed his throat violently (as Castillo had), and appeared to be choking. The doctor noted that he was in a state of delirium.
Robert Kaiser again asked Sirhan about his notebooks and Sirhan explained everything he could about them. He said that they were writings about the occult, that he had been studying the objective mind in relation to the universal mind. "If you give your subjective mind an intense command by your objective mind, your subjective mind will gather the information to carry out the commands of the objective mind. . ."
Sirhan said that he'd been sitting in front of a mirror after he'd seen a replay of Robert Kennedy on television reporting in 1948 on the Arab-Israeli war in Palestine. "I concentrated on RFK in the mirror," he said. "I had to stop him. Finally, his face was in that mirror instead of my own. Then I went to my notebook and started writing. It was part of the auto-suggestion necessary to get my subjective mind to get my objective mind moving. I read in the Rosicrucian magazine how if you wanted to do anything, you should write it down. It automatically works toward the realization of what you want.
"With that power," Sirhan said with intensity, "I could have been a millionaire! A millionaire! Ohh shit!"
"Why did I not go to the races that day?" Sirhan asked Kaiser. "Why did I not like the horses? Why did I go to that range? Why did I save those Mini-Mags [the high powered bullets used on Kennedy]? Why did I not expend those bullets? Why did I go to Bob's? Why did Mistri give me that newspaper? Why did I drink that night? It was," he said, "like some inner force."
"But you wrote in your notebook 'RFK must die,'" Kaiser said.
"After the bit with the mirror," Sirhan told him, "I forgot it all. The idea of killing Kennedy never entered my mind, sir."3
During Sirhan's trial for murder, the judge refused to authorize the use of lie detectors or truth serum. Sirhan, like Ray, was quickly "put away" for life.
There were those, however, who refused to let the matter rest. In 1973, while Sirhan sat in prison, Dr. Edward Simpson, the San Quentin prison psychiatrist, submitted an affidavit to the California courts requesting that Sirhan be granted a new trial and that the Robert Kennedy case be reopened.
Dr. Simpson testified that the "expert" psychiatric psychological testimony at Sirhan's trial was full of numerous factual errors and misleading to the jury. "Most of the doctors testifying," Simpson said, "saw their role as proving why Sirhan killed Kennedy, which required a focus on pathology (mental illness) that I found does not exist, They failed to consider the real facts in a more objective light and failed to consider the possibility, clearly suggested by the ballistic testimony and Sirhan's own testimony under close scrutiny, that perhaps Sirhan did not kill Robert F. Kennedy."
"Sirhan's trial," Dr. Simpson wrote, "was not handled properly by the mental health professionals. In retrospect, a close study of the trial testimony and my own extensive study of Sirhan leads to one irrevocable and obvious conclusion: Sirhan's trial was, and will be remembered, as the psychiatric blunder of the century."
Dr. Simpson knew whereof he spoke. For six years he had worked at San Quentin Prison and had made a study of men on Death Row. For two years he'd been in charge of the prison's psychological testing program. In 1969 he interviewed and tested Sirhan extensively during twenty weekly visits. After these visits were terminated, Sirhan requested that his family contact Simpson for the purpose of reviewing the psychiatric testimony that had been given at his trial.
After examining Sirhan, and reviewing the "expert" psychiatric testimony, Dr. Simpson discussed his findings with the prison's chief psychiatrist, Dr. David G. Schmidt. Together they concluded that their findings did not confirm "but, in fact, were strictly in conflict" with the findings reported at Sirhan's trial.
"Nowhere in Sirhan's test response," Dr. Simpson said in the affidavit, "was I able to find evidence that he is a 'paranoid schizophrenic' or 'psychotic' as testified by the doctors at the trial . . . The fact is, paranoid schizophrenics are almost impossible to hypnotize. They are too suspicious and do not trust anybody, including friends and relatives, not to speak of a hypnotist from, for him, the most hated race. Psychotics in general are among the poorest subjects for hypnosis. They cannot concentrate, they do not follow instructions and basically do not trust. Sirhan, however, was an unusually good hypnotic subject. Sirhan asked me to hypnotize him, which I did not do, in order not to contaminate my test findings with fantasies. He himself had manufactured a hypno-disk, and was practicing self hypnosis in his cell, an activity requiring considerable selfcontrol which no psychotic has. The fact that Sirhan was easy to hypnotize, as testified by Dr. Diamond, proves he was not a paranoid schizophrenic.
"Dr. Diamond," Simpson continued, "used hypnosis in six sessions out of eight with Sirhan. What was the purpose of it? To plant ideas in Sirhan's mind, ideas that were not there before? To make him accept the idea that he killed Robert F. Kennedy?
"When Dr. Diamond was unable to get Sirhan to admit that he wrote the notebooks, he testified: '. . . so I undertook some experiments on possible hypnotic suggestion.' This admission strongly suggests the possibility of hypnosis being used for implanting hypothetical ideas in Sirhan's mind, rather than uncovering facts .. . A lie detector, not hypnosis, should have been used in finding out whether Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.
'Why was a lie detector not used? It should have been, as it is much more reliable than hypnosis, which often provideo contaminated results . . . Dr. Diamond's testimony is wrong, as he states: 'I have very little or no faith in the accuracy [of a lie detector].' The truth is, the polygraph exceeds in accuracy certain techniques, such as hypnosis, that tend to fuse and contaminate experiences from past and present and also can be influenced significantly by the operator [hypnotist]; it makes a significant difference who the hypnotist is. . ."
In 1975 when the California investigation into the RFK killing was briefly reopened, the public learned that crucial physical evidence, such as ceiling tiles from the hotel pantry and bullet fragments, had been destroyed or lost by the LAPD. And, as in the Oswald case, critical testimony had been ignored. [The above testimony, of Dr. Simpson, pointed to the possibility that Sirhan was a hypno programmed assassin.]
Also in 1975, seven years after the crime, former high ranking U.S. intelligence officer and one of the developers of the PSE Charles McQuiston analyzed recordings of Sirhan's interview with psychiatrists in San Quentin.
Sirhan said, "To me, sir, he [Kennedy] is still alive . ., I still don't believe what has happened .. . I don't believe that he is dead. I have no realization still that I killed him, that he is in the grave." McQuiston's PSE analysis showed that on this statement Sirhan exhibited very little stress.
"After analyzing the tapes," McQuiston said, "I'm convinced that Sirhan wasn't aware of what he was doing. He was in a hypnotic trance when he pulled the trigger and killed Senator Kennedy . . . Everything in the PSE chart tells me that someone else was involved in the assassination—and that Sirhan was programmed through hypnosis to kill RFK. What we have here is a real live 'Manchurian Candidate.' "4
After examining Sirhan's PSE charts, Dr. John W. Heisse, Jr., president of the International Society of Stress Analysis, agreed with McQuiston. Dr. Heisse, who had studied hundreds of people under hypnosis using the PSE, said, "Sirhan kept repeating certain phrases. This clearly revealed he had been programmed to put himself into a trance. This is something he couldn't have learned by himself. Someone had to show him and teach him how.
"I believe Sirhan was brainwashed under hypnosis by the constant repetition of words like 'you are nobody, you're nothing, the American dream is gone' until he actually believed them. At that stage someone implanted an idea, kill RFK, and under hypnosis the brainwashed Sirhan accepted it."
Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who wrote the introduction to The Control of Candy Jones, has been billed as one of the country's leading medical experts on hypnosis. Spiegel said of Sirhan's case: "It's very possible to distort and change somebody's mind through a number of hypnotic sessions. It can be described as brainwashing because the mind is cleared of its old emotions and values which are replaced by implanting other suggestions . . . This technique was probably used with Sirhan. From my own research, I think Sirhan was subjected to hypnotic treatment."
Even in the early days of the investigation, there were those who found it easy to believe the hypno-programming theory. Among them was writer Truman Capote, who had for a long while been a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill. After writing his best seller In Cold Blood, Capote was regarded as something of an expert on murder. On the NBC "Tonight" show Capote suggested that Sirhan and his accomplices had been intensively trained and brainwashed trigger men. Their purpose, Capote proposed, was to drive the United States to its knees by assassinating all its leaders.
According to Robert Blair Kaiser, "With a little more diligence than they exercised, and a great deal more intelligence than they had, the police might have established links between Sirhan and the underworld, between Sirhan and the right wing, between Sirhan and the left wing, between Sirhan and the Al Fatah. . ."5
But neither the police nor the FBI showed any interest in Sirhan's "connections"—perhaps because there were so many. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan was a contradiction. He could be linked to many different groups, all of which could easily have had a political motive to kill Robert Kennedy. So the LAPD did the same thing the Warren Commission did; it took what evidence it needed to prove its case for a "lone nut" and ignored the rest.
Defense director Diamond, subsequently explaining his tactics in Sirhan's trial, said he was surprised when he first tried to hypnotize Sirhan. "Most people may take an hour or more to go under hypnosis the first time," Diamond said. "A schizophrenic usually takes much longer, if he goes under at all. But it took less than ten minutes for Sirhan to go into a deep authentic sleep."
Sirhan, Dr. Diamond concluded, had obviously had experience with hypnosis before. He found that Sirhan was reluctant to speak under hypnosis but that he could easily write without being post hypnotically blocked. "Writing under hypnosis is called automatic writing," Diamond said, "and the term aptly describes the way Sirhan would write like a robot and keep on repeating a word or phrase until I stopped him."
Taking a sheet off a legal pad lying nearby, Diamond asked Sirhan to write his answers to the questions put to him in the hypnotic trance. He showed Sirhan a sample of his diary page.
"Is this crazy writing?" Diamond asked.
"YES YES YES," Sirhan wrote.
"Are you crazy?" Diamond asked.
"NO NO," Sirhan wrote.
"Well, why are you writing crazy?" Diamond asked.
"PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE," Sirhan responded.
"Practice for what?" Diamond asked.
"MIND CONTROL MIND CONTROL MIND CONTROL" is what Sirhan wrote."6
Perhaps now, looking back, we can understand more about Sirhan from David. David was a good Air Force candidate for mind-control: He was an obedient soldier, penitent, and patient. His amnesia, you'll recall, was so total, so complete, that it took years of psychotherapy to restore his memory. This is what he had to say on the subject of forgetting and remembering:
"The air force used hypnosis for opening up my subconscious mind. It's the subconscious mind that remembers everything. That was the way it was explained to me. The subconscious mind must trust the person who is conditioning it. So if a person gets another's subconscious mind to trust them, then that subconscious mind will tell them everything that it has seen or heard from the day it was born even back to when it was in its mother's womb.
"So under a voice or word command the information can be brought out once the subconscious has been conditioned to respond to the right command. It might respond to one voice or a group of voices. I'd be given a certain cue and I would remember what I was supposed to remember. I was tested constantly. And then, when the meeting was over, I would be unable to remember, and automatically my subconscious would close.
"The cue command would be at the beginning of a meeting. I don't think you need a dual command. I think you need only a command to start, then once something is finished, the process stops automatically. During the training period I'd do whatever I wanted for a couple of days, then go back and the next thing I knew I was remembering the computer numbers again. A word would be said and I'd just begin remembering. They'd give a command, and if your subconscious has really trusted the person conditioning you, that triggers the memory. I don't know who the person I trusted was, because I was usually only talking to the tape recorder. I was actually thinking I was talking to someone that was very close. That would be the person who'd listen to the tape, I guess.
"Really I was talking to myself, but behind this was that person—no name, no face, just that friendly, trustworthy person who had conditioned me. And at the same time it was myself. Who would I trust more than myself?
"They must have told me that after I got out of the service I'd be unable to remember anything of a sensitive nature. I suppose they told me in a way that made it acceptable. But I don't think I ever thought I would have the problems which resulted from loss of my memory . . . When you can't remember things in sequence about your life, you have no idea what that does to you. It interferes with your whole identity."
Considering the connections between Cuba or Cubans and Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray's Latin accomplice 'Raoul,' and Luis Castillo's Cuban intelligence training one cannot help but wonder whether a variation on a scenario written in 1943 by hypnotist George Estabrooks wasn't being played out in the assassinations.
In his book Hypnotism, Estabrooks outlined a plan in which suddenly the Cubans had become belligerent and were "building a great naval base at Havana, an obvious menace to our overseas trade." He suggested that a Cuban oil executive be hypno-programmed to spy on the Cuban government. "Neither he nor the group in question (his oil company) need know anything of the arrangements. The instructions to his unconscious in hypnotism are very definite. Find out everything possible about the naval base. He is shown maps of this before he goes and coached as to just what is important. Nor is he ever allowed to submit written reports. Everything must be handed on by word of mouth to one of the very few individuals who are able to hypnotize him . . . Under these circumstances we may count on this man doing everything in his power to collect the information in question."
Estabrooks explained: "There are certain safeguards if we use hypnotism. First, there is no danger of the agent selling out, but this would probably not be of great importance in this particular case. More important would be the conviction of innocence which the man himself had, and this is a great aid in many situations. He would never 'act guilty' and if ever accused of seeking information would be quite honestly indignant. This conviction of innocence on the part of a criminal is perhaps his greatest safeguard under questioning by authorities. Finally, it would be impossible to 'third degree' him and so pick up the links of a chain. This is very important, for the most hardened culprit is always liable to 'talk' if the questioners are but ruthless enough."
Then Estabrooks expanded his point: "Far more useful than the foregoing purpose, however, would be that for a counterespionage service, built along the same lines. This would require both care and time to perfect, but once working it might prove extremely effective. Here the best approach would probably be through those of enemy alien stock within our own gates. Once again let us choose the aggressive Cubans as examples. In the event of war, but preferably well before the outbreak of war, we would start our organization. We could easily secure (say) one hundred or one thousand excellent subjects of Cuban stock who spoke their language fluently, and then work on these subjects.
"In hypnotism we would build up their loyalty to this country; but out of hypnotism, in the 'waking' or normal state we would do the opposite, striving to convince them that they had a genuine grievance against this country and encouraging them to engage in 'fifth column' activities. Here we would be coming very close to establishing a case of 'dual personality.' There is nothing at all impossible in this. We know that dual, and even multiple, personality can be both caused and cured by hypnotism. Moreover, that condition, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde combination, is a very real one once it is established.
"They would, as we before said, be urged in the waking state to become fifth columnists to the United States, but we would also point out to them in hypnotism that this was really a pose, that their real loyalty lay with this country, offering them protection and reward for their activities. Through them we would hope to be kept informed of the activities of their 'friends,' this information, of course being obtained in the trance state."
As to the possibility of hypno-programming assassins, Estabrooks wrote: "Strange to say, most good subjects will commit murder. In the writer's opinion there can be very little doubt on this score. They commit a legal, but not an ethical murder, so to speak. For example, we hypnotize a subject and tell him to murder you with a gun. We hand him a loaded revolver. In all probability he will refuse. Frankly for very obvious reasons, the writer has never made the experiment. Corpses are not needed in psychological laboratories." That, Estabrooks suggests, best be left to the intelligence agencies.7
next
THE PATRIOTIC ASSASSIN
notes
Chapter 14
1. Willem Oltmans, Atlas, May, 1977.
Chapter 16
1. Robert Blair Kaiser, R. F. K. Must Die, 2d ed. (New York, Dutton, 1970)
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Charles McQuiston, National Enquirer, October 20, 1975. 296 Walter Bowart
5. Kaiser, op. cit.
6. Bernard Diamond, Psychology Today, September, 1969.
7. Estabrooks, Hypnotism.
Earl Warren said, "Mr. Ruby, I think I can say this to you, that if he has been told any such thing, there is no indication of any kind that he believes it."
When it became apparent that Warren did not realize Ruby had intended to confess to being a part of the plot to kill President Kennedy, Ruby exploded. "I am sorry, Chief Justice Warren, I thought I would be very effective in telling you what I have said here. But in all fairness to everyone, maybe all I want to do is beg that if they found out I was telling the truth, maybe they can succeed in what their motives are, but maybe my people won't be tortured and mutilated . . ."
Warren could find no meaning in Ruby's testimony. He merely assured him that neither he nor his family would be tortured or mutilated by anyone. "You may be sure of that," the Chief Justice added.
"No," Ruby answered. "The only way you can do it is if he knows the truth, that I am telling the truth, and why I was down in that basement Sunday morning, and maybe some sense of decency will come out and they can still fulfill their plan, as I stated before, without my people going through torture and mutilation."
Warren assured Ruby that the President would know everything he had said. "But I won't be around, Chief Justice," Ruby said. "I won't be around to tell the President."
Then one of the aides asked the first intelligent question of the day, "Who do you think is going to eliminate you, Jack?"
Ruby replied, "I have been used for a purpose, and there will be a certain tragic occurrence happening if you don't take my testimony and somehow vindicate me so my people don't suffer because of what I have done . . ."
Jack Ruby was subsequently given a polygraph test which proved to be inconclusive due to high levels of stress.
In 1965 syndicated columnist Dorothy Kilgallen interviewed Ruby in bis Dallas cell. She was the only major journalist allowed to interview him. She told a few friends that from what Ruby had told her, she was able to obtain evidence that would "blow the JFK case sky high." Within a few days, Dorothy Kilgallen died of a massive overdose of barbiturates combined with alcohol. Her apartment was found in shambles. The transcripts of her interview with Ruby were missing. Her death was ruled a suicide.
In early 1967 Ruby complained that he was being poisoned. He was diagnosed as having cancer, but a few weeks after complaining of being poisoned, he died not of the cancer, but of a "stroke" similar to the one that had killed David Ferrie.
Another deathbed confession supports what Jack Ruby was trying to tell the Warren Commission. That confession was made by Professor George de Mohrenschildt, a former intelligence agent who was also a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald.
De Mohrenschildt was born in 1911 in the Ukraine. Following the revolution, in 1921 he and his parents fled Russia for Poland. He attended a Polish military academy for a year, and later, in 1938, received a doctorate in international commerce. He emigrated to the United States soon thereafter and, in 1949, became a citizen.
After becoming interested in the exploration and generation of oil, de Mohrenschildt received his master's degree in petroleum geology and petroleum engineering. Sometime thereafter he became acquainted with right-wing oil magnate H. L. Hunt. Although the basis of their relationship is unknown, de Mohrenschildt, in a recent interview with Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans, stated, "I knew Hunt, now the late Mr. Hunt, intimately. For some twenty years I was invited to his parties."
FBI disclosures in 1976 suggested that Lee Harvey Oswald was also acquainted with Hunt. And de Mohrenschildt knew Oswald. Apparently he had introduced himself to Oswald after hearing about him through a Russian speaking group in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Marina Oswald told the Warren Commission: "Lee did not have any close friends, but at least he had—here in America—he had a great deal of respect for de Mohrenschildt .. . he considered him to be smart, to be full of joy of living, a very energetic and very sympathetic person . . ."
It was the conclusion of the Warren Commission, after extensive investigation, that de Mohrenschildt had exhibited no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct. The Warren Report stated: "Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witness contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking de Mohrenschildt to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy."
It was subsequently revealed, however, that de Mohrenschildt had indeed been associated with various intelligence operations over the years. He was connected with French intelligence during World War II and was also linked to the CIA Bay of Pigs operation.
In late March, 1977, de Mohrenschildt's name was brought before the newly formed House Select Committee on Assassinations. Willem Oltmans told the committee that de Mohrenschildt held the key to the Kennedy assassination; that de Mohrenschildt had privately confessed to him that prior to the assassination he was aware of a conspiracy to murder the President in Dallas. According to Oltmans de Mohrenschildt was about to have a book published which would reveal the details of his knowledge of the assassination.
After Oltmans' testimony, a spokesman for the House Committee on Assassinations said that the committee would investigate his claims and would, if warranted, track down de Mohrenschildt for questioning. He was located a week later in Palm Beach, Florida, but he could not be called to testify. George de Mohrenschildt was found dead, the victim of a gunshot wound in the head. Local officials termed his death a suicide.
Following de Mohrenschildt's death, his Dallas attorney) Pat Russell, supported Oltmans' claims to the Commission. He verified the fact that before his death, de Mohrenschildt had insisted that persons other than Lee Harvey Oswald had participated in the slaying of President Kennedy. The attorney revealed that he had in his possession tapes, a book-length manuscript, and a photograph which de Mohrenschildt had turned over to him earlier. He said the tapes consisted of ten reels of interviews with de Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination, which, he claimed, were firsthand accounts of the late professor's recollections of Oswald.
Russell said that although he did not know if the tapes or the book contained any new evidence, the photograph should be of particular interest to assassination investigators. He claimed that although the photo was similar to a well-known picture obtained by the Dallas police which showed Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle and wearing a pistol, what made the photograph interesting was that it was autographed on the back by Oswald and dated May 4, 1963, approximately six months prior to the assassination.
After de Mohrenschildt's death Willem Oltmans released a portion of his interview with the deceased. Oltmans described him as "Oswald's most intimate friend," and, without offering an explanation, said that he had been ultimate with Oswald during "the years when Oswald's brain was being programmed toward the murder of the century."
In the interview dated February 23, 1977, de Mohrenschildt told Oltmans "In June, 1976, I completed a manuscript. That's when disaster struck. You see, in that book I played the devil's advocate. Without directly implicating myself as an accomplice in the JFK assassination I still mentioned a number of names, particularly of FBI and CIA officials who apparently may not be exposed under any circumstances. I was drugged surreptitiously. As a result I was committed to a mental hospital. I was there eight weeks and was given electric shocks and as a consequence I sometimes forget certain details temporarily . . ."
De Mohrenschildt went on to say that as a result of the drugs and shocks, he could take no more. "I tried to commit suicide five times . . . One of these days I will put a revolver to my head . . ."
According to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt left Dallas in the middle of the night on March 3, 1977, telling him, "I don't want anybody to see me." Oltmans reported that at that time de Mohrenschildt was in a state of panic, constantly worried whether "they" would let him leave the country. "He always felt watched and followed," Oltmans said. "I really cannot see how somebody who does not have anything to hide would develop such behavior."1
On the day he died, George de Mohrenschildt was being interviewed by author Edward Jay Epstein for his book The Legend of Lee Harvey Oswald. They broke for lunch at one o'clock and Epstein walked de Mohrenschildt to his car. They were supposed to resume the interview at three P.M., and when de Mohrenschildt didn't return, Epstein called his room and heard a distraught maid tell him that de Mohrenschildt had taken his own life. De Mohrenschildt's daughter, Alexandra, told Epstein that she believes her father took his own life after having had a post-hypnotic suggestion triggered by a voice over the telephone in his room.
The last days of George de Mohrenschildt sound strikingly similar to those of the victims of mind control. Could it have been that when drugs and "electric shock" failed to erase his memory, the final solution was prescribed? Or was he programmed to self-destruct?
Chapter Fifteen
ANOTHER HYPNO-PATSY?
On April 4, 1968, Nobel laureate Dr. Martin Luther
King was murdered on a second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Half of the six thousand-man FBI force was assigned to the task of bringing the killer to justice. The FBI should have had an easy job. There was an abundance of evidence left behind on the second floor of a rooming house a block from the Lorraine Motel. There were fingerprints on the window ledge of a bathroom next to a room which had been rented to an "Eric S. Galt." On the sidewalk in front of the house was a weapon, a high powered rifle with telescopic sight. Neighbors said they had seen a white Mustang roar away moments after the shooting.
Nevertheless, the killer got away.
A ham radio operator broadcasting from a fixed station posed as a CB operator in a mobile unit. He broadcast a convincing account of a high-speed chase between a white Mustang and a blue Pontiac. He reported that the two cars Were shooting at each other. While police concentrated their search in the area described by the ham operator, the white Mustang they were seeking sped away from MemPhis in the other direction. The ham operator's actions were explained away by authorities as a hoax. Within a few days local police and federal authorities forgot the incident. While the use of a high-powered ham radio on the eleven meter CB band and the broadcasting of false emergency information are two clear violations of the Federal Communications Code, the identity and fate of that ham "prankster" are not known.
The FBI soon discovered that the fingerprints left at the scene of the crime belonged to the man who had rented the room, Eric S. Gait. Through a computer search they later found that Galt's real name was James Earl Ray.
The day after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, James Earl Ray was captured in London. He was apprehended by British customs inspectors while attempting to leave the country on a passport issued to a Canadian constable.
Ray was quickly extradited to Tennessee for trial. The lengthy search and investigation, billed as "the most complete manhunt in history," was followed by one of the shortest trials in history. On March 10, 1969, less than one year after the assassination, Ray had his day in court, literally. By most standards his was not a trial but a deal. The deal had been arranged by Ray's attorneys, who had urged him to plead guilty so that he would get ninety-nine years instead of the death penalty.
Under Tennessee law, even if a defendant enters a guilty plea, a jury is required to attend the plea and to "ratify" the plea and the sentence. In a courtroom sealed by the tightest possible security, twelve jurors heard the prosecutor, State Attorney General Phil Canale, explain to Ray his rights to a trial by jury. They heard Ray plead guilty to murder in exchange for the ninety-nine-year sentence. They heard prosecutor Canale say that, as required by law, he would outline the evidence which would have been presented had the case gone to formal trial. Canale then asked the jury if they each could sit as jurors and accept the guilty plea from the defendant. They nodded in unison.
Canale told the jury: ".. . There have been rumors going all around—perhaps some of you have heard them— that Mr. James Earl Ray was a dupe in this thing, or a fall guy or a member of a conspiracy to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I want to state to you, as your Attorney General, that we have no proof other than that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by James Earl Ray, and James Earl Ray alone, not in concert with anyone else. Our office has examined over five thousand printed pages of investigation work done by local police, by national police organizations, and by international law enforcement agencies. We have examined over three hundred physical bits of evidence physical exhibits. Three men in my office, Mr. Dwyer, Mr. Beasly and Mr. John Carlisle, the Chief Investigator of the Attorney General's Office. . . have traveled thousands of miles all over this country and to many cities in foreign countries on this investigation, our own independent investigation, and I just state to you frankly that we have no evidence that there was any conspiracy involved in this. . ."
The state had not charged Ray with conspiracy; it had charged him with murder in the first degree. Nevertheless the prosecutor felt compelled to deny that Ray had collaborators.*
* Though it was not presented at the "trial," Ray's version of the story had already been published. In a series of magazine articles written by William Bradford Huie, Ray had confessed that he had been the unwitting pawn in a conspiracy to kill Dr. King.
Stranger still was the reaction of defense attorney Percy Foreman, a man who had never lost a case, to the remarks of the prosecuting attorney. As soon as Canale had finished issuing his disclaimer of conspiracy, Foreman rose and faced the jury. "It is an honor to appear in this Court for this case. I never expected or had any idea when I entered this case that I would be able to accomplish anything except perhaps save the defendant's life .. . It took me a month to convince myself of that fact which the Attorney General of these United States, and J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced last July, that is, what Mr. Canale has told you—that there was not a conspiracy."
Just as the jury was about to rubber stamp "the deal," Ray rose to his feet. "Your Honor," he said, "I would like to say something. . . I don't want to change anything that I have said, but I just want to enter one other thing. The only thing that I have to say is that I can't agree with Mr. Clark."
"Ramsey Clark?" Foreman asked.
The judge said, "Mr. who?"
"Mr. J. Edgar Hoover," Ray said. "I agree with all these stipulations, and I am not trying to change anything."
The judge said, "You don't agree with whose theories?"
". . . Mr. Canale's, Mr. Clark's, and Mr. J. Edgar Hoover's about the conspiracy. I don't want to add something that I haven't agreed to in the past," Ray answered, making sure he didn't blow the deal.
Foreman tried to explain. "I think that what he said is that he doesn't agree that Ramsey Clark is right, or that J. Edgar Hoover is right. I didn't argue that as evidence in this case, I simply stated that, underwriting the statement of General Canale [sic] that they had made the same statement. You are not required to agree with it all."
The judge wanted nothing to sidetrack the smooth proceedings. "You still . . . your answers to these questions that I asked you would still be the same? Is that correct?"
"Yes, sir," Ray answered.
And so the proceedings continued with Canale's presentation of a report of what would have been the evidence had this been a real trial.
After hearing from eyewitnesses that Dr. King had been killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Canale called experts from the Memphis Police Department and the FBI to testify on how they had accumulated physical evidence that linked Ray to the scene of the crime.
In the boarding house room that Ray (a/k/a Eric Starvo Galt) had rented, the FBI and police found a green bedspread, a pair of pliers and a hammer, some shaving articles, binoculars, beer cans, a newspaper, a T-shirt, shorts, a transistor radio, and two leather straps for binoculars. The testimony established that the white Mustang was found in Atlanta, Georgia. It had a sticker on it that indicated it had crossed the border into Mexico. The pliers had been obtained in Los Angeles, California, as had the T-shirt and shorts. In the bathroom from where the shot was supposed to have been fired, the investigators found scuff marks in the bottom of the tub. They found the window of the bathroom opened and the screen forced off.
"This [window] sill was ordered removed, was cut away and was subsequently sent to the FBI for comparison," Canale said, "and the proof would show through expert testimony that the markings on this sill were consistent with the machine markings as reflected on the barrel of the 30-06 rifle which has heretofore been introduced to you."
If this were a trial Canale said, eyewitnesses would be called to testify that Ray had purchased the rifle in Birmingham, Alabama, that he'd stayed at a motel in that city and had checked out on the nineteenth of December and Operation Mind Control 209 had returned to Los Angeles. Also Dr. Russel C. Hadley of Hollywood, California, would be called by the state to testify that "in his capacity as a plastic surgeon, he did perform an operation on the nose of the defendant under the name of Eric Galt on March 5, 1968."
Canale placed in evidence a photo he said was of James Earl Ray, a photo of a graduating class from the International School of Bartending.
Other evidence Canale said would have been presented in a trial was the expert testimony of FBI fingerprint analyst George Bornebreke. The fingerprint expert would testify that he found "a print of sufficient clarity on the rifle . . . another print of sufficient clarity for identification on the scope mounted on the rifle .. . a print on one of the Schlitz beer cans .. . a print on the binoculars .. . a print on the front page of the April 4th issue of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. . ." and "prints of sufficient clarity" on maps of Atlanta, Birmingham, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, all of which, it could be proved, were the fingerprints of James Earl Ray.
The entire presentation of the case took just under three hours. There was a recess for lunch, after which Ray was ordered jailed for ninety-nine years.
As soon as Ray began to serve his sentence he renewed his protestations of innocence and began working for a new trial. He fired attorneys Percy Foreman and Arthur Hanes, alleging that he had not had a fair trial. He said that he'd been "set up to take the rap" for a crime he didn't commit. At Ray's hearing on a new trial, he stated, under oath, "I Personally did not shoot Dr. King, but I may have been partly responsible without knowing it."
If Ray's psychological profile made him a likely victim for anyone who might need a fall guy in a murder, he was equally well suited to be a victim of mind control. The crimes for which he had previously been tried and convicted were all robberies in which no one was harmed. They were all remarkable for one thing—the chase that followed.
Each time Ray committed a crime he left a trail of evidence. Each time he left the scene in either a footrace or a hair-raising car chase, with outraged citizens or police or both in hot pursuit. In each crime, Ray behaved like a little boy who'd just stolen money from his father's pockets and was then daring him to catch and punish him. He was from a deprived family, the eldest of eight children. Many individuals who were once emotionally deprived children learn to seek negative attention since positive attention was unavailable to them in their formative years. James Earl Ray fit that pattern. In the opinion of a psychologist he may have committed his daring daylight robberies not out of a need for money, but out of a subconscious desire to receive love.
The only evidence which cast light on Ray's possible motive for the assassination was an eyewitness report that he had spoken passionately of his hatred of blacks in a Los Angeles bar.
A few years' after Ray's sentencing, other evidence came to light which suggested that the FBI had a stronger motivation to kill Martin Luther King than Ray had. On November 19, 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made public the fact that the FBI had sent a compromising tape recording with an anonymous letter to Dr. King in late 1964 in a crude attempt to blackmail him into silence. Dr. King had thought the tape and letter were an effort to drive him to suicide.
King received the package thirty-four days before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The tape was allegedly of a sexual encounter of Dr. King and a young woman. It was accompanied by an unsigned note that read, "King there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just thirty-four days in which to do it. (This exact number has been selected for a specific reason.) It has definite practical significance. You are done. There is but one way out for you."
A month after Dr. King received his copy of the tape, a duplicate was sent to his wife. Mrs. King said publicly that she and her husband had listened to the tape together and had concluded that it had nothing on it that would discredit King.
The Senate subcommittee said that at about the same time Mrs. King had received her copy of the tape, a copy was submitted to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Accompanying that tape was a memorandum written by the FBI Chief of Counter-intelligence William Sullivan. The memo suggested that the FBI discredit King by "knocking him off his pedestal."
The Senate committee disclosed further that the FBI had kept tabs on Dr. King for six years prior to his death. It had instituted sixteen different wiretap operations and had planted eight room bugs in its attempts to catch him in some compromising situation which could be used for blackmail or public discreditation. The shocked Senate select committee members discovered that the tapes and bugs had produced "thousands of hours of tapes."
In addition, it was discovered that Hoover had ordered some of his men to rewrite reports that had originally indicated King was not a threat to the country. Those officials who were ordered to change their reports readily did so, the committee said, because they feared for their jobs.
After the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made these facts known, Mrs. Coretta King said what she had feared to say before. She said she believed that her husband had been killed by a government conspiracy.
"The way he was documented and followed around by Hoover and the CIA, when he was abroad, it [his assassination] would have to have been attached to the forces of our government that felt he was a threat to the system as it existed," said Mrs. King.
A few days after Mrs. King issued that statement, Maryland private investigator Harold Weisberg used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain previously classified FBI reports. These reports revealed that directly contrary to claims made by Canale at Ray's "trial," the FBI had been unable to find any physical evidence that a rifle had been fired from the window in Ray's rooming house, either on the weapon or in the room from which the assassin had allegedly fired. This was a crucial discovery, in that it was the rifle alone which linked Ray to the killing.
If the rifle was not fired from the second-story room, then, no matter how Ray's fingerprints got on the weapon, reasonable doubt existed that Ray was the assassin. No ballistics evidence links the rifle to the bullets in King's body, The FBI's evidence, which was kept secret, had all the while pointed to the conclusion that the rifle could have been planted in front of the rooming house to implicate Ray while the real assassin had fired from a location outside the rooming house.
A few months after Weisberg's find, Newsday published a copyrighted story reporting that a top law-enforcement official in Memphis had removed one particular black detective who had been assigned to protect Dr. King just hours before he was assassinated. The Newsday article suggested that Detective Ed Redditt had been pulled from his post because he had developed a contingency plan to apprehend any assassin who might make an attempt on King's life. Redditt's plan was to seal off a four-block area in the event a shot was fired.
Earlier the same week, Newsday had revealed that the Memphis Police Department had assigned "provocateurs" to protect King. The paper charged that men who had previously participated in anti-King riots were "protecting" the civil rights leader at the moment he was shot.
The activities of James Earl Ray during the year preceding the assassination could be interpreted to suggest the possibility that Ray was a patsy in the mold of Oswald. Ray had been to Mexico, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, places which had figured prominently in the activities of Oswald and the others who were indicted by Jim Garrison.
Facts which were not presented at Ray's quick "trial" included the following: Ray had escaped from prison, one year before the King assassination. Evidence indicated that he had been helped by someone in his escape. During the year he was "on the lam," he received an estimated $12,000 from a source he identified only as "Raoul." He had no difficulty in obtaining a car and several complete sets of identification. Each set belonged to a living individual, something an intelligence agent would prefer if he were to set up a false identity. Ray had no difficulty traveling all over the United States, Canada, and Mexico with his fake papers.
The contradictory history of Ray's activities in Los Angeles led private investigators to consider, as they had in the Oswald case, that there may have been two James Earl Rays. One, the James Earl Ray who had been in prison, was a painfully shy fellow who seldom opened his mouth and hardly ever raised his voice. Fellow inmates found they had a hard time describing him, since he maintained such a low profile. He had been raised dirt-poor, had never graduated from a school of any kind, and there is no record of his ever having expressed a political idea about anyone. In Los Angeles, the "other" James Earl Ray was described as an outgoing fellow. He enrolled in and graduated from bartending school; he became involved in an altercation with a girl in a bar who objected to his making slurs about the black race; he was very conscientious about his appearance and was an impeccable dresser, who even wore expensive alligator shoes; and he was a right-wing politician who conspicuously campaigned for George Wallace.
One other bit of evidence gives unity to the contradictions—Ray had been hypnotized while in Los Angeles.
It was not mentioned in Ray's "trial," but at the time of his arrest in London, he had in his possession three books on hypnotism: Self-Hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living by Leslie M. LeCron, How to Cash In on Your Hidden Memory Power by William D. Hersey, and Psychocybernetics by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. Ray had told William Bradford Huie, "I took a course in hypnosis while in L.A. I had read a lot about it in prison on how it was used in dentistry and medicine."
On November 27, 1967, Ray appeared in the office of Dr. Mark Freeman, a psychologist who practiced in Beverly Hills. Dr. Freeman remembered that Ray, who'd given his real name, asked to be hypnotized because he wanted to sleep better and remember things better.
"This fellow really wanted to improve his mind," Dr. Freeman said. "He had an awe of learning. He had a bent for reading. He didn't fight hypnosis. He learned something."
Dr. Freeman told George McMillan, author of The Making of an Assassin, "You've got to keep in mind that I get a lot of angry people around here. A lot of people who come to me want to teach me how to do it. I get a lot of rough stuff around here. I mean psychotic, that stuff. But I couldn't pick up on any of that with Ray. He made a favorable impression on me. He was a good pupil. I'd show him how to go under, and pretty soon he'd be lying on the couch on his back and start talking. I taught him eye fixation, bodily relaxation, how to open himself to suggestion. I gave him lots of positive feelings of confidence."
It may have been that Freeman found Ray so suggestible because he had been hypnotized before. His contact with freeman and other hypnotists (he told Huie he'd been to as many as eight) may have been prompted by an unconscious urge to undo what had already been done to him—a hypnotically induced split personality, one which was programmed to kill upon command, or merely one which was programmed to run away, following his normal pattern, but this time on command. It's easy to program someone to do under posthypnotic cue what he normally does. And it's a lot easier to program a patsy than it is to program a hit man.
Chapter Sixteen
CONFESSION BY AUTOMATIC WRITING
The circumstances of Robert Kennedy's death are well
known. On June 5, 1968, at 12:15 A.M., Sen. Robert Kennedy was shot in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in
Los Angeles. Karl Uecker grabbed the gun, a .22 caliber
Iver-Johnson revolver. It was smoking in the hand of Sirban Beshara Sirhan, a Palestinian refugee. The Los Angeles police immediately took Sirhan into custody. At first they appeared to be taking every precaution so that they wouldn't make the same mistakes the Dallas police had. They taped every interrogation session with the suspect and kept him under surveillance through a closed-circuit TV camera in his cell. They took every measure to protect the life of this man, the second "lone nut" to gun down a Kennedy.
Trying to avoid anything which would be an infringement on the rights of the alleged assassin, the police carefully informed Sirhan of his legal rights before trying to interrogate him.
Through the first hours of questioning, Sirhan chose to remain silent. For some time, no one knew who the curly haired, swarthy man in custody was.
It wasn't until the police found a truck in the parking lot of the hotel, and traced it to Sirhan Beshara Sirhan, that they were certain of his identity. Police immediately went to his house and searched his bedroom. On the floor next to Sirhan's bed was a large spiral notebook. On the desk was another notebook. There was a third small notebook, a good deal of occult literature, a brochure advertising a 216 Walter Bowart book on mental projection, and a large brown envelope from the Internal Revenue Service on which someone had written, "RFK must be disposed of like his brother was." At the bottom of the envelope was scrawled "Reactionary."
In one of the notebooks there was a page which was used later in the trial to prove premeditation: "May 18 9:45 A.M.—68. My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession . . RFK must die—RFK must be killed Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated . . . Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of of of of of this or that please pay to the order of . . ." Also drawn on the page were spirals, diamonds, and doodies.
While Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty ignorantly told the press Sirhan was "a member of numerous Communist organizations, including the Rosicrucians," Sirhan's neighbors told a different story. One said he was "very religious." Another reported that he was "just a normal kid. He took cars and bikes apart and put them back together again." Neighborhood kids said he was "nice." When asked if Sirhan was the angry type, a black girl in his neighborhood said, "He didn't show it." Arthur Bean, another neighbor said, "Someone talked that kid into gunning down Kennedy."
When Irwin Garfinkel, a deputy attorney in the public defender's office, asked Sirhan about the shooting, he said, "I don't remember much about the shooting, sir. Did I do it? Well, yes, I am told I did it. I remember being at the Ambassador. I was drinking tom collinses. I got dizzy. I went back to my car so I could go home. But I was too drunk to drive. I thought I'd better find some coffee. The next thing I remember I was being choked and a guy was twisting my knee."
George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, was in the hotel pantry when Kennedy was shot. He was one of the men who wrestled Sirhan down. According to Newsweek, Plimpton "offered some eloquent testimony that appeared to some to support the defense's contention that Sirhan Bishara Sirhan had, in fact, been in a 'trance' during the shooting. 'He was enormously composed', recalled Plimpton. 'Right in the midst of this hurricane of sound and feeling. he seemed to be almost the eye of the hurricane. He seemed purged.'"
The chief counsel for the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, A. L. Wirin, went to Sirhan's defense within hours of his arrest. On his second meeting with the accused, Wirin brought the local papers with him. Sirhan read the headline "KENNEDY'S DEAD," then he dropped his head in grief. After fighting to control his emotions, he looked at Wirin through tearfilled eyes and said, "Mr. Wirin, I'm a failure. I believe in love and instead of showing love. . . ." Then, Wirin recalled, "he muttered something about having betrayed his own primary beliefs."
That night, Sirhan complained of being sick. He became very dizzy and had severe stomach cramps, just as had Castillo and Candy Jones. For several weeks Sirhan was given a half grain of phenobarbital at night to help him sleep.
The Los Angeles police went through the motions of looking into the possibility that a conspiracy was behind the RFK assassination. They looked for the girl in the polka-dot dress who witnesses said had been standing next to Sirhan, smiling and talking to him just before he began shooting in the pantry. Sirhan also said he'd been talking to the girl after he'd drunk several torn Collinses. The girl in the polka-dot dress was not found, and conflicting statements cast doubt on whether there had ever been such a girl. Forty-five "top men" from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) were assigned the job of tracking down all leads to a conspiracy, but incredibly, they came up empty-handed.
A bag of women's clothing, which included a polka-dot dress and new undergarments, was found by the LAPD in an alley, but police could not find out who'd bought them or who'd worn them. According to Sirhan's biographer Robert Blair Kaiser, ". . . The police and FBI hardly did all they could [to find the owner of the polka-dot dress]. They used faulty logic and browbeat witnesses to eliminate the girl in the polka-dot dress."1
To penetrate Sirhan's amnesia, the defense decided to call in an expert hypnotist, Dr. Bernard L. Diamond of the University of California. Diamond was the associate dean UCLA's School of Criminology and a professor of both law and psychiatry. No one knew more about law, psychiatry, and hypnosis than Diamond.
In a pre-hypnosis interview, Diamond asked Sirhan to tell him about his notebooks, and Sirhan said he couldn't recall writing them.
Diamond asked if he thought that what he had done helped things, and Sirhan said, "I'm not proud of what I did."
"What do you mean, you're not proud of it?" Diamond asked him. "You believe in your cause, don't you?" (Sirhan had been contacted by Arab sympathizers and others who insisted that the reason he'd killed Kennedy was out of sympathy for the PLO.)
"I have no exact knowledge, sir, that this happened yet. I'm all, it's all in my mind, but goddamn it, when my body played with it .. . I couldn't understand it. I still don't believe it. My body outsmarted my brain, I guess."
"What did your body do?" Diamond asked.
"Pulled that trigger," Sirhan said.
"Does your body remember it, even if your mind doesn't?"
"I don't give a damn, sir, in a way. Now I don't even care," Sirhan said.
Diamond asked Sirhan if he'd thought about suicide. "Hell, no," Sirhan said, "I couldn't do that."
Then Diamond expressed a thought which contained a significant "Freudian slip." "Why didn't you turn the gas on yourself, ah, why didn't you turn the gun on yourself after you killed Kennedy?"
Sirhan waved his hand in front of his face. "It was all mixed up. Like a dream."
Diamond hypnotized Sirhan on six of eight visits. At one point, reliving the killing, Sirhan grabbed at his belt on the left side. Until then police had no idea where he'd carried the weapon. Under hypnosis Sirhan also created writings similar to those in his notebooks.
In one session Diamond had Sirhan climb the bars of his cell like a monkey. After he'd been brought out of trance, Sirhan explained the reason for his climb. He said he was only getting exercise. Then Diamond played the tape to prove to Sirhan that he, Diamond, had given the instructions to Sirhan to climb the cage. But Sirhan denied that he'd done it because he'd been hypnotized.
At the trial Dr. Diamond, acting as the director of Sirhan's defense, testified that Sirhan was a paranoid schizophrenic. His testimony was supported by several other doctors who had examined the psychiatric "evidence" obtained from tests, interviews, and hypno-interviews conducted by Diamond.
Dr. Diamond did not consider that Sirhan had been other than self-programmed. Having worked for the Army Medical Corps in World War II, he did not realize that the U.S. cryptocracy could develop mind control and use it to control the political destiny of the nation.
Sirhan was given yet another battery of tests by Dr. Eric Marcus, a court-appointed psychiatrist for the defense. Among the tests was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which contains more than 500 questions requiring true-false answers. Psychologists interpret the answers to the MMPI according to a set of statistical norms. Two of Sirhan's non-responses were significant, since usually non-responses are considered to be more important than the "yes-no" responses. The questions Sirhan did not respond to were: "291. At one or more times in my life, I felt that someone was making me do things by hypnotizing me . . ." and "293. Someone has been trying to influence my mind."
By the second visit, Dr. Marcus had had time enough to familiarize himself thoroughly with Sirhan's notebooks. On one page of the notebooks Sirhan had written: "I advocate the overthrow of the current President of the fucken United States of America. I have no absolute plans yet, but soon will compose some. I am poor—this country's propaganda says that she is the best country in the world—I have not experienced this yet—the U.S.—says that life in Russia is bad .. . I believe that the U.S. is ready to start declining, not that it hasn't—it began in November 23, '63, but it should decline at a faster rate so that the real Utopia will not be too far from being realized during the early seventies in this country."
In one of the notebooks the name "Peggy Osterkamp" was written over and over. "I love you, Peggy," in one place and in another, "Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Sirhan."
When Dr. Marcus asked Sirhan who Peggy Osterkamp was, he said that she was just a girl he'd met a few times at the ranch where he'd worked as an exerciser of horses. Dr. Marcus asked Sirhan if he'd ever dated her, and Sirhan told Marcus the story he'd told the public defender about the night of the assassination.
That night, Sirhan said, he had gone to a shooting range and practiced with his pistol until the range closed. Then he went with a friend, a foreign student named Mistri, to get a hamburger at Bob's Big Boy Restaurant. While eating, they talked about horses. For some reason Sirhan showed his friend a pocketful of bullets. He then was given a current newspaper and in it he read a news item about a Zionist rally in Hollywood. He became very angry over this and made up his mind to go to the rally. When he could not find that rally, he wandered into the campaign headquarters of Senator Kuchel and there heard that there would be a party at the Ambassador Hotel nearby.
When he got to the hotel he was fascinated by the television lights. He went to the bar and ordered two tom collinses. He got dizzy and said to himself that he'd better go home. He was reluctant to drive in his drunken condition, and the next thing he remembered was being choked in the Ambassador pantry.
Dr. Marcus didn't buy Sirhan's amnesia. He thought that it was only a convenient cover-up, and that Sirhan was a paranoid. In his testimony at Sirhan's trial, Dr. Marcus selected another page from Sirhan's notebook to illustrate his psychological evaluation. On June 2, 1967, Sirhan had written:
A Declaration of War Against American Humanity . . . when in the course of human events it has become necessary for me to equalize and seek revenge for all the inhuman treatment committed against me by the American people. The manifestation of this Declaration will be executed by its supporter(s) as soon as he is able to command a sum of money (2,000) and to acquire some firearms—the specification of which have not been established yet.
The victims of the party in favor of this declaration will be or are now—the President, vice, etc.—down the ladder. The time will be chosen by the author at the convenience of the accused. The method of assault is immaterial—however, the type of weapon used should influence it somehow. The author believes that many in fact multitudes of people are in harmony with his thoughts and feelings.
The conflict and violence in the world subsequent to the enforcement of this decree shall not be considered likely by the author of this memoranda, rather he hopes that they be the initiatory military steps to WW III—the author expresses his wishes very bluntly that he wants to be recorded by history as the man who triggered off the last war. . .
In mid-August Sirhan's notebooks were analyzed by the FBI crime lab in Washington. The pages were subjected to photo and chemical analysis to establish when each had been written and in what order. The FBI experts concluded that Sirhan had penned the notes in a haphazard fashion, skipping around in the books. The two pages dated June 2, 1967, and May 18, 1968, the lab said, had actually been written on those dates.
An overview of the notes shows that Sirhan had been concerned with three things that appeared over and over in the writing: money, the girl Peggy Osterkamp, and a new Mustang, in that order of importance—as determined by the number of times each was mentioned.
Several times he had written, "please pay to the order of. . . ," but when asked about this he could not remember what it meant. He had written, "Today I must resolve to come home in a new Mustang. Today I must resolve to come home in a new Mustang. Mustang. Mustang."
The FBI and the LAPD located Peggy Osterkamp. She was a tall, willowy blonde, the attractive daughter of an affluent dairyman. A horse lover, she had once worked at the ranch where Sirhan worked. She said she knew him only slightly and had been introduced to him at the Pomona Fair in 1966. She said she had never dated him.
On one page of the notebooks Sirhan had written, "Tom, my wannest salutations. I do not know what has prompted you to write to me. . ." And on another page he'd written, "Hello Tom perhaps you could use the enclosed $Sol perhaps you could use the enclosed $." On yet another page Sirhan had written: "11 o'clock Sirhan 11 o'clock Sirhan Sirhan Sirhan 11 o'clock Sirhan Livermore Sirhan Sirhan Pleasanton . . . Hello Tom racetrack perhaps you could use the enclosed $."
The FBI guessed that Sirhan had been writing about Walter Thomas Rathke, his first employer at the racetrack. The FBI found him working as a groom at the Pleasanton Race Stables, just east of Oakland.
Rathke told investigators that he had known Sirhan, and that they'd compared notes on the occult. He said he'd written Sirhan twice and had asked him if he needed any money. Later it was discovered that Rathke had far more influence over Sirhan than he cared to admit, but the LAPD and FBI dropped him as uninteresting.
In addition to examining the bizarre notebooks, investigators also made note of Sirhan's unusual behavior after the assassination. Sirhan, like Candy Jones, had a "thing" about mirrors. In his cell he'd stare into a little mirror for hours on end. He also practiced concentrating on candle flames, trying to turn them from red to blue to green. And he was apprehensive about drugs.
When asked by his biographer Robert Blair Kaiser if he thought he'd get the death penalty, Sirhan shrugged and said, "A death penalty would only be vengeance. What would it gain?" After another pause he added, "I know I've killed a man. At least, I'm told of it. I have nothing in my conscience about it, but . . . I'm told I killed a man, so I deserve some punishment, but maybe I could serve humanity by working ten years in a hospital, to pay my debt you might say." Later Sirhan said flatly, "I don't regard myself as a criminal."
Kaiser reported, "Sirhan talked about Gandhi, and the black revolution." He identified with both. "The Negroes," he said, "can see everything, but they can't eat it. Their only solution is to dig in and eat it." Immediately Sirhan added: "I wanted a new car. I always wanted a Mustang. I said, 'All I need is money and how am I gonna get it?' They're not giving Mustangs away."2 Was Sirhan implying that he killed Kennedy for money?
The court ordered that Sirhan be fully tested psychologically to see what his mental state really was. They gave him an electroencephalogram to see if by chance his brain had been damaged by a fall he'd taken from a horse two years earlier. The EEG showed that Sirhan had a normal brain-wave pattern. Then, just to determine if alcohol had any effect on the pattern, the doctor, who'd obtained the recipe for the Ambassador Hotel's torn collins, gave Sirhan the equivalent of four drinks and measured his brain patterns again. Still there was nothing unusual in them.
But even though the EEG showed no unusual brain activity, Sirhan got very drunk and shivered violently for ten minutes. He became irrational, agitated, and restless. He screamed out curses.
When someone told him, "Dr. Marcus is here," Sirhan screamed, "Get that bastard out of here!" The doctor ordered Sirhan taken back to his inner cell, and Sirhan seemed confused. "What the hell is going on here?" he asked, then grabbed his throat violently (as Castillo had), and appeared to be choking. The doctor noted that he was in a state of delirium.
Robert Kaiser again asked Sirhan about his notebooks and Sirhan explained everything he could about them. He said that they were writings about the occult, that he had been studying the objective mind in relation to the universal mind. "If you give your subjective mind an intense command by your objective mind, your subjective mind will gather the information to carry out the commands of the objective mind. . ."
Sirhan said that he'd been sitting in front of a mirror after he'd seen a replay of Robert Kennedy on television reporting in 1948 on the Arab-Israeli war in Palestine. "I concentrated on RFK in the mirror," he said. "I had to stop him. Finally, his face was in that mirror instead of my own. Then I went to my notebook and started writing. It was part of the auto-suggestion necessary to get my subjective mind to get my objective mind moving. I read in the Rosicrucian magazine how if you wanted to do anything, you should write it down. It automatically works toward the realization of what you want.
"With that power," Sirhan said with intensity, "I could have been a millionaire! A millionaire! Ohh shit!"
"Why did I not go to the races that day?" Sirhan asked Kaiser. "Why did I not like the horses? Why did I go to that range? Why did I save those Mini-Mags [the high powered bullets used on Kennedy]? Why did I not expend those bullets? Why did I go to Bob's? Why did Mistri give me that newspaper? Why did I drink that night? It was," he said, "like some inner force."
"But you wrote in your notebook 'RFK must die,'" Kaiser said.
"After the bit with the mirror," Sirhan told him, "I forgot it all. The idea of killing Kennedy never entered my mind, sir."3
During Sirhan's trial for murder, the judge refused to authorize the use of lie detectors or truth serum. Sirhan, like Ray, was quickly "put away" for life.
There were those, however, who refused to let the matter rest. In 1973, while Sirhan sat in prison, Dr. Edward Simpson, the San Quentin prison psychiatrist, submitted an affidavit to the California courts requesting that Sirhan be granted a new trial and that the Robert Kennedy case be reopened.
Dr. Simpson testified that the "expert" psychiatric psychological testimony at Sirhan's trial was full of numerous factual errors and misleading to the jury. "Most of the doctors testifying," Simpson said, "saw their role as proving why Sirhan killed Kennedy, which required a focus on pathology (mental illness) that I found does not exist, They failed to consider the real facts in a more objective light and failed to consider the possibility, clearly suggested by the ballistic testimony and Sirhan's own testimony under close scrutiny, that perhaps Sirhan did not kill Robert F. Kennedy."
"Sirhan's trial," Dr. Simpson wrote, "was not handled properly by the mental health professionals. In retrospect, a close study of the trial testimony and my own extensive study of Sirhan leads to one irrevocable and obvious conclusion: Sirhan's trial was, and will be remembered, as the psychiatric blunder of the century."
Dr. Simpson knew whereof he spoke. For six years he had worked at San Quentin Prison and had made a study of men on Death Row. For two years he'd been in charge of the prison's psychological testing program. In 1969 he interviewed and tested Sirhan extensively during twenty weekly visits. After these visits were terminated, Sirhan requested that his family contact Simpson for the purpose of reviewing the psychiatric testimony that had been given at his trial.
After examining Sirhan, and reviewing the "expert" psychiatric testimony, Dr. Simpson discussed his findings with the prison's chief psychiatrist, Dr. David G. Schmidt. Together they concluded that their findings did not confirm "but, in fact, were strictly in conflict" with the findings reported at Sirhan's trial.
"Nowhere in Sirhan's test response," Dr. Simpson said in the affidavit, "was I able to find evidence that he is a 'paranoid schizophrenic' or 'psychotic' as testified by the doctors at the trial . . . The fact is, paranoid schizophrenics are almost impossible to hypnotize. They are too suspicious and do not trust anybody, including friends and relatives, not to speak of a hypnotist from, for him, the most hated race. Psychotics in general are among the poorest subjects for hypnosis. They cannot concentrate, they do not follow instructions and basically do not trust. Sirhan, however, was an unusually good hypnotic subject. Sirhan asked me to hypnotize him, which I did not do, in order not to contaminate my test findings with fantasies. He himself had manufactured a hypno-disk, and was practicing self hypnosis in his cell, an activity requiring considerable selfcontrol which no psychotic has. The fact that Sirhan was easy to hypnotize, as testified by Dr. Diamond, proves he was not a paranoid schizophrenic.
"Dr. Diamond," Simpson continued, "used hypnosis in six sessions out of eight with Sirhan. What was the purpose of it? To plant ideas in Sirhan's mind, ideas that were not there before? To make him accept the idea that he killed Robert F. Kennedy?
"When Dr. Diamond was unable to get Sirhan to admit that he wrote the notebooks, he testified: '. . . so I undertook some experiments on possible hypnotic suggestion.' This admission strongly suggests the possibility of hypnosis being used for implanting hypothetical ideas in Sirhan's mind, rather than uncovering facts .. . A lie detector, not hypnosis, should have been used in finding out whether Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy.
'Why was a lie detector not used? It should have been, as it is much more reliable than hypnosis, which often provideo contaminated results . . . Dr. Diamond's testimony is wrong, as he states: 'I have very little or no faith in the accuracy [of a lie detector].' The truth is, the polygraph exceeds in accuracy certain techniques, such as hypnosis, that tend to fuse and contaminate experiences from past and present and also can be influenced significantly by the operator [hypnotist]; it makes a significant difference who the hypnotist is. . ."
In 1975 when the California investigation into the RFK killing was briefly reopened, the public learned that crucial physical evidence, such as ceiling tiles from the hotel pantry and bullet fragments, had been destroyed or lost by the LAPD. And, as in the Oswald case, critical testimony had been ignored. [The above testimony, of Dr. Simpson, pointed to the possibility that Sirhan was a hypno programmed assassin.]
Also in 1975, seven years after the crime, former high ranking U.S. intelligence officer and one of the developers of the PSE Charles McQuiston analyzed recordings of Sirhan's interview with psychiatrists in San Quentin.
Sirhan said, "To me, sir, he [Kennedy] is still alive . ., I still don't believe what has happened .. . I don't believe that he is dead. I have no realization still that I killed him, that he is in the grave." McQuiston's PSE analysis showed that on this statement Sirhan exhibited very little stress.
"After analyzing the tapes," McQuiston said, "I'm convinced that Sirhan wasn't aware of what he was doing. He was in a hypnotic trance when he pulled the trigger and killed Senator Kennedy . . . Everything in the PSE chart tells me that someone else was involved in the assassination—and that Sirhan was programmed through hypnosis to kill RFK. What we have here is a real live 'Manchurian Candidate.' "4
After examining Sirhan's PSE charts, Dr. John W. Heisse, Jr., president of the International Society of Stress Analysis, agreed with McQuiston. Dr. Heisse, who had studied hundreds of people under hypnosis using the PSE, said, "Sirhan kept repeating certain phrases. This clearly revealed he had been programmed to put himself into a trance. This is something he couldn't have learned by himself. Someone had to show him and teach him how.
"I believe Sirhan was brainwashed under hypnosis by the constant repetition of words like 'you are nobody, you're nothing, the American dream is gone' until he actually believed them. At that stage someone implanted an idea, kill RFK, and under hypnosis the brainwashed Sirhan accepted it."
Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who wrote the introduction to The Control of Candy Jones, has been billed as one of the country's leading medical experts on hypnosis. Spiegel said of Sirhan's case: "It's very possible to distort and change somebody's mind through a number of hypnotic sessions. It can be described as brainwashing because the mind is cleared of its old emotions and values which are replaced by implanting other suggestions . . . This technique was probably used with Sirhan. From my own research, I think Sirhan was subjected to hypnotic treatment."
Even in the early days of the investigation, there were those who found it easy to believe the hypno-programming theory. Among them was writer Truman Capote, who had for a long while been a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill. After writing his best seller In Cold Blood, Capote was regarded as something of an expert on murder. On the NBC "Tonight" show Capote suggested that Sirhan and his accomplices had been intensively trained and brainwashed trigger men. Their purpose, Capote proposed, was to drive the United States to its knees by assassinating all its leaders.
According to Robert Blair Kaiser, "With a little more diligence than they exercised, and a great deal more intelligence than they had, the police might have established links between Sirhan and the underworld, between Sirhan and the right wing, between Sirhan and the left wing, between Sirhan and the Al Fatah. . ."5
But neither the police nor the FBI showed any interest in Sirhan's "connections"—perhaps because there were so many. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan was a contradiction. He could be linked to many different groups, all of which could easily have had a political motive to kill Robert Kennedy. So the LAPD did the same thing the Warren Commission did; it took what evidence it needed to prove its case for a "lone nut" and ignored the rest.
Defense director Diamond, subsequently explaining his tactics in Sirhan's trial, said he was surprised when he first tried to hypnotize Sirhan. "Most people may take an hour or more to go under hypnosis the first time," Diamond said. "A schizophrenic usually takes much longer, if he goes under at all. But it took less than ten minutes for Sirhan to go into a deep authentic sleep."
Sirhan, Dr. Diamond concluded, had obviously had experience with hypnosis before. He found that Sirhan was reluctant to speak under hypnosis but that he could easily write without being post hypnotically blocked. "Writing under hypnosis is called automatic writing," Diamond said, "and the term aptly describes the way Sirhan would write like a robot and keep on repeating a word or phrase until I stopped him."
Taking a sheet off a legal pad lying nearby, Diamond asked Sirhan to write his answers to the questions put to him in the hypnotic trance. He showed Sirhan a sample of his diary page.
"Is this crazy writing?" Diamond asked.
"YES YES YES," Sirhan wrote.
"Are you crazy?" Diamond asked.
"NO NO," Sirhan wrote.
"Well, why are you writing crazy?" Diamond asked.
"PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE," Sirhan responded.
"Practice for what?" Diamond asked.
"MIND CONTROL MIND CONTROL MIND CONTROL" is what Sirhan wrote."6
Perhaps now, looking back, we can understand more about Sirhan from David. David was a good Air Force candidate for mind-control: He was an obedient soldier, penitent, and patient. His amnesia, you'll recall, was so total, so complete, that it took years of psychotherapy to restore his memory. This is what he had to say on the subject of forgetting and remembering:
"The air force used hypnosis for opening up my subconscious mind. It's the subconscious mind that remembers everything. That was the way it was explained to me. The subconscious mind must trust the person who is conditioning it. So if a person gets another's subconscious mind to trust them, then that subconscious mind will tell them everything that it has seen or heard from the day it was born even back to when it was in its mother's womb.
"So under a voice or word command the information can be brought out once the subconscious has been conditioned to respond to the right command. It might respond to one voice or a group of voices. I'd be given a certain cue and I would remember what I was supposed to remember. I was tested constantly. And then, when the meeting was over, I would be unable to remember, and automatically my subconscious would close.
"The cue command would be at the beginning of a meeting. I don't think you need a dual command. I think you need only a command to start, then once something is finished, the process stops automatically. During the training period I'd do whatever I wanted for a couple of days, then go back and the next thing I knew I was remembering the computer numbers again. A word would be said and I'd just begin remembering. They'd give a command, and if your subconscious has really trusted the person conditioning you, that triggers the memory. I don't know who the person I trusted was, because I was usually only talking to the tape recorder. I was actually thinking I was talking to someone that was very close. That would be the person who'd listen to the tape, I guess.
"Really I was talking to myself, but behind this was that person—no name, no face, just that friendly, trustworthy person who had conditioned me. And at the same time it was myself. Who would I trust more than myself?
"They must have told me that after I got out of the service I'd be unable to remember anything of a sensitive nature. I suppose they told me in a way that made it acceptable. But I don't think I ever thought I would have the problems which resulted from loss of my memory . . . When you can't remember things in sequence about your life, you have no idea what that does to you. It interferes with your whole identity."
Considering the connections between Cuba or Cubans and Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray's Latin accomplice 'Raoul,' and Luis Castillo's Cuban intelligence training one cannot help but wonder whether a variation on a scenario written in 1943 by hypnotist George Estabrooks wasn't being played out in the assassinations.
In his book Hypnotism, Estabrooks outlined a plan in which suddenly the Cubans had become belligerent and were "building a great naval base at Havana, an obvious menace to our overseas trade." He suggested that a Cuban oil executive be hypno-programmed to spy on the Cuban government. "Neither he nor the group in question (his oil company) need know anything of the arrangements. The instructions to his unconscious in hypnotism are very definite. Find out everything possible about the naval base. He is shown maps of this before he goes and coached as to just what is important. Nor is he ever allowed to submit written reports. Everything must be handed on by word of mouth to one of the very few individuals who are able to hypnotize him . . . Under these circumstances we may count on this man doing everything in his power to collect the information in question."
Estabrooks explained: "There are certain safeguards if we use hypnotism. First, there is no danger of the agent selling out, but this would probably not be of great importance in this particular case. More important would be the conviction of innocence which the man himself had, and this is a great aid in many situations. He would never 'act guilty' and if ever accused of seeking information would be quite honestly indignant. This conviction of innocence on the part of a criminal is perhaps his greatest safeguard under questioning by authorities. Finally, it would be impossible to 'third degree' him and so pick up the links of a chain. This is very important, for the most hardened culprit is always liable to 'talk' if the questioners are but ruthless enough."
Then Estabrooks expanded his point: "Far more useful than the foregoing purpose, however, would be that for a counterespionage service, built along the same lines. This would require both care and time to perfect, but once working it might prove extremely effective. Here the best approach would probably be through those of enemy alien stock within our own gates. Once again let us choose the aggressive Cubans as examples. In the event of war, but preferably well before the outbreak of war, we would start our organization. We could easily secure (say) one hundred or one thousand excellent subjects of Cuban stock who spoke their language fluently, and then work on these subjects.
"In hypnotism we would build up their loyalty to this country; but out of hypnotism, in the 'waking' or normal state we would do the opposite, striving to convince them that they had a genuine grievance against this country and encouraging them to engage in 'fifth column' activities. Here we would be coming very close to establishing a case of 'dual personality.' There is nothing at all impossible in this. We know that dual, and even multiple, personality can be both caused and cured by hypnotism. Moreover, that condition, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde combination, is a very real one once it is established.
"They would, as we before said, be urged in the waking state to become fifth columnists to the United States, but we would also point out to them in hypnotism that this was really a pose, that their real loyalty lay with this country, offering them protection and reward for their activities. Through them we would hope to be kept informed of the activities of their 'friends,' this information, of course being obtained in the trance state."
As to the possibility of hypno-programming assassins, Estabrooks wrote: "Strange to say, most good subjects will commit murder. In the writer's opinion there can be very little doubt on this score. They commit a legal, but not an ethical murder, so to speak. For example, we hypnotize a subject and tell him to murder you with a gun. We hand him a loaded revolver. In all probability he will refuse. Frankly for very obvious reasons, the writer has never made the experiment. Corpses are not needed in psychological laboratories." That, Estabrooks suggests, best be left to the intelligence agencies.7
next
THE PATRIOTIC ASSASSIN
notes
Chapter 14
1. Willem Oltmans, Atlas, May, 1977.
Chapter 16
1. Robert Blair Kaiser, R. F. K. Must Die, 2d ed. (New York, Dutton, 1970)
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Charles McQuiston, National Enquirer, October 20, 1975. 296 Walter Bowart
5. Kaiser, op. cit.
6. Bernard Diamond, Psychology Today, September, 1969.
7. Estabrooks, Hypnotism.
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