Mind Control: The Rosetta
Stone of the JFK Assassination
11/20/03
“How can we make a monster out of a
man? Unfortunately, it is quite simple.”
--George Estabrooks, Harvard PhD & Military Hypnosis Expert
In the stunning 1962 film “The Manchurian
Candidate,” communist agents take an unwitting U.S. soldier behind enemy lines
and turn him into a brainwashed sleeper-agent. Under the influence of enemy
mind control, this programmed GI returns to the States and assassinates an
American presidential candidate.
I believe that a series of events similar to
this actually happened--explaining the assassination of an American president.
The murder was none other than that of President John F. Kennedy by supposed
Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald. However, the brainwashing was done not by an enemy
government, but by doctors allied with the United States Central Intelligence
Agency. The CIA put its own shocking
twist on the “Manchurian Candidate” scenario by first sending Oswald behind
enemy lines as a brainwashed agent of his own government in the guise of a
communist defector. Following his return to the U.S., Oswald would be used
as a counter-intelligence operative by playing the role of provocateur and, ultimately, unwitting assassin.
Could Oswald really have been a victim of
the CIA’s crash mind control program (MKULTRA) and employed as one of the numerous fake defectors we now know the US successfully used in sophisticated,
top-level Cold War operations against the Soviet Union? Did elements tied to
the CIA’s
then-secret Castro assassination plots subsequently use Oswald in a sinister
plot to assassinate a
President it deemed a threat to its aggressive anti-Cuba operations? I believe
this is so and review fascinating declassified data and the confessions of
government insiders to support this theory in my book The
Perfect Assassin.
Indeed, in the 40 years since the
assassination we have learned much more about the CIA’s historic use of mind
control, fake defectors, provocateurs and assassins than most people realize. And this information is invaluable in
weaving together seemingly contradictory strands of evidence to converge on a
coherent theory of the JFK case.
For example, Oswald as a “programmed assassin,” incredible as it seems, was foreshadowed to an amazing extent in a declassified CIA memo on “terminal experiments” in mind control. Detailed information about a planned assassination experiment using a defector was revealed in a 1950s-era CIA memorandum published by the New York Times in 1978. The subject of the experiment would be a defector “induced” under mind control “to perform an act, involuntarily, against a prominent (deleted) politician or if necessary, against an American official.” The CIA memo continued: “After the act of attempted assassination was performed, it was assumed that the subject would be taken into custody by the (deleted) government and thereby ‘disposed of.’”
Maybe this idea was just a lot of smoke, spy bureaucrats
dreaming of novel ways to manipulate their agents to carry out missions even
“against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.” But maybe it
was more than that. Examine the parallels between this idealized CIA-backed
assassination and the events which would unfold in Dallas: Oswald, a defector,
after allegedly committing the assassination of the American President was
“taken into custody” by agents of the U.S. government and shortly thereafter
“disposed of” by Jack Ruby on national television in the basement of a city
jail.
For
years following the assassination, Oswald was portrayed as an unstable,
lone-nut assassin with communist sympathies, as evidenced by what his mother
called his “so-called” defection to the Soviet Union. But now we know more.
Depending on the time and place, Oswald could display either militant pro-communist
or anti-communist sympathies. Upon closer examination, this seemingly
perplexing behavior forms a pattern which points to his being a victim of the
CIA’s technology for creating “programmed” agents who, while exhibiting
pro-communist traits, were actually being used in anti-communist operations.
The
confessions of a top-level military hypnotist
named George Estabrooks provide shocking details on how fake defectors and assassins were created and used for
anti-communist purposes in textbook fashion through hypnosis. The trick was to create an unwitting double agent with a dual
personality structure (one personality a
“rabid communist” the other “rabidly American and anti-communist”) that could
be worked however the CIA saw fit in its covert war against communism. In
Oswald’s case, the idea was to set him up in both anti-communist and
pro-communist roles on the highly charged Cuban issue in the early 1960s. This
would allow him to be manipulated for covert spying operations, then, if
needed, be used in a final deadly assignment.
Despite
the labor involved in the process of creating a hypnotized double agent with a
dual personality structure, Estabrooks boasted that the rewards would be well
worth the trouble: “The proper training of a person for this role would be long
and tedious, but once he was trained, you would have a super spy compared to
which any creation in a mystery story is just plain weak.”
One use for Oswald, documents suggest, was to establish him as a
communist sympathizer so he could identify and track Kennedy-era pro-Castro
elements that might threaten U.S. preparations for invading Cuba. We now know
that the CIA used scores of phony leftists to infiltrate and disrupt suspect
groups on a grand scale throughout the 1960s. As one of the CIA’s many ‘60s-era
agents provocateur, Oswald could not
only infiltrate
organizations but discredit them as well through CIA manipulation.
The pipeline was a chapter of Fair Play for Cuba Committee
[FPCC] formed personally by Oswald. The FPCC was an organization despised by
the CIA, which conspired to monitor and discredit it. Evidence supporting the
theory of Oswald as agent provocateur includes the fact that the
New Orleans address printed on some of his pro-Castro FPCC leaflets, 544 Camp
Street, was also that of a violently anti-Castro CIA “front” organization
staffed by one Guy Banister, an ex-FBI agent turned private detective with a long
history involving intelligence-related, anti-Castro activities. Would a
legitimate leftist agitator have the address of a militant anti-communist on
his pro-communist literature?
Certainly a shared address does not make
Lee Harvey Oswald a double agent under the influence of hypnosis. But it does
raise suspicions, especially when considering the numerous benefits of his
actions to the CIA and the parallels between his behavior modes and those
described by Kennedy-era documents on mind control.
John
Marks, author of The
Search for the “Manchurian Candidate” and who has conducted extensive
research on declassified CIA documents from the Kennedy-era, disclosed details of an illuminating CIA hypnosis operation
with a programmed double agent sent out to spy on leftist organizations:
…Agency officials would tip off the local police that the man was a
dangerous communist agent, and he would be arrested. Through their liaison
arrangement with the police, Agency case officers would be able to watch and
even guide the course of the interrogation. In this way, they could answer
many of their questions about hypnosis on a live guinea pig who believed his
life was in danger. [emphasis added]
Marks’ description of the CIA’s proposed use of a hypnotized
informant, arrested in an orchestrated intelligence operation (Marks was himself
the victim of a CIA-orchestrated arrest while doing overseas research on CIA
operations), sheds light on events that occurred while Oswald was in New
Orleans just prior to the Kennedy assassination. While brandishing a “Viva Fidel” sign and
handing out “Fair Play for Cuba!”
pamphlets on a street corner, a scuffle broke out between now “pro-Castro Oswald” and an
anti-Castro Cuban on the CIA payroll whom “anti-Castro Oswald” had previously
offered to help in overthrowing the Cuban leader. Oswald was immediately
arrested, only to be released the next day. What
went on in that interrogation room?
Oswald’s actions following this episode are intriguing with
respect to the hypothesis that he was playing a role in the CIA’s war against
the Fair Play For Cuba Committee. He appeared on the radio to explain and defend his
Marxist views–an act that not only helped discredit the FPCC but also
established the credibility of his “Marxist traitor” role that would later be
useful in pinning the convenient elimination of
Kennedy—the enemy of the more extreme anti-Castro operatives—on a
disgruntled defector and Castro sympathizer.
Oswald
also dutifully wrote a revealing letter to the Communist Party USA to tell it
that his actions may have “compromised” the FPCC: “I feel I may have
compromised the FPCC, so you see that I need the advice of trusted. [sic] Long
time fighters for progress. Please advise.” Elsewhere in his correspondence to
the American Communist Party, Oswald cogently noted that “Our opponents could
use my background of residence in the U.S.S.R. against any cause which I join”
and that “by association, they could say the organization of which I am a
member, is Russian controled, ect [sic]. I am sure you see my point.” Indeed.
Philip Melanson summarized the convenience of Oswald’s supposedly
hostile actions in Spy Saga:
Oswald’s New Orleans summer was indeed productive. It generated
negative publicity for the FPCC and was a propaganda coup for the
anti-Castroites; it produced a paper trail supporting the agency’s professed
theory of communist subversion while simultaneously legitimizing domestic
spying. Beyond these payoffs, there was another one which–whether or not it was
specifically intended at the time–would be crucial within three months.
Oswald’s pro-Castro involvement would be a central element in the purposely
crafted image of Oswald-the-assassin.
The synergy between Oswald’s actions and ongoing CIA
operations goes back further. There is his bizarre defection to the Soviet
Union, which gave him the “communist sympathizer” credentials to infiltrate
leftist groups in the U.S. following his “redefection.”
Numerous irregularities about the episode are consistent
with the postulate that the defection was staged and monitored. For one thing,
the CIA seemed to handle Oswald’s defection with marked indifference. Given the
super-sensitive nature of the American U-2 spy-plane information (which he
brazenly offered to give to the Soviets after his defection) Oswald supposedly
had access to as a Marine stationed at a U-2 base in Japan, a major damage
assessment should have been conducted by the U.S. intelligence agencies to
determine if their prized surveillance capability had been fatally compromised.
But apparently no such assessment was undertaken. According to the official
story, Oswald was not even debriefed by the CIA when he returned to the U.S.
Nor was he prosecuted for offering to sell American military secrets to the
Soviets.
Melanson noted these suspicious facts:
The Agency claims it had no interest in Oswald and never debriefed him
upon his return from Russia. Was the CIA so simple-minded that it saw no
possible connection between Oswald and the U-2? Did it see one but forget to
follow up on it by debriefing him? Or did it already know precisely what
Oswald had told the Soviets? [emphasis added]
Researchers have proposed that Oswald’s defection was
actually part of an orchestrated CIA counterintelligence operation designed to
find a Soviet “mole” in U.S. intelligence. The CIA feared this Russian agent
was providing the Soviets damaging information on the top-secret U-2 spy
plane—the most powerful espionage tool in the CIA’s Cold War arsenal. According to one scenario, by staging Oswald’s
defection, American officials hoped to determine how much classified
information the Soviets already had on the U-2, and as a bonus, to nail the
mole.
A
recently uncovered precedent shows how this might have worked. David Wise
revealed an eerily similar operation with a fake soldier-defector named Joe
Cassidy (code-named WALLFLOWER) in his exposé Cassidy’s
Run. This sophisticated, twenty-year counterintelligence operation
began the same year Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. Dangling a phony
traitor (prepped to provide carefully chosen top-level disinformation) in front
of Soviet agents proved fantastically successful. As summarized by Wise:
By the questions the Soviets put to WALLFLOWER, the FBI and the
Pentagon discovered a good deal about what the Russians knew and did not know
about American military strength and secrets. The United States also learned
more about how the Soviets recruited and ran American agents and more about
their tradecraft techniques as well, from hollow rocks, new chemicals for
secret writing, and rollover cameras, to codes and communications. In addition,
the six Soviets sent to handle Joe Cassidy were kept busy running a controlled
source, which left them less time to recruit and run real spies.
This fascinating “Operation SHOCKER” was made easier in that it
took place on U.S. soil. How could a similar operation with a fake
defector/traitor be monitored in the Soviet Union itself? A declassified CIA
document unearthed by Dr. Colin Ross (Bluebird:
Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists) reveals how
valuable operational information could be obtained from a hypno-programmed
field-operative himself, unwittingly playing the roles of leftist traitor and
then “loyal American”: “Once every month or at such time is advisable, they
will be contacted by a member of our intelligence department, hypnotized and as
loyal Americans will tell what they know. This sounds unbelievable, but I
assure you, it will work.”
This CIA memo echoes top-level military hypnotist George Estabrooks
who also wrote of military
men being used as fake defectors in intelligence missions. In numerous
publications he pointed out the power of hypnosis in
creating convincing agents for such operations and his revelations are as
detailed as they are startling. Estabrooks even
described one case in which hypnosis was used to induce his polarized personality structure in a Marine prior to his being
given a dishonorable discharge. The ultimate purpose of the charade was to
use the unwitting Marine, in his crafted pro-Communist role, as an intelligence
pawn:
During World War II, I worked this technique with a vulnerable Marine
lieutenant I’ll call Jones. Under the watchful eye of Marine intelligence I
split his personality into Jones A and Jones B. Jones A, once a “normal”
working Marine, became entirely different. He talked communist doctrine and
meant it. He was welcomed enthusiastically by communist cells, and was
deliberately given a dishonorable discharge by the Corps (which was in on the
plot) and became a card-carrying party member. [emphasis added]
Manipulating
this Marine’s artificially polarized personality structure according to his
textbook description, Estabrooks could recover information about the enemy
groups his programmed communist spy had infiltrated (as “Jones A”) by accessing
the anti-communist personality mode “Jones B”: “All I had to do was hypnotize
the whole man, get in touch with Jones B, the loyal American, and I had a
pipeline straight into the communist camp,” Estabrooks bragged.
The
extent to which discharged Marine Oswald resembles such
an operative who was programmed and planted for an intelligence mission
is tantalizing. Bob Callahan described soldier Oswald
as a “a top secret Marine radar operator who worked on the U-2; a disenchanted
jarhead who spent his time spouting Marxist slogans to mysterious women
companions in expensive Japanese bars.” Compare that description to that of another of Estabrooks’ unwitting military dupes, an
“Officer Cox” he boasted of brainwashing to play the role of defector:
“He was planted in an international café in a border country where it was
certain there would be enemy agents. He talked too much, drank a lot, made
friends with local girls and pretended a childish interest in hypnotism.”
Estabrooks
had not only described the advantages of using such unwitting, programmed agents for espionage, he warned that such
techniques could be used to produce assassins. As he revealed
in one publication: “The key to
creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man’s personality,
or creating multipersonality, with the aid of hypnotism.” He added: “This is not science fiction. …I have done
it.” Elsewhere, Estabrooks issued an even more explicit warning:
Is hypnosis dangerous? It can be. Under certain circumstances, it is
dangerous in the extreme. It has even been known to lead to murder. Given the
right combination of hypnotist and subject, hypnosis can be a lethal weapon.
Indeed, hypnosis has been used as a
lethal weapon. A fascinating real-life case was described by Paul Reiter (Antisocial or Criminal Acts and Hypnosis: A
Case Study) prior to the JFK
murder. It involves a hypnotized ex-military man with ties to anti-communist
extremists who was manipulated into engaging in staged, underground leftist
political activities and ultimately committing a double murder. This is exactly
what Lee Harvey Oswald, the ex-soldier accused of killing the U.S. President
(and a Dallas police officer while on the run) is accused of doing.
Was
Oswald brainwashed as a CIA assassin in addition to being used as an operative
along the lines explicitly described by Estabrooks? Oswald, the supposed
lone-nut, was not exactly a stranger to violence-prone, CIA-backed groups or
even CIA assassins. But it would take thirty years for this truth to come out.
In 1993, the New
York Times reported on its front page that Oswald
was under simultaneous CIA and FBI surveillance “as he met with the mobster the
C.I.A. had hired to kill Fidel Castro.” Since when does a “lone-nut assassin”
meet with a government hit man and then go on to kill a president while under
the near continuous surveillance of its two most powerful intelligence
agencies?
Curiously, there is documented evidence that CIA mind-control experts
studied the option of using “Manchurian Candidate”
technology on these anti-Castro assassins. And Estabrooks specifically
mentioned aggressive Cubans as future victims of his technology. Another CIA mind-control expert was even put in charge of
the Castro assassination program in which Oswald played a role.
History and the declassified documents cited here (and this
is just the tip of the iceberg) show beyond a doubt how the CIA was obsessed in
the war against communism and its Cuban persona. A massive, illegal
infrastructure was put in place to wage covert war against Castro. But, I
believe, there were those tied to the Cuba project who took their obsession one
step further.
Recently uncovered documents from Operation Northwoods
reveal Kennedy had refused to approve horrifying plans from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff. As unbelievable as it sounds, the scheme intended to blame Castro for
U.S.-manufactured terrorist attacks as a pretext for a second invasion of Cuba.
Options considered as a means to “cause a helpful wave of national
indignation” included staged assassinations on American soil.
A 1961 CIA report declassified in 1998 showed that powerful
elements in the agency blamed Kennedy for their own mistakes in the failed first
invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Couple this with the on-the-record
anti-communism hysteria and the fact that Kennedy was seen as a threat to the
entrenched command structure planning a second
invasion of Cuba (Kennedy fired CIA director Allen Dulles who later served
on the Warren Commission) and a frightening picture comes into focus: By
eliminating Kennedy and blaming it on Castro’s agents, the anti-Castro
infrastructure could not only remove a roadblock to its covert “get Castro”
policies, it could provide a justification for them.
And with that deadly scenario, enter Lee Harvey Oswald.
Oswald’s work as defector and violent pro-Castro provocateur had set him up perfectly for the role of politically
motivated assassin and fall-guy, a
man whose mind was manipulated under the pretext of the Cold War and in the end
became a microcosm of it.
Kennedy’s assassination brought
momentous changes for those waging the Cold War. The prophetic 1954 CIA memo
which outlined the mind control experiment in which an assassin would be “induced
…to perform an act, involuntarily, if necessary, against… an American official”
and then be “disposed of” while in government custody also predicted that this experiment
might be useful “as a ‘trigger mechanism,’ for a bigger project.” Swept into
power as a result of the JFK murder, Johnson would continue the anti-Castro
operation. But he would oversee a far bigger project.
Under Johnson, the covert warfare specialists would
go on to use what is now known as a manufactured terrorist attack (the Tonkin
Gulf incident) to justify the devastating escalation from covert to overt
warfare in Vietnam. Ironically, Castro would survive, despite ongoing covert
actions against him (one CIA assassination attempt was in gear the day Kennedy
was shot), but the leader of Vietnam was not so lucky--President Diem was
killed in a CIA-orchestrated coup within a month of the JFK’s death. The
Oswald-era domestic CIA actions against the anti-war groups of the early
sixties foreshadowed, if not rationalized, a repeat, greatly magnified in
scope, against the anti-Vietnam war groups. It was a New
York Times exposé of this latter phase of the massive, illegal surveillance
against American anti-war groups which led to our current understanding of the
earlier phase in which I propose Oswald unwittingly participated.
My research is not meant to create a groundswell of sympathy for
Lee Harvey Oswald, nor to engage in finger-pointing four decades after an event
that changed the course of American, and world, history. Like everyone, I just
want to know what really happened that fateful November day, and more
important, why it happened. Indeed, if the past is truly prologue, the world needs to know.
It is my hope that the theory proposed from this research will not only open the eyes of the public to the dangers of hypnosis but also provide a new perspective on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This “Manchurian Candidate” hypothesis has numerous advantages over conventional theories. It could harmonize many of the seemingly contradictory details in our current knowledge of the assassination and synthesize heretofore-puzzling differences in the conclusions presented by Warren Commission apologists and “conspiracy” researchers, whom I believe are looking at two different sides of the same coin.
By taking a step back and viewing Oswald’s behavior through the lens provided by Estabrooks’ detailed descriptions of how Marines with polarized personalities were created and used by intelligence agencies, an understanding of the reasons underlying Oswald’s polarized behavior modes can be gained. This can not only depolarize the ongoing debate but inspire new avenues of investigation as to who was ultimately responsible for the crime.
Certainly in light of all that has been uncovered in the four decades since the death of the 35th President there are grounds to re-think Oswald’s role. Considering the scale of anti-communist zealotry those 40 years ago, the now-apparent benefits of Oswald’s behavior to the CIA and the declassified information that creates striking parallels between Oswald’s actions and the CIA’s mind-control experimentation to create programmed killers, I do not consider it unpatriotic to ask serious thinkers whether Oswald really have been used as one of these agents against our own President.
In the wake of the 9-11 tragedy, an act perpetrated by a “former” CIA asset and used by the CIA to roll back legislation limiting its illegal domestic role (enacted as a result of 60’s-era excesses described above), a true patriot must always be alert to the CIA’s role in domestic and international manipulation and seek to understand the various ways this may be accomplished. Hypnosis is one of the most powerful and least understood tools in the CIA’s arsenal. It’s time the public understood that.
# # #
“Only a people who refuse to permit
themselves to sink into intellectual lethargy and conformity, only a people who
question and think . . . can be sure that hypnosis—disguised or direct—will not
undermine their freedom and rob them of their very lives.”
-George Estabrooks
For the full story on mind
control and the JFK assassination, please see