Part 7: Operation Mind Control...The Patriotic Assassin....Deep Probe

Operation Mind Control
By Walter Bowart

Chapter Seventeen 

THE PATRIOTIC ASSASSIN 

All the assassins in the cryptocracy army of hit men are not, by any means, programmed. There are other ways besides mind control to motivate the commission of murder. 

In 1298 Marco Polo returned from his Asiatic travels with a tale of assassins who were motivated by an unusually clever technique. Polo described a fortress he had visited in the valley of Alamut in Persia. He said the valley was the headquarters of a notorious group known as the Hashishin, from which the word "assassin" evolved. 

Polo's story echoed numerous legends about an "Old Man of the Mountain," named Allauddin, who used subtle and elaborate psychological tricks to motivate simple country boys to undertake fearless acts of murder. The Old Man had created an inescapable valley between two mountains by building up high walls at both ends. He turned the valley into a beautiful garden, the largest and most beautiful that had ever been seen. In this valley he planted every kind of fruit tree and built several elaborate, ornamented pavilions and palaces which were said to be of such elegance they could not be described in words. Everything that could be, was covered with gold. The buildings housed the most exquisite collection of paintings and sculpture in the known world. Man-made streams flowed wine, milk, honey, and water. 

Also in the Old Man's garden was a harem of the most beautiful houris in the world, trained to play all manner of instruments, and to sing and dance in the most sensuous and seductive manner. All had also been highly trained in the fine art of lovemaking, and were reputed to know every possible way in which to make a man happy. 

The garden was well fortified, and there was no way to get in or out of it except through the Old Man's castle. None were allowed to enter the Old Man's Garden except those who had been selected to be among the Hashishin. 

Youths from the countryside were attracted to the Old Man's court, lured by tales of the fantastic paradise. They believed that the Old Man was one of God's elect, and that angels did his bidding. Only those ranging in age from twelve to twenty years who displayed a taste for soldering and were in prime physical condition were admitted to the Hashishin. 

The Old Man's garden duplicated every detail of Paradise as described in the Koran by the Prophet Mohammed. A young man selected for the Hashishin would soon come to believe in the Old Man just as he already believed in Mohammed. 

After the proper indoctrination was completed, the Old Man would have his candidate drugged with a mysterious potion that would cast him into a deep sleep. Once asleep, the candidate would be lifted and carried into the garden and would wake up to find himself in a place he was certain must be Paradise. 

As time went on, he'd become more and more convinced that he was in Paradise. Ladies offered everything a young man could want, beyond even the wildest expectations of these simple folk. After only a few days in this garden, no young country boy would have left of his own accord. 

When the Old Man wanted to send one of his young Hashishin on a mission, he would again have him given the mysterious potion, and carried in his sleep from the garden to the castle. There the youth would be dressed in his old clothes and placed into the original position in which he'd fallen asleep before being taken into the Garden. 

Upon awakening to "reality" he would experience a great sense of loss at finding that he was no longer in Paradise. Then, as if meeting this young man for the first time, the Old Man would ask him where he had come from. Usually the youth would reply that he had just come from Paradise, and in great excitement explain that it was exactly as Mohammed had described it in the Koran. This would, of course, give eavesdroppers an even greater desire  to get there, and the strongest among them would, days later, wake up in the arms of the houris of paradise. 

When the Old Man wanted a rival prince killed, he would command such a youth who'd just returned from Paradise, "Go thou and slay So-and-so; and when thou returnest my angels shall bear thee back into Paradise. But shouldst thou die in the process, nevertheless, even so will I send my angels to carry thee back into Paradise." 

With this psychological ruse the Old Man would motivate youths to transcend the fear of death. Usually there was no order that a young Hashishin would not obey, no peril he would not risk, so great was his desire to get back to Paradise. 

In this manner the Old Man got his Ashishin to murder anyone he named. He inspired such dread in the princes of other kingdoms that they offered tribute to him in order that they might live in peace. 

Marco Polo's story of early mind control has elements which bear a striking similarity to today's modern Hashishin of the cryptocracy. 

In the 1950s the CIA smuggled a captive Soviet Air Force officer to the United States for interrogation. He was taken from a West Berlin prison to the CIA's Langley, Virginia, "farm" where he was interrogated at length. Once he'd begun to fear for his life, the CIA men showed him clemency. They took him to New York, where he attended a baseball game, and enjoyed a full sampling of the nectar of freedom. He was plied with wine, women, song, and, in the true American tradition, hot dogs. 

After a few weeks of high living, the officer was returned to the West Berlin prison, where he was thrown into a dark cell. At an opportune moment he was allowed to escape. After the CIA had established that he was back at his post, flying the kind of aircraft they needed, they placed an ad in a Western paper which was circulated in the underground behind the Iron Curtain. The ad said that a certain group, not identified with the CIA, would pay $100,000 and arrange for political asylum for any pilot who would deliver the specified Soviet aircraft to the West. 

A few days after reading the ad, the Soviet officer flew his plane to the West, collected his $100,000, gained political asylum, and entered the "paradise" he had glimpsed for only two weeks. 

It should come as no surprise that many men will murder for simple, old-fashioned motives: sex, love, or money. One psychologist found that a sizable percentage of Americans would be willing to kill another human being if they were offered enough money and assured they would never be caught. 

In 1976 a Pasadena, California, psychologist, Dr. Paul Cameron, put the murder-for-pay question to 452 persons. Those questioned were divided into two groups. The first group included those who had already deliberately killed or attempted to kill another human being—usually in military service. The second group consisted of those who had never attempted to kill another person. 

The question was: "What is the least amount of money you would take to push a button to kill a person inside a black box—if no one would ever know what you did?" 

To Cameron's surprise, 45 percent of those who had killed before said they would be willing to push the black box button for an average price of only $20,000. Twenty five percent of those who'd never killed said they'd be willing to commit murder for an average price of $50,000, about the price of a house in the suburbs. 

Mind control is not needed to motivate assassins; it is, however, most useful to protect assassins and their employers from their own incriminating memories. 

In the course of researching this book I talked with a number of retired intelligence personnel (from various government agencies) who had either committed assassination or admitted having heard tales of assassins in their work. Few had heard of an assassin being mind-controlled. One man I consulted, however, took a special interest in the stories of David and Castillo. A chemist who had worked for one of the intelligence research labs, he developed new ways for killing quickly and quietly. And he had met several of the killers who were to use his formulas. 

Over a three-year period I talked with this chemist on a number of occasions. He came to trust that I would reveal no names and endanger no lives in telling the story of mind control. After hearing details of my research, he offered to introduce me to a man he had met while working at the lab. This man had been a high-ranking officer in the military, retired after thirty years of service. He had served as an officer in World War II and Korea. During the Vietnam conflict because of his special knowledge of "black science," he was induced to sign on after he retired from military service as a private contractor for the cryptocracy. During the next eighteen years, he accepted several simple assassination jobs. He told the chemist about some of his friends having come back from similar missions with "holes in their memories." 

The chemist had arranged a meeting in a noisy public restaurant in a small New Mexico town. Having promised to take no notes, I had secreted in my pocket the smallest tape recorder made, which allowed me to record three hours of the assassin's talk, amid clanking glasses and the general restaurant noise. 

When I finally sat across from him, my heart raced. The retired assassin was a sixty-year-old man, gray-haired, but as strong as a man twenty-five years his junior. He had a .357 magnum revolver strapped to his side, as did the man he introduced as his bodyguard. As a cover for the guns, he and the bodyguard both wore National Rifle Association patches sewn prominently to the pockets of their crisply pressed khaki clothes. 

The chemist had already informed his friend about the book I was researching. As we sat down and were introduced by first names only, I told the assassin I was especially interested in finding out why men had been returned to civilian life with amnesia. 

I mentioned the ad I had placed and the number of men who had responded. I mentioned also that the majority of those who responded, and who had reason to believe their minds had been tampered with, had been enlisted men. 

Career officers, he explained, were legally bound by security oaths and economically dependent upon pensions and the privileges of rank, but enlisted men, while perhaps bound by an oath, were likely to separate from the service knowing more than they needed to know. Somebody had to man the high-technology instruments of war and those who were merely computer fodder had to be protected against their knowledge—they could not be trusted. Patriotism, especially during the Vietnam era, was a waning motivation. Their memories had to be erased. But, he explained, mind control was not needed to make a killer. Professionals didn't usually need to be motivated. Most members of search-and-destroy or "executive action" teams were already willing to kill—men, women, or children—if their superiors ordered it. 

I concluded that he meant a career killer didn't need to be debriefed by mind control. When I said that, he contradicted me. "You want to bet?" he said. "They'd all kill, but they might not be able to keep the secret. It would depend entirely upon what activities they were involved in, whether the assignment was combat, mop-up, search-and destroy, political assassination, or whatever .. . 

"This debriefing is done in such a way, in many cases, as to cause actual memory damage. As things have gone along and progressed, the techniques have been smoothed out, but memory damage still occurs. In certain cases memory recall is so critical that they bend over backwards to be damned sure that you can't remember. 

"Many of the things that occur are not as pretty as you'd like the public to think," he said. 

"So you've witnessed many atrocities of war?" I asked. 

"I don't call them atrocities," he countered. "I call them military actions. There's a lot of conflict of interest there— the politicians against the military ... " 

I let him rail a while about the evils of the government and then brought him back to my point of interest. "OK, who killed JFK, RFK, King, and who was behind Bremer?" I asked. He didn't remember who Bremer was, so I explained that he was the man who'd shot Wallace. 

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Bremer was just a kook. Wallace was shot just by a kook. But whoever got the Kennedys and King probably got a gold medal. 

"We were set up to wipe Castro out. Kennedy interfered at the last minute. You want to take a guess at who killed him? . . . Oswald was just a patsy. I've fired the same kind of rifle Oswald was supposed to have used. You can't rapid-fire that thing like he was supposed to have done. Now who do you suppose killed Kennedy? 

". . . Don't kid yourself. This country is controlled by the Pentagon. All the major decisions in this country are made by the military, from my observations on the clandestine side of things. 

"The CIA's just the whipping boy. NSA [the National Security Agency] are the ones who have the hit teams. Look into their records—you won't find a thing. Look into  their budget—you can't. For the life of you, you can't find any way they could spend the kind of money they've got on the number of people who're supposed to be on their payroll. Even if they had immense research and development programs, they couldn't spend that kind of money. 

"The CIA's just a figurehead. They are more worldwide—like the FBI is. They're accountants, lawyers, file clerks, schoolboys. They are information gatherers. They've pulled a lot of goddamned shenanigans, I'm not going to deny that, but as far as intelligence goes the NSA's far, far superior to them—far in advance in the 'black arts.' 

"The CIA gets blamed for what NSA does. NSA is far more vicious and far more accomplished in their operations. The American people are kept in ignorance about this—they should be, too." 

"In other words," I responded, "what you're saying is that the military is more dangerous to our democracy than the CIA or other intelligence groups?" 

"The CIA gathers information, but the military heads the show. Look at how many former military officers work for the CIA. Look at how many former high-ranking military officers work for the multinational corporations. Can't you figure it out?" 

"What are you suggesting, that there is an invisible coup d'etat which has occurred in the United States?" I asked. 

"OK. There is a group of about eighteen or twenty people running this country. They have not been elected. The elected people are only figureheads for these guys who have a lot more power than even the President of the United States." 

"You mean that the President is powerless?" I asked. 

"Not exactly powerless. He has the power to make decisions on what is presented to him. The intelligence agencies tell him only what they want to tell him, however. They don't tell him any more than they have to or want to. 

"You have to wonder at American stupidity. How much does it take to get people to wake up to what has happened? It's public knowledge that the CIA has falsified documents and given Presidents fake intelligence reports so that he can only arrive at one conclusion—the conclusion they want them to arrive at. The Pentagon Papers revealed that fact. 

"What people don't know is that the global corporations have their own version of the CIA. Where they don't interface with the CIA, they have their own organizations—all CIA-trained. They also have double agents inside CIA and other intelligence organizations who are loyal to those corporations—I mean where's the bread buttered? Would you rather take the government pensions, or would you rather work a little for the corporation on the side and get both government pensions and corporate benefits after you retire? Most men retire after twenty years, and they're only in their mid-forties . . . then they go to work for the corporation they've been working for while they were in government service. They get both the pension and the corporate paycheck that way! 

"Together with what the corporations do on their own, they have a worldwide espionage system far better than the CIA's. There is a network of what amounts to double agents—they do work for the government, and may appear to be government agents, but they are first loyal to the corporations. They report to those corporations on the government and on what foreign governments might be planning which would interfere with those corporations foreign investments. These guys are strictly free enterprise agents." 

"You call these guys contract agents?" I wondered. 

"Oh, no, no, no .. . Take, for example—we develop a new death ray. We've got all the security the government can think of on it. We've got the best security in the United States on it, which is tied for second place for the best security in the world. Tied for first place are the Russian and Chinese security systems. 

"Now even with all this security, before FACI [First Article Configuration Inspection, the government's checking system on the manufacturing of military hardware] on a government contract—that death ray is up for grabs in every nation in the world. Any amount of military security can't keep it secret." 

"What you're saying," I interrupted, "is that American people are selling secrets, wholesale, to the highest bidder? That is to say, I assume, if the highest bidder is an American company?" 

"And even if it's not," he said. "Usually it is another nation. I've dealt with weapons and usually the nation that wants it most will pay the most for it. Once in a while these companies, these government contractors, will find that someone has stolen one of their secrets and there'll be a big flap. But the big boys that are in the military are an entirely different ball of wax . . . the big guys get away with it. 

"When one of these companies finds someone inside it that's selling secrets, they take him on a fishing trip, a boat ride, and get rid of him. It's quite common," he said. "For example, if I was tied in with one of these companies where money is no object, and they wanted me to get rid of you, I'd obtain a passport or a duplicate passport with your smilin' face on it. After I'd obtained it, I'd put whoever's face on it I wanted. Then after we dumped you, that 'someone' whose face was on your passport would take a trip to Australia. 

"Later your friends or family would notice you were missing and people would begin to inquire as to your whereabouts. Eventually they'd check with the Australian customs who'd say, yes, this guy entered the country on such and such a date. By then the guy who'd traveled over there on your passport would have already come back on his own, and as far as the best detective could tell you've gone to Australia and you've never come back." 

"What do you know about the military or the intelligence agencies' use of pain-drug hypnosis?" I asked. 

"They used several different things. I've seen, actually seen, guys coming back with blanks only in certain places of their memory. Let's say that I know positively, not by hearsay, that it's done." 

"You've seen it?" I asked. 

"You'll never get me to admit it;" he grinned. 

"Well, how is it done?" I asked. 

"They use hypnosis and hypnotic drugs. They also use electronic manipulation of the brain. They use ultrasonics, which will boil your brain. When they use hypnosis, they'll at the same time be using a set of earphones which repeat 'You do not know this or that,' over and over. They turn on the sonics at the same time, and the electrical patterns which give you memory are scrambled. You can't hear the ultrasonics and you can't feel it, unless they leave it on— then it boils your gray matter." 

Unless the assassin had done the same research I had, he could only have known this through firsthand experience. The CIA documents released in 1976 revealed that ultrasonic research was undertaken for a period of more than twenty years. But the documents said that the research had stopped, so I asked him about that. 

"Yeah. The research has stopped. They've gone operational. It ain't research any more. They know how to do it," he said. 

"Do you mean that it is your opinion that it hasn't stopped, or do you mean that you know it hasn't stopped?" I asked. 

"I mean I know it hasn't stopped," he said. "For example, suppose that a dictator in some South American country is setting up real problems and we try to kick him out. We call in some of my former group and say, 'Look, the bastard has got to have a fatal accident, and it's gotta look good—like he fell on a bar of soap and broke his neck in the bathtub or something.' So we go down there and get the job done. 

"But it could be quite embarrassing if any of the guys were cross-examined about where they'd been and what they'd done .. . So the guys who were in on the job suddenly have a cold or something, and they are put in a hospital for maybe just a routine checkup. They come out of the hospital in about fifteen days. They're alive. They're well. They're healthy. And they're happy, too. Lots of luck if you question them: they don't remember anything. 

"That's one way it's used. The other way is to use it to improve memory—say, with couriers. You want a secret message carried, outside the chain of command—there's no need to have it carried by a person if it's a legal message, because the military's got a thousand ways of sending messages which are unbreakably secret. But if it's outside the chain of command, as so many things are these days, if it's an illegal message, and our Constitution doesn't permit us to do much that is legal—then you have a hypno-programmed guy carry the message. You improve his memory so that he can carry an entire coded book of what appears to be gibberish, and when he's got it down you give him amnesia and seal off that message by a posthypnotic code word, and whammo! You got a real good secret courier, because he can be tortured to death but he can't remember. Unless the proper cue is uttered. 

"Then if the courier's going to operate against the enemy, who might have the techniques of hypnosis down, you give him several layers of post hypnotic command. In the first layer, he'll confess a false message. In the second layer, he'll confess another different false message. Finally, maybe on the fourth or fifth layer is the real message. 

"Our guy who is supposed to get the message knows that the first three cues, say, are fake, and he gives the fourth cue and out comes the correct message. If the courier was in enemy hands he could be there for years before anybody will figure out where he was in all those layers . . . Each identity will probably be that of a real 'cut out'—a person enough like him, so that the enemy will think that they've got the real guy. 

"Many of the men in my unit were given assignments, after which they were so 'persuaded' that they didn't remember anything. I mean to say, they'd gone in believing that the only thing in life that meant anything to them was completing the assignment—to get it done, and when they got done with it they couldn't remember anything about it." 

"Could these guys have been that way without hypnosis?" I asked. 

"Well, they could have believed that their mission in life was that particular assignment. They usually had no family affiliations, no friends, nothing but their careers. But I don't think they'd have forgotten about those kind of assignments. Not without a little help, let us say." 

"What was the conditioning that these guys had, was it drugs, hypnosis, or something else?" I wanted to know. 

"Hypnosis, electrotherapy, programming them by tapes, by voice-over earphones, awake or in trance, or asleep. By a number of methods." 

"How widespread was this mind control?" I asked. 

"Well, it was—well, that is something I can't really answer. I know of several different groups upon whom it was used. I know that it was used in some of the hairier areas of Korea and Vietnam, and it was started in World War Two, but it has been refined far more since then. How much of it was used, I don't know. I know of several groups that I was affiliated with that had it used on them." 

"Would you say this kind of thing did not exist before World War Two?" I asked. 

"Oh, it did. But it was not in such a sophisticated form. It's as old as man, but now it is refined to an art. Before it  was torture and psychological pressure—that can accomplish a lot. We've been trained to use it in primitive field situations. But now it's done with the idea that the mind can be put under complete control. Just like they used to use rubber hoses at the police stations. They don't do that anymore. Well, rubber hoses still work, but they don't work as well as some other things which the police now have." 

"Are you saying that the police also use mind control?" I asked. 

"At the highest levels, yes. The FBI certainly uses it, and they, of course, give a lot of help to the local police. There are certain areas of the brain which control your inhibitions. When they control those centers, then the subject will go on with his assignment, regardless. I've seen men whose mother could be sitting there having coffee, and if they'd been instructed to kill her, they'd walk right in and shoot her, and it wouldn't even upset their appetites for supper. They were conditioned to do it in such a way that they have no guilt. They wouldn't have guilt because after they were through they wouldn't even remember it. 

"Let me tell you something: the cheapest commodity in the world is human beings. Most assassins don't need to be programmed to kill. They're loyal to command. They're conditioned, first by the circumstances of their own early life, then by a little 'loyalty training.' The command is their only justification for living. It is also their only protection once they're into it .. . 

".. . When I came out of the service and went to work for the government, I had a colonel assigned to me as a bodyguard. When he retired I hired him," he said, pointing to his bodyguard. "He's still with me, and that's why we have these . . ." He pointed to the .357 magnum—the most powerful handgun in the world—strapped to his side in plain sight. 

"Who're you worried about? The Russians? The Chinese?" 

"Well, I'll tell you. You can damned near put a pin in the map anywhere you want. I got into military security before the Second World War. I was just a kid. Over the years I was assigned to thirty two different countries. So you can draw your own conclusion." 

"But what you've been talking about is a political action,  not a military one. How, then, as a military security man did you get involved in political actions?" 

"Well, suppose there were countries that were doing technological research on things which could be injurious to the welfare of the United States. I'd be one of the guys assigned to destroy those scientists who were involved in the research. That was with friendly and unfriendly governments. So, naturally, if they found out that I was in on it, even now, they'd come after me. 

"In other cases I was involved in knocking off some dictators. Then we'd change the people's voting ideas when they had to elect someone." 

I returned to the main thread of our conversation, "OK now, since we have this mind-control technology, what is to keep the guys in the cryptocracy or the military, as you maintain, from programming Presidents as soon as they take office, or immediately after they get elected?" 

"I have always wondered about Nixon," he mused. "He was very pro-military. He gave them just about everything they wanted in the world. But he wanted to create a monarchy with himself as king. And, slowly but surely, he tried to take over the military and the CIA through subordinate officers who were loyal to him only. 

"All you hear about are left-wing conspiracies to overthrow our government. You never hear about right-wing conspiracies. 

"Well, some of these right-wing groups are far more dangerous than the left wing. The left wing's mostly kids with dreams. The right wing is usually retired military. They're hard. They're trained. They've got arms. But if the right wing took over right now, there would be just a military dictatorship, and the military would find that its best plans were not upset at all. I'm saying if a dictatorship took over. Hell, we've got one right now, but it ain't overt, it's subtle." 

"You mean those twenty men you were talking about?" I asked. 

"Yeah .. . if the people of this country actually knew that, they would say 'no' the next time they were asked to go to Vietnam. We need the people behind us to fight a war, and if they knew the true facts, who's running things, there wouldn't be the following we'd need to defend the country. That fact alone keeps the sham of politics and 'free elections' going." 

"If that is the case, then the results would be different?" 

"Yes. If people knew they had a dictatorship. Have you ever heard of a factory slowdown, a strike? Well, Russia has run up against the problem, and so have we in supporting the foreign dictators we support. The American people, like most people, have to feel that they have some right, that they're the 'good guys.' This is the reason we have never lost a war and have never won a peace. 

"You've got to maintain the sham of freedom, no matter what. It wouldn't make any difference what party is in charge or whether it was the elected government or what you call the cryptocracy running it; from an operational sense, the government would operate as it presently is. From the point of view of people paying taxes and defending their country, well, we found in Latin America that people won't fight if they think that they have a dictator who is just as bad as the enemy who is attacking. 

"That's probably why it would be fairly easy to take over the Soviet Union, short of nuclear war. The Soviets could probably be convinced by psychological warfare that their government is certainly a lot more evil than ours. And if we went to war with them we could eventually win . . . that is until the H-bomb started to fall, then nobody'd be the winner." 

Changing the subject I asked, "What area of the military were you involved in?" 

"I don't think I ought to answer that. Let's say there was a group which first sought to solve problems politically. If that didn't work, then there was another group which went in and tried to buy solutions. If that failed, then my group was sent in to be damned sure things were accomplished the way we wanted them to be." 

"So you were operational, and not research at all?" I asked. 

"No. I had been in the lab for a long time. The knowledge I developed was very valuable in an operational sense. I was put into the field because of this knowledge." 

"You're talking about pretty sophisticated equipment, not commando stuff?" 

"Right. For example, I won't say the name of the country, but it was a South American country. We had a leader that we had supported there who suddenly got the idea that he was going to go off on his own. They tried to reason,  negotiate, buy off his affections. When all that failed, my team was sent in to correct the situation. 

"We went in very quietly and left very noisily. We went in as tourists, but the important material we brought in was the turning point. Let's say we couldn't reason with the man anymore. We were there about six days, and the problem disappeared. Not many bodies, just the important ones." 

The assassin was very specific telling about some of the jobs he'd accomplished. Several included actions taken against a well-known political figure—that, the assassin said, was the only assassination he'd ever "blown." His rifle malfunctioned at the critical moment when he had his target in the crosshairs of his sight. 

I cannot say that I had originally believed the assassin's claims, but after running the Psychological Stress Evaluator on all the critical portions of his interview, and finding no areas which unexpectedly or inexplicably produced stress, I believed that the assassin was telling the truth. The newspaper office he had mentioned was bombed when he said it was, but he could have gained knowledge of that from newspaper reports. The target of his unsuccessful hit was subsequently "taken care of" in another way which did not cost him his life. 

The assassin concluded the interview with a chilling prophecy. Jimmy Carter was then a candidate for the presidency. 

"I'll tell you something right now," the assassin said. "You've got a man running for office that is expressing the same goddamned philosophy John Kennedy had. Now he could be saying this stuff just to get elected. Matter of fact, if you look into his background, you find that he was a good naval officer. He had top security clearance. He was trained by Admiral Rickover who, he said, had a strong influence on his life. Taking this into consideration, you can assume that he's a loyal member of the old boy net, so he probably will make a good figurehead president for those in power. 

"But if he ain't an old boy and if he does believe all those things he's been telling the voters—if he tries to implement those reforms he's talking about, well, it's not a question of whether he's going to be snuffed, it's only a question of when or where." 

The assassin confirmed many of my own conclusions which had been based only on research: that an invisible coup d'etat had taken place in the United States; that the CIA is only the tip of the cryptocracy iceberg; and that ultrasonic and electrical memory erasure was used to protect "search-and-destroy" operators from their own memories. I had some indication that the cryptocracy had investigated such techniques (a 1951 CIA document had briefly cited the need for such research), but the assassin's disclosure that the cryptocracy had developed invisible forms of sonics and electronic stimulation of the brain for mind control sent me back to the libraries.

Chapter Eighteen 

DEEP PROBE 

Jose Delgado stood sweating in the center of a bull ring in Madrid. He was steaming from the heat of the sun reflected on the sand. He felt a twinge of natural fear as the door at one end of the walled ring swung open, and a huge black bull lunged forth from the darkness into the plaza de toros. 

This was a very good bull, one the best matador would have desired. It charged as if on rails, straight at Delgado. In front of a ton of black beef two sharp horns aimed to gore the vital parts of his body. 

Delgado stood face to face with the charging Andalusian toro. But Delgado was no matador. He stood in the ring alone in his shirtsleeves. He wore no "suit of lights" and he carried no cape. Instead of a sword, he held only a little black box. 

He wanted to wait until the last possible moment, but he could not contain his fear. When the bull was thirty feet away he pressed the button on the box. The bull immediately quit his attack and skidded to a halt. Toro looked right, then left, then, as if bewildered, he turned his broad side toward Delgado and trotted away. 

From the stands it was difficult to see the metal box between the horns which held that small radio receiver which picked up Delgado's signal and transmitted it as an electric impulse through a probe inserted into the center of the bull's brain. Delgado was not living out the boyhood fantasy of being a matador, nor was he demonstrating his  bravery. He was demonstrating his faith, as a scientist, in the power of electronic brain stimulation. 

Jose Delgado was a neurophysiologist at the Yale University School of Medicine. By 1964, when he made his dramatic demonstration with the bull, he had already been experimenting with electronic stimulation of the brain (ESB) for nearly two decades. His work, supported by the Office of Naval Research, had been inspired by the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who said that knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make man the true master of creation. Cajal suggested that man's most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquest of his own brain, and upon this premise Jose Delgado began his relentless quest to make his mentor's dream come true. 

"From ancient times," Dr. Delgado said, "man has tried to control the destiny of other human beings by depriving them of liberty and submitting them to obedience. Slaves have been forced to work and to serve the caprices of their masters; prisoners have been chained to row in the galleys; men were and still are inducted into the armed forces and sent thousands of miles away to create havoc, take lives, and lose their own. 

"Biological assault has also existed throughout recorded history. In ancient China, the feet of female children were bound to reduce their size. In many countries thieves have been punished by having their hands cut off; males have been castrated to inhibit sexual desire and then placed as eunuchs in charge of harems; and in some African tribes it was customary to ablate the clitoris of married females to block their possible interest in other men and insure their fidelity."1 

The Spanish-born Delgado believed that, thanks to electronic brain stimulation, science was at last on the verge of "a process of mental liberation and self-domination which is a continuation of our evolution." He believed that through the direct manipulation of the brain, society could produce "more intelligent education, starting from the moment of birth and continuing throughout life, with the preconceived plan of escaping from the blind forces of chance." 

Delgado believed that by direct influence of the cerebral  mechanisms and mental structure it would someday be possible to "create a future man .. . a member of a psychocivilized society, happier, less destructive, and better balanced than the present man." 

In 1969 Dr. Delgado pleaded that the U.S. government increase research into ESB in order to produce the fundamental information which would give birth to a "psychocivilized society." He said that the needed research could not be "generated by scientists themselves, but must be promoted and organized by governmental action declaring 'conquering of the human mind' a national goal at parity with conquering of poverty or landing a man on the moon."2 

Delgado insisted that brain research was much less expensive than going to outer space and would produce benefits to society equal to, if not greater than, those produced by space technology. 

By the time Delgado's remarks were published, the cryptocracy had already come a long way in developing the techniques to create the "psycho-civilized society" Delgado dreamed of. Delgado himself had been funded by grants from the cryptocracy but, like other researchers, was kept isolated and compartmented. He had no way of knowing about the other government-directed brain control research that was going on simultaneously with his own. A number of government agencies were actually at work on projects similar to Delgado's, and through these projects the cryptocracy had gained the technology for direct access to the control of the brain and through it, the mind. 

In 1949, Dr. Irving Janis of the Rand Corporation had recommended that the air force undertake a study of the "effects of electricity on the brain." His report said that, in research based on the literature of the 1940s, there were at least some indications that electric shocks to the brain might be conducive to mind control. 

Janis wrote: "Many studies have shown that there is a temporary intellectual impairment, diffuse amnesia, and general 'weakening of the ego' produced during the period when a series of electroshock convulsions is being administered." 

Dr. Janis was not talking about electronic brain stimulation; he was referring to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), a crude treatment for schizophrenia originated in Hungary in the 1930s, which consisted of passing a strong electrical current through the entire brain at once. 

Unlike ESB, ECT was not aimed at the microscopic neural centers of the brain. It was just one large jolt of electricity, which produced, rather than a specific neural event, a massive convulsion. Electrical current administered in such a way temporarily affected the electrical properties of all the neurons in the brain. It produced sharp biochemical changes in the levels of glucose, oxygen consumption, protein synthesis, and other functions. It also produced amnesia, sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent. 

As biochemist Steven Rosen said, "The [ECT] treatment is analogous to attempting to mend a faulty radio by kicking it, or a broken computer by cutting out a few of its circuits."3 Often the extreme convulsions induced by ECT produced such strong muscular contractions that the bones of the subject's body snapped like breadsticks. 

But Dr. Janis did not seem to think it too severe a treatment for use in mind control. "From my own and others' investigations of the psychological effects of such treatments," he wrote, "I would suspect that they might tend to reduce resistance to hypnotic suggestions. It is conceivable, therefore, that electroshock treatment might be used to weaken difficult cases in order to produce a hypnotic trance of great depth."4 

Meanwhile, astonishing discoveries were being made which indicated that the use of electronic stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain as a reward for performance could be used to enhance learning. Experiments conducted at the end of World War II showed that rats learned to run around mazes and perform in Skinner boxes better after they had received properly applied electronic stimulation of their brains. Repeated experiments showed that when animals were rewarded with electricity applied to the pleasure center of the brain, they learned much more rapidly than did animals who were conditioned by rewards of food. One Department of Defense project graphically illustrated the use of such pleasure stimulation conditioning. 

The Sandia Corporation in New Mexico was asked by the Department of Defense to set up a demonstration of ESB and film the results. Sandia produced a striking film which showed electrodes being implanted into the brain of an army mule. After the mule recovered from surgery, a brain stimulator was placed in a pack on its back, along with a prism and mirror which were arranged so that they operated a photocell when the animal was facing directly toward the sun. When sunlight struck the photocell, it turned on a brief burst of electricity which was sent along wires into the pleasure center of the mule's brain. When the mule turned away from the sun, the stimulation stopped. But when the mule faced the sun again, the pleasurable stimulation resumed. 

So wired, the mule marched over hill and dale across the barren land of New Mexico, always facing the sun. Finally it came to the boundary of the property, where a scientist was waiting. The mirror was reversed and then the mule retraced its steps by keeping its back to the sun. Mules are not noted for being cooperative beasts, but this electrically stimulated mule traced and retraced its path without deviation, just as long as the stimulation continued. 

Sandia's mule film created a great deal of enthusiasm at the Pentagon. Quickly, the officers saw the military significance of the experiment: mules could be made to clear minefields! They could be used to deliver explosives to assigned targets, much as the Russians had used trained dogs to carry explosives against German tanks during World War II! And what mules could accomplish on land, porpoises, with much greater intelligence, could accomplish in the sea! 

It soon became clear to the cryptocracy that electronic brain stimulation held the greatest promise for specific, selective mind control. The usefulness of drugs in manipulating human behavior had been limited by the inability of researchers to control either the desired or the undesired effects of the drugs with any precision. ESB, however, used in conjunction with psycho-surgery and behavior modification, offered unlimited possibilities. After experiments on laboratory animals met with success, human experimentation was enthusiastically undertaken in quest of the most reliable and absolute method of remote control of the mind. 

Because human behavior is influenced by many more variables, experimentation on humans proved to be more complex than with animals. Experimenters were constantly reaching false conclusions. Often the observed effects of stimulating certain areas of the brain turned out to be only indirectly related to the stimulation. 

For example, a fifty-year-old female mental patient was stimulated in what was thought to be her pleasure center. She had been an extremely withdrawn and melancholy person whose expression always seemed impassive and dour. When electronic stimulation was applied at irregular intervals and different times of day, she would laugh or smile. The scientists concluded that they were stimulating a strong pleasure region in her brain and grew confident that they had found a way to cure the woman of her melancholia. They began to discuss their findings openly in her presence, until one day she became angry and told them she did not enjoy the experiments at all. She explained to the scientists that the stimulus was not giving her pleasure, it was creating a rhythmic contraction of certain pelvic muscles. She had smiled and laughed from being tickled! 

After many years of experimentation, it is still unknown just exactly which effects of electronic brain stimulation are psychological, which are physical, and which are psychophysical. For every experiment suggesting that a particular behavior change is due to the direct effect of electricity applied to a center of the brain, there are others which suggest that the effect is a result of some psychological response to the initial stimulus. 

From the Brain Research Institute at the University of California came a report by Dr. Mary Brazier that one patient continued to "self-stimulate even after electricity was turned off and there was no more current in the electrode." Others gave similar reports, saying that some subjects continued to press a lever which had rewarded them with pleasurable stimulation long after the current was cut off. These subjects pushed the lever hundreds of times when they were receiving no stimulation at all, and kept on doing it until the experiment was terminated. 

Several experimenters reported that ESB elicited sexual feelings and in some cases orgasms. In a report summarizing seven years of research with ESB, Dr. R. G. Heath told of one melancholic patient who had attempted suicide a number of times. When all else failed to elevate his mood, doctors resorted to ESB. An electrode implanted in his hypothalamus was activated and the subject smiled. After the experience he said, "I feel good. I don't know why, I just suddenly felt good." Upon further questioning the patient admitted that there might have been sexual overtones in his experience. He said, "It's like I had something lined up for Saturday night .. . a girl."

Heath reported that in several instances ESB led to orgasm. While orgasms may have been caused by genital sensations created when certain areas of the brain were stimulated, Heath said that he did not believe that genital sensations had to be present for orgasm to occur. He observed that self-stimulation usually stopped after orgasm was reached. He concluded that stimulation of the orgasm center of the brain, if that was what had produced the orgasms, appeared to be no more compelling than masturbation. 

From the Soviet Union came a report typical of many of the surprising results of ESB. A thirty-seven-year-old woman suffering from Parkinson's disease was given ESB treatments to alleviate the effects of palsy. The stimulation evoked sexual sensations which eventually led to orgasm. The woman then began to hang around the laboratory. She would initiate conversation with aides and assistants whenever she could. She even waited for them in the hospital corridors and the garden trying to find out when the next session was scheduled. She was especially affectionate toward the doctor who was throwing the switch to activate the probes in her brain. When she was finally told that there would be no more stimulation, she displayed extreme dissatisfaction. 

Strangely, the stimulation did not give the woman any sexual pleasure until her menstrual cycle, which had been absent for eight years, resumed as a result of the stimulation. Soviet investigators expressed their belief, based on studies such as this, that the motivational consequences of ESB are subject to conscious control. This conclusion is supported by the results of many experiments in the West as well. 

In 1964 Richard Helms reported to the Warren Commission (see Appendix A) that the trend in the Soviet Union was to build "the New Communist/Man" through cybernetics (the use of machines as control/mechanisms). Helms quoted an unidentified Soviet author saying: "Cybernetics can be used in 'molding of a child's character, the inculcation of knowledge and techniques, the amassing of experience, the establishment of social behavior patterns . . . all functions which can be summarized as control of the growth process of the individual.' " The Helms memo indicated that the Soviets did not possess any knowledge which the West did not have, and in some areas even lagged far behind U.S. research. The tone of his memo seemed to suggest that the U.S. cryptocracy was also interested in creating a "new man"—a cyborg. 

The term "cyborg" was coined in the mid-sixties by C. Maxwell Cade. It was first used to describe a human body or other organism whose functions are taken over in part by various electronic or electromechanical devices. But true man-machine interface will not exist until the machine becomes an extension not of a man's hands but of his brain. When the machine responds directly to thought, just as an arm or hand does, then the cyborg will be among us. Electronic brain stimulation is the first real step toward the creation of a true cyborg. 

ESB has, meanwhile, been strikingly successful in other areas. It has been used to modify mental mechanisms, to produce changes in mood and feelings, to reinforce behavior both positively and negatively. It has been used to activate sensory and motor regions of the brain in order to produce elementary or complex experiences or movements, to summon memories, and to induce hallucinations. It also has been used to suppress or inhibit behavior and experience and memory—outside of the conscious control of the owner of the brain. 

ESB has inhibited the intake of food. It has inhibited aggressiveness and even the maternal instinct. It has been widely used in medical research to help stroke victims recover from paralysis and to block epileptic convulsions. It has proved to be an aid to paraplegics in controlling their bladders and it has helped certain kinds of paralysis victims to walk again. It has been found to be effective in blocking even the most severe pain. 

ESB has been used by psychiatrists to improve mood, increase alertness, and produce orgasm. It has been used as a conditioning tool to "cure" undesirable social behavior such as homosexuality. And, in 1974, the first victim of Parkinson's disease treated by ESB walked gracefully out of a San Francisco hospital under his own power, thanks to portable ESB. He had a "stimoceiver" implanted in his brain which he could activate from a battery-powered device in his belt. The "stimoceiver," which weighed only a few grams and was small enough to implant under his scalp, permitted both remote stimulation of his brain and the instantaneous telemetric recording of his brain waves. 

Ten years before, Dr. Delgado had foreseen the day when a psychocivilized society would resort to the use of such stimoceiver for control of the masses. He had said, "A two-way radio communication system could be established between the brain of a subject and a computer. Certain types of neuronal activity related to behavioral disturbances such as anxiety, depression, or rage could be recognized in order to trigger stimulation of specific inhibitory structures . . ."5 What he was describing was a society kept under emotional control by electronic brain manipulation. Rather than have man control a machine with his brain, Delgado wanted the control of man by machine. 

The present state of Western technology enables man to open garage doors, fly model airplanes, and change television channels by remote control. The government communicates via telemetry with satellites far out in the solar system. Medical scientists monitor heartbeats and vital functions of patients in hospitals and astronauts on the moon. And by the late 1960s, the "remote control" of the human brain—accomplished without the implantation of electrodes—was well on its way to being realized. 

A research and development team at the Space and Biology Laboratory of the University of California at the Los Angeles Brain Research Institute found a way to stimulate the brain by creating an electrical field completely outside the head. Dr. W. Ross Adey stimulated the brain with electric pulse levels which were far below those thought to be effectual in the old implanting technique. 

In one experiment, Dr. Adey analyzed the brain waves of chimpanzees who were performing tasks that involved learning. He established that there were two very distinct brain-wave patterns which accompanied correct and incorrect decisions. Building on this, Dr. Adey attempted to control the rate at which the chimps learned by applying force fields to the outside of the head to alter behavior, moods, and attention. Dr. Adey's research indicated that his subjects were able to remember new information faster and better with stimulation. 

In the vanguard of brain technology, Dr. Adey worried about misuse of ESB when applied to humans. "My personal concern," he said, "is that we do it well. That if we decide that this manipulation is feasible, that we do it in ways that are socially acceptable."6 

In 1975 a primitive "mind-reading machine" was tested at the Stanford Research Institute. The machine is a computer which can recognize a limited amount of words by monitoring a person's silent thoughts. This technique relies upon the discovery that brain wave tracings taken with an electroencephalograph (EEG) show distinctive patterns that correlate with individual words—whether the words are spoken aloud or merely subvocalized (thought of). 

The computer initially used audio equipment to listen to the words the subject spoke. (At first the vocabulary was limited to "up," "down," "left," and "right.") At the same time the computer heard the words, it monitored the EEG impulses coming from electrodes pasted to the subject's head and responded by turning a camera in the direction indicated. After a few repetitions of the procedure, the computer's hearing was turned off and it responded solely to the EEG "thoughts." It moved a television camera in the directions ordered by the subject's thoughts alone! 

This "mind-reading machine" was the creation of psychologist Lawrence Pinneo and computer experts Daniel Wolf and David Hall. Their stated goal was eventually to put a highly skilled computer programmer into direct communication with the computer. Their research indicated that a nonsymbolic language—brain-wave patterns—did exist. By teaching computers this language, the time consuming practice of speaking or writing computer instructions could be abandoned. Faster programming would result in an information explosion whose effects could cause a transformation of our civilization unlike anything that has happened since the Industrial Revolution. 

Many beneficial effects of the Stanford "mind-reading machine" may eventually accrue. Physically handicapped people may be able to use mini-computers to interpret signals from their environment and compensate for the loss of some bodily functions. The deaf may be able to hear; the blind to see; the paralyzed to walk. 

Military applications of a "mind-reading machine" will someday allow faster computer input and output of information, remote control of war machines, and even the creation of animal or human robots to do the bidding of the military. 

Norbert Wiener, the "father of cybernetics," once said that the human brain, while functioning in a manner parallel to the computer, actually imitates only one run of it. Rudolph Flesch clarified Wiener's statement, adding that it was the computer which had the advantage since it had the ability to store memory away until needed for the consideration of a new problem. He said that while the machine starts each new problem from scratch, man carries his past with him until he dies. 

One young scientist at Rockefeller University, Dr. Adam Reed, is working under a Department of Defense contract to change all that. At a 1976 symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Adam Reed said, "Ideally, the computer of the future should be an electronic extension of the natural brain functioning in parallel with some of the existing brain structures and using the same program and data languages." 

According to Dr. Reed, within two decades it will be possible to encode and transmit brain waves from a small device implanted inside the skull. It will be linked by radio control to a large computer with a huge memory bank which, he said "will have stored in it everything you might want to know about foreign languages, mathematics, music, history—and any other subject you would want to add. You'll enjoy instant recall. The information stored in your own memory cells and in your computer will be readily accessible. You won't be able to forget things . . . You'll also be able to calculate even the most complicated problems with split-second speed." 

But Dr. Reed admitted that there were very real dangers to mental freedom posed by the brain technology now being developed. "It is essential that people be able to use them [the computers] for their own purposes rather than for purposes imposed on them by the political structure." [Well duh, and good luck with that you useful idiot,I mean what did you think was going to happen with the tech considering you were at Rocky U. Geez, some peoples kids piss me off DC]

While Dr. Reed conceded that it was "conceivable that thoughts could be injected" into a person's mind by the government, he indicated that he did not believe it had already been done. "If the political system changes and massive abuses appear likely," he said, "that would be the time to disappear from the society." [Thanks for the sage advice,as I shake my head at his naive attitude about the 'political system' around him DC]

Dr. Lawrence Pinneo at the Stanford Research Institute also discouraged the idea of a conspiracy to create a "psycho-civilized," mind-controlled society. When asked if there weren't a real and present danger of government control of the thoughts of citizens posed by brain-computer technology, Pinneo told a San Francisco reporter, "Anything is possible. But government could lock us all up today, so this sort of thing doesn't really change that possibility. It is really up to us to be vigilant against misuse."7 

Typically, the scientists have not been vigilant enough, for the cryptocracy already has developed remote-controlled men who can be used for political assassination and other dangerous work, as is the cyborg in the "Six Million Dollar Man"—but for less noble purposes. Cyborgs— altered and controlled humans—are far less expensive than fully mechanical robots. Due to the high cost of technology men are cheaper than machines, and much more expendable.

next
FROM BIONIC WOMAN TO STIMULATED CAT

footnotes
Chapter 18 
1. Jose Delgado, Physical Control of the Mind (New York, Harper, 1969) 
2. Ibid. 
3. Steven Rosen, Future Facts (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1976) 
4. Irving Janis, Are the Cominform Countries Using Hypnosis Techniques to Elicit Confessions in Public Trials? 
5. Delgado, op. cit. 
6. Fred Warshofsky, The Control of Life: The 21st Century (New York, Viking, 1969) 
7. Lawrence Pinneo, San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, 1974.

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