John Hinckley, Jr. – Manchurian Candidate For Who?
The CIA, George Bush, MKUltra, LSD, Scientology, James Earl Ray, John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, Artie Bremer, the Unabomber
They’re all Here by Trowbridge H. Ford
Big John Hinckley - Can You See Me Now?
The contrast behind the myth and reality regarding the health of American democracy when President Jimmy Carter sought re-election in 1980 could not have been greater.
The liberals and responsible conservatives who had brought about the resignation of the rampaging Nixon thought that constitutional government had been restored, or at least secret government had been significantly reined in.
But actual conditions, despite appearances, had become worse thanks to leaders of covert rule finding new ways to perform old operations.
The CIA had been slimmed down, particularly the Operations Directorate where the adoption of more technical means for the collection of intelligence, and through the retirement and death for some of the worst offenders – especially former DCI Richard Helms, CI chief James Angleton, and “Executive Action’s” William King Harvey.
[Editors Note: Dear VT readers. This is a full magazine presentation, roughly 5500 words. Mr. Ford has put together an amazing piece of work here which we felt should not be condensed. On these complicated historical controversies there are not really any shortcuts to connecting the dots. For your time investment we have tried to make this an interesting read and it's loaded with historical links. Let us know in the comments if we have succeeded. Thanks. Jim W. Dean]
But that process had been more than compensated by old troublemakers finding new homes in other agencies, current ones finding ways to operate behind the backs of their nominal superiors, and old agent capability, especially in the production of mind-control, obtaining new technology and candidates for covert operations.
The Secret Team’s, to use Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty‘s terminology, hopes that Theodore Kaczynski (aka the Unabomber) had the makings of a perfect Manchurian Candidate for killing President Carter’s re-election chances, despite promising testing, proved unfounded.
Kaczynski, though connected to all the right people while at Berkeley at the end of the 1960s through Colston Westbrook’s Black Cultural Association, was not politically motivated enough to become a predictable robot.
"And I took the Road Less Traveled"...Walt Whitman
The loner mathematician, while he was finally recruited from Montana where no skeptics would suspect CIA involvement, was not willing to go after targets it had in mind, no matter how hard his co-conspirator brother David drove him, or how much drugs he was given.
Ted Kaczynski had it in for university colleagues, especially those who supported the build-up of technology the Agency was interested in, and air lines which permitted them to experiment all around the world, as his FBI code name prefix indicated.
The Unabomber showed his unreliable character in the wake of the failed hostage rescue mission in Iran (Operation Eagle Claw) by following up his attack on an American Airline flight to Washington with a crude bomb sent to United Air Line president Percy Wood on June 9, 1980.
Kaczynski set Wood up by writing first in the name of Enoch W. Fischer, recommending that he, and other leaders of the capitalist world read Sloan Wilson’s new book, Ice Brothers, which would be arriving in a separate wrapper.
A Demo of Kaczynski's Book-Pipe Bomb
This nostalgic account by Wilson – the author also of best-selling The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit – of his service during WWII in the Greenland Patrol was a telling reminder of just how far the author and Kaczynski had fallen out with their wartime buddies.
This was particularly the case with Ted’s most ambitious brother David in the post-war grab for personal glory.
For those interested in pursuing red-herrings on the internet about the book, see Ross Getman’s website where he claims that Kaczynski, a neo-Nazi, found inspiration for his anti-Semitism in its pages.
Characteristically, the Bureau questioned Sloan rather than David Kaczynski about the book’s significance, once the Unabomber was finally caught.
Ronald Reagan in His Prime
Ronald Reagan’s biggest contribution to the covert campaign against Carter’s re-election then became the expertise that Dr. Earl Brian, his former Secretary of Health, supplied for mind-control operations.
The CIA’s Dr. George White, had been obliged officially to close down experiments in California, and former head of the Technical Services Staff Dr. Sidney Gottlieb was driven to convenient suicide because of legal questions arising in 1979 about painter Stanley Milton Glickman’s incapacity, another unwitting CIA guinea pig from a quarter century before in Paris.
Brian, like George Bush, Theodore Shackley, and William Casey, would ultimately be linked to the “October Surprise”, and the Reagan Justice Department’s theft of PROMIS software from Bill Hamilton’s INSLAW company to keep track of foreign counterintelligence (Jonathan Vankin and John Whelan, The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, p. 119ff.).
But actually Dr. Brian, like White and Gottlieb, was most closely connected to “LSD surprises”, what had led to tennis professional Harold Blauer’s death from forced injections, and Dr. Frank Olson’s most suspicious death in 1953.
Dr. Sidney Gottlieb approved of an MKULTRA on LSD in this June 9, 1953 letter
Brian even tried to establish in 1975, with Governor Reagan’s support, a center for the study of violent behavior in the Santa Monica Mountains, what would permit all kinds of mind-control operations with complete secrecy under UCLA professor Dr. Louis “Jolly” West’s leadership, but the fallout from Watergate prevented the California legislature from authorizing such a reckless initiative.
West – as Henry Martin and David Caul indicated in a long 1991 series about the state’s continuing mind-control program for the Napa Sentinel – was a product of the University of Minnesota’s Morse Allen, the leading expert on making Manchurian Candidates.
He had worked at Oklahoma for 15 years with John Gittinger, the developer of the crucial Personal Assessment System for finding potential ones. ( For more, see obituary, “Louis Jolyon ‘Jolly’ West,” The Los Angeles Times, Jan. 7, 1999.)
The CIA's Dr. Louis Jollyn West
At Oklahoma, West, as John Marks indicated in The Search for the ‘Manchurian Candidate, became the leading recipient of secret funding for LSD experimentation (p. 63), what ultimately led to certain people being programmed with sufficient doses of the drug not only to betray their countries but also their families, even their spouses.
LSD, in an operational setting, could make the patient into a paranoid madman, set on destroying his marriage and memory.
Coming to UCLA in 1968, just after the assassinations of MLK and RFK, West was very successful in securing grants, over $5 million for himself from the National Institutes of Mental Health, and as much as $14 million in a single year for his Neuropsychiatric Institute from a wide range of sources.
He used these for conducting experiments on controlling allegedly violent individuals – what gave all kinds of opportunities for creating them through the assistance of cooperating, professional informants.
Though West feigned to be a great civil libertarian, and made a point of providing free expert opinion in public interest cases (See his letter in the June 24, 1976 issue of The New York Review of Books about Patty Hearst’s unsuccessful defense.), he, and side kick Dr. “Oz” Janiger, were such pavlovians when it came to drugs that Aldous Huxley, the greatest proponent of LSD’s liberating qualities, could not abide their obsessions. (See Huxley’s June 6, 1961 letter to Timothy Leary.)
In 1966, LSD was prohibited by the Drug Abuse Control Amendment from being used in experiments, causing the FDA to raid Janiger’s office in Beverly Hills, and to confiscate all his drugs, and records of clinical research.
“When the panic subsided, only five government-approved scientists were allowed to continue LSD research…,” Todd Brendan Fahey wrote in the Las Vegas Weekly, the leading one being West. Until then, Janiger had gotten LSD from people like the CIA’s Captain Al Hubbard for his experiments on those who wanted to improve their performance, especially among Hollywood’s actors, notably Cary Grant.
Albert Hofmann - The Father of LSD
Now Janiger would get it from West, and, in return, he would be given access to his most promising subjects.
This came in most handy in 1977 when The Washington Post reported that the scientific assistant to Carter’s Navy Secretary, Dr. Sam Koslov, had ended the program that West was running out of Stanford’s Research Institute at Fort Meade to create Manchurian Candidates by electronic means (“The Constantine Report No1,”).
This apparently left only the old means of deprivation, drugs, psychic driving, and hypnosis for making people with multiple personalities into their Neo-Assassins.
West’s greatest asset was that he was now interested in cults, the ideal cover for anyone who wanted to continue practicing “brain-washing” by CIA’s more traditional methods.
In the wake of Charles Manson’s murders, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping and brain-washing by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the massacre/suicide of 913 cultists at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, the public was prepared to believe that such brain-washing was only the result of thought reform which the CIA had apparently helped sponsor with drugs in order to make sure that student radicalism spun out of control in utter confusion.
To legitimize the idea of coercive persuasion, West’s associate Dr. Margaret Singer wrote a ground-breaking paper the following year on the new phenomenon (“Dr. Margaret Singer’s 6 Conditions for Thought Reform,” csj.org/studyindex), and she and Yale’s Dr. Robert Jay Lifton started propagating the claims as advisory board psychologists to the new American Family Foundation.
Dr. Margaret Singer
Singer and Lifton had studied the brain-washing techniques on Amercian POWs by the North Koreans for Washington back in the ‘fifties, ruling out wrongly their drug, and hypnosis-based techniques – what West used heavy doses of LSD-25, and hypnotism to replicate. (Jeffrey Steinberg, “Who Are the American Family Foundation Mind-Controllers Targeting LaRouche?,” Executive Intelligence Review, April 19, 2002, and larouche pub.com/other/2002)
During August 1980, Reagan’s campaign managers, especially pollster Richard Werthlin, Georgetown professor Richard Allen, and former CIA agent Richard Beal, organized a special operations group to counter any Carter “October Surprise” – the only thing they thought would secure his re-election.
At the same time, John Hinckley, Jr. was programmed to assassinate President Carter just in case he was able to secure the release of the hostages by negotiation – what these people, along with Marine Captain Oliver North and Colonel Robert MacFarlane – had been able to prevent by force.
The operation’s attraction lay in the fact that despite the publication of John Marks’s book on Manchurian Candidates the previous year, only Milton Kline, onetime President of the American Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and sometime CIA consultant in actual operations, believed that patsies and assassins could be, and had been created on occasion. (p. 199ff., esp. 204, note.)
Hinckley, one of the Beat Generation, was the offspring of an upward-mobile, disassociated family, growing up in Dallas during the years before the JFK assassination and during its aftermath.
While his older brother Scott was following in his father’s footsteps at the Agency-connected Vanderbilt Energy Corporation, John was having trouble even getting started, spending seven years, on and off, at Texas Tech but without success.
Hinckley - Playing His Version of Taxi Driver
About the only thing he picked up was how to play the guitar, and an inclination for acting.
During a trip to Hollywood in 1976, he came across Dr. Janiger, it seems, and was soon taking LSD again, and watching incessantly Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, based on the life of George Wallace assassin Arthur Bremer, in the hope of becoming a successful actor.
Before it was over, he imagined that he had become Robert Di Niro’s alter ego. (“John W. Hinckley, Jr.: A Biography,” law.unkc.edu/faculty/proje…)
Movie Image Imprinting - Part of Mind Control
Hinckley was so convinced that he was a carbon copy of the alienated, drugged cabbie that he even fantasized, it seems, that he too had a girl friend, like Betsy in the film, working in a campaign for a politician he ultimately plotted to kill in order to impress her, calling her Lynn Collins.
The only trouble with this propensity was that there was no need for it now in Agency operations as critics like Senator Frank Church were finished off early by the electorate, among other things, because of their attacks on America’s covert government.
Hardly had the unknown Carter gotten established in the White House than Hinckley was back in Hollywood a year later for more.
The trouble with Hinckley’s potential was that the new President was proving much more supportive of the plans by secret government than any one had imagined (See, e. g., Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff, p. 294ff.), and making Walter Mondale, the most experienced politician in keeping the intelligence community in check, President would only compound problems with its critics.
Consequently, Hinckley’s handler, and it seems to have been either Dr. Singer or one of her female associates, directed him towards more beneficial activity, leading apparently to his gaining a role in a play, and becoming romantically attached to an actress, a daughter of the mother of all conspiracy theorists, Mae Brussell, of all people.
Mae Brussell
“Brussell,” Vankin and Whelan have written, thought that this well-heeled individual without any visible means of support “…might be an ‘agent provocateur’ directed against her by the FBI via her daughter.” (p. 66)
Then, as when Jules Ricco Kimble aka Raoul thought that Harvey was pursuing him in New Orleans in 1967, and called the Domestic Contact agent to protest, she called the Bureau’s Monterey Resident Agent to complain, making herself likewise a possible suspect in future developments.
Ms. Brussell, thanks to financial support from the John Lennons, and publication support from The Realist’s Paul Krassner, was becoming increasingly convinced that Governor Reagan was to be the beneficiary of all the ongoing ‘dirty tricks’. (Paul Krassner, Confessions of a raving, unconformed nut, pp. 213-5)
Once the summer season was over, Hinckley returned to Texas Tech with a new lease on life for the stage, changing his major from business administration to English to suit his new career goals, only to see his relationship with Mae’s daughter ended, apparently because the mother opposed it, possibly resulting in the daughter’s death in an automobile accident.
In a tailspin, Hinckley helped young George W. Bush in his unsuccessful 1978 run, directed by brother Neil, for the House seat in Lubbock, a campaign which Hinckley’s parents contributed money to. When it too proved unsuccessful, Hinckley went completely off the rails.
He played Russian roulette with a .38 pistol he bought in August 1979, as he began to experience all kinds of aliments, requiring him to seek professional help, and to take both anti-depressants and tranquilizers, talltail signs of a manic depressive in a stretched out state.
Hinckley even anticipated his role as Carter’s assassin in March 1980, before his handlers had even decided upon it, by stalking him on his own during his early campaigning.
Young Jodie Foster as the Taxi Driver Hooker
Once the Reagan campaign against Carter moved into gear, and his assassination was now a distinct possibility, Hinckley spent three weeks during September enrolled at Yale, stalking actress Jodi Foster who played the teenage prostitute, Iris, in the movie.
It was a classic case of negative psychic driving where the candidate would have experiences, and emotional reactions which would spur him on to more threatening actions.
James Earl Ray experienced this after he attended dancing classes, graduated from bartending school, underwent a nose job, joined a Swinger’s Club, and advertized his sexual prowess in the Los Angeles Free Press but to no avail. (Gerald Posner, Killing the Dream, p. 208ff., though n.b. that he did not see hypnosis by Dr. Xavier von Koss as the cause.)
As Hinckley wrote Foster, perhaps a bit too self-consciously, just before he set off on his final mission to shoot Reagan:
“And by hanging around your dormitory, I’ve come to realize that I’m the topic of more than a little conversation, however full of ridicule it may be.” (evidence in U.S. v. John W. Hinckley, Jr.)
“In a three-day period, Hinckley visited three cities where Carter rallies were held: Washington, D. C., Columbus, and Dayton.” (Doug Linders, “The Trial of John W. Hinckley, Jr.”) Though he once got within 20 feet of the President, he wasn’t able to draw his pistol, and shoot, claiming cryptically that he wasn’t in the proper frame of mind.
Actually, the President hadn’t made a surprise announcement about the hostages which would have triggered the shooting, like what RFK’s announcement caused after he won the California primary.
Not the Dream Team We Thought
Then trips by Hinckley to Lincoln, Nashville, Dallas, Washington, and Denver proved no more efficacious, thanks to the apparent failure of a leading Nazi to stiffen his nerve, to a tip off to airport authorities about a pistol in his luggage, and the like.
Hinckley’s defense, if he had been pushed to shoot Carter, would have been that he was such a rabid supporter of the Reagan-Bush ticket, thanks particularly to all his connections with the Vice President’s family, that he could not restrain himself when the President stole the election by completely underhanded means because of Mae Brussell’s hatred of Reagan and his supporters.
Just when all Hinckley’s stalking had apparently proven unnecessary – Reagan’s campaign officials concluded that Tehran’s consultations with Carter’s Iranian Core Group had ended in failure.
Bush received a report from former Texas Governor John Connally, now Reagan’s campaign finance director who had helped box, with Shackley’s help, the President into the White House’s Rose Garden during the crisis, that Carter had worked out an “October Surprise” with Tehran after all.
This caused him to activate Allen. Robert Parry has explained in “The Consortium: Bush & a CIA Power Play”:
‘George Bush,’ Allen’s notes began, ‘JBC (Connally) – already made deal. Israelis delivered last wk. spare pts. via Amsterdam. Hostages out this wk. Moderate Arabs upset. French have given spares to Iraq and know of J. C. (Carter) deal w/Iran. JBC (Connally) unsure what to do. RVA (Allen) to act if true or not.’ (consortiumnews.com)
In another column, Parry added about Bush’s role: “Whenever Allen knew more, he was to relay information to ‘Shackley (sic) via Jennifer’ (Fitzgerald, Bush’s infamous secretary).” (“Clouds over George Bush,” Dec. 29, 1998, ibid.) When Allen’s queries failed to resolve the confusion, he activated Shackley.
Frank Nugan - of Nugan Hand Bank
The Agency’s former DDO was just the man to activate a programmed assassination at the drop of a hat, as former DCI Richard Helms had noted earlier – what the emergency required as there was no time to indoctrinate another Candidate.
Recently, he had mysteriously gotten rid of Frank Nugan of the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia when it became bankrupt – what risked exposing the Secret Team’s dirty tricks in the illegal drugs trade with America if he was not silenced.
Shackley’s successor, John McMahon, supervised the work of the Stanford Research Institute which was still developing “remote viewing” – the projection of words and images right into patient’s brains by machines and psychics – despite Koslov’s attempts to kill it off.
In 1995, McMahon admitted that the Agency had spent $20,000,000 on remote viewing research. “McMahon has, according to Philip Agee, the whistle-blowing exile, an affinity for ‘technological exotics’ for CIA covert operations,” Alex Constantine wrote in Virtual Government.
Most of the program’s “empaths” – victims – came from Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, and Dr. West provided medical oversight for the psi experiments. West conducted his own on the “phenomenology of disassociate states” – the creation of people with multiple personalities.
Thanks to research by Yale’s Jose Delgado, California’s Dr. Ross Adey, Walter Reed Hospital’s Joseph Sharp, and DOD-funded J. F. Scapita, Dr. Elizabeth Rauscher, of San Leandro’s Technic Research Laboratory in the Bay area, was prepared to produce any kind of human behavior by directing extremely low frequency (ELF), electromagnetic waves of words and images into victim’s brains.
This technique permitted handlers to quickly create robot killers, provided they had willing victims, and were able to move them around at will. Ideally, they would want to find someone who had a love-hate relationship with the proposed target.
One just had to find a candidate who could be easily persuaded to do the evil deed with the appropriate psychic driving without any calculation or reservation. Then it was just a question of getting the controlled killer into position for killing the target on cue – what could be managed nearby with the proper electronic equipment.
It was like having a home-deliverty assassination service.
CIA's Ted Shackley - All of of Them!
The same day, October 27th, that Shackley was alerted to take action, Mark David Chapman, a Hinckley lookalike – who had quit his job when Hinckley’s mission had ended, and signed out in Lennon’s name as if he were the target, only to cross it out before adding his own – started preparing to assassinate the famous Beatle, buying a .38-caliber Charter Arms Special in a Honolulu gun shop. (Fred McGunagle, Mark David Chapman, Chapter Six – “To the Brink and Back,” p. 2)
Hinckley was no longer available to go after anyone, being back in Denver under the care his parents had arranged with psychologist Dr. John Hopper after he had taken an overdose of antidepressants.
Chapman, who long had been of two minds about the former Beatle, had been ready for a similar assignment for a month, having been put through the psychological wringer the previous two months.
Chapman, the same age as Hinckley, and born in nearby Fort Worth, was another product of a dysfunctional family, though it took longer for him to descend to Hinckley’s state.
Then, just when he had miraculously gotten married, and worked himself out of debt, Chapman fell into a similar mental frenzy, believing increasingly that he was becoming Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, even writing Hawaii’s Attorney General about the necessary procedure for changing his name. (McGunagle, p. 1)
At the time, Chapman was working as a maintenance man at the Castle Memorial Hospital, under the supervision of psychologist Leilani Siegfried, after its therapists had nursed him back to health from a suicide attempt.
While Chapman, a Hinckley copycat, could have been positioned to shoot Carter too, it would have been extremely difficult, and the shooting of Lennon would still be efficacious at the polls.
Chapman indicated that he had a few other high profile targets, one added as recently as October 1980 when Carter captured the public’s fancy, on his assassination list when he went before the NY State parole board after 20 years incarceration, the names of whom were so sensitive that it redacted them from the published report.
Famous Last Photo - Lennon with Chapman
Lennon’s murder, it was assumed, would send liberal elements and the beat generation in the American electorate into a tailspin, and any violence, like burning down Harlem, would rally conservative American voters flocking to the voting booth for Reagan, as had happened for Nixon after the MLK and RFK shootings.
Lennon had drawn the ire and interest of MI5, and the FBI because of his songs of peace, and support of radical causes, especially the IRA’s, while taking drugs since the Nixon years (Fenton Bressler, Who Killed John Lennon?, excerpts, Part 2, pp. 2-3, www. shout.net/-bigred/lennon).
John and Yoko unwisely considered themselves like comedians Laurel and Hardy when it came to serious political business until it was far too late.
Lennon discounted the idea that CIA could have gotten rid of artists like Jimmi Hendrix, and James Morrison to quell radical ardor until his last days, only to concede to Krassner: “Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident. (Krassner, p. 215, emphasis Lennon’s)
The Agency had far more reason for wanting to fix the unexpected permanent residents in America for underestimating the consequences of taking drugs, especially LSD, and of MK-ULTRA operations than the British and American security services, and few would suspect it having done so.
Making the taking of such drugs much less criminal, and mainline would also undercut the illicit drug business that Shackley had been leading for years.
Loser Artie Bremer Grabs His Moment in History
While the surprisingly well-heeled Chapman, whose source has never been adequately identified, set off for New York, like Holden Caulfield in the Salinger novel, on October 30th, splurging like Arthur Bremer at the Waldorf while stalking Nixon and Wallace, he allegedly failed to procure ammunition for his revolver when he bought it, requiring a trip to Atlanta to make up for the deficiency.
Actually, it would have been most easy for anyone to purchase ammunition in New York.
In the meantime, Carter’s last-minute effort to free the hostages through negotiation had been trumped by Bush and Allen bribing the Iranian Hostage Policy Committee’s Mohammad Behesti - thanks to a tipoff by Donald Gregg in the Carter National Security Council – who accompanied them, about the state of the President’s efforts.
This was apparently the cause of the delay, and by the time Chapman returned, shooting Lennon had become meaningless with Reagan’s election, his handler persuading him to return to his wife Gloria in Hawaii in the hope of regaining a normal life.
There were the strongest operational reasons, though, for this not being allowed to continue. A cured Chapman, his CIA handlers in the “remote viewing” program soon feared, might well recall how he had been maneuvered to kill Lennon, eager to tell all about the regime the Agency had put him through.
More sinister elements in the program rued the loss of an actual operation which would determine if a patient could really be driven directly to shoot a target wherever it appeared. As typical scientists, they were obsessed with seeing if their push button approach to assassination really worked.
Most important, Reagan’s people wanted a diversion to direct the people’s attention away from his “October Surprise,” the return of all the hostages being postponed until after his inauguration to prevent further speculation.
The Irony of All Three Becoming Entwined
No sooner, though, did Reagan hint that he might have pulled off an “October Surprise” of his own than Chapman’s Castle Memorial therapist started winding him up again.
This resulted in his having such a shouting match with supervisor Siegfried that he was obliged to resign, resulting in threatening phone calls, and bomb threats to various parties – reminiscent of when Kaczyinski went off the rails.
The apparent loner “… spent his days harassing a group of Hare Krishnas who daily appeared in downtown Honolulu.” (McGunagle, “Is That All You Want?,” p. 1)
Arriving back in New York on December 6th, Chapman planned to kill Lennon the next day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a fitting reminder to Yoko Ono of the betrayals.
After a spate of psychic driving Chapman acted as if he were a close associate of Lennon’s while living as if he were a nobody without a friend in the world. He bought a poster intended to screw up his courage, spotted a photograph of the former Beatle on a newsstand advertising an interview with the Lennons to focus his attention.
Lennon's Legend Lives On - Chapman's Does Not
Next he purchased a copy of Lennon’s latest albumn to remind himself of his words, and finally bought a new copy of The Catcher in the Rye to renew his hatred of the world’s biggest phony – the image, sound, and words which were to trigger the shooting by impulses into his brain when he was in position.
In doing this programming, though, Chapman was so engrossed that he missed a few opportunities to kill Lennon.
When Lennon finally came into the picture, Chapman couldn’t bring himself to shoot him because he was so friendly, open, and generous.
Instead of allowing Chapman to go back to Hawaii with the signed Lennon album, and possibly a photograph of the friendly Beatle handing over the prized possession to this apparent nobody, his handler so bombarded him with negative impulses during the night at the Sheraton that he was back the next night at the Lennons’ Dakota residence to finish the job.
There was no way that Chapman could escape now, as any remission from what he had been through would be more dangerous than ever, given the ever increasing conspiratorial activities by Reagan’s people.
The negative driving finally won, as Chapman later explained: “He walked past me, and then a voice in my head said, ‘Do it, do it, do.’ over and over again, saying ‘Do it, do it, do it, do,’ like that.” (McGunagle, ch. 8, p. 1)
And Chapman, after getting Lennon to turn, and show his face, did it, and then, after preparing himself for the arrival of the police, resumed reading Salinger’s novel.
While Lennon’s assassination had the expected belated effect upon the American people, it served no useful purpose. In fact, it brought Hinckley out of his drug-related fantasies with a vengeance. He was so upset by Lennon’s assassination – the Beatle being the one person he truly loved – that he went to New York, and attended a service in Central Park to honor his contributions to music and art.
As the debate about who was behind it, and the release of the prisoners in Iran grew, Hinckley increasingly sided with, of all people, Mae Brussell who explained Lennon’s assassination thus:
“It was a conspiracy. Reagan had just won the election. They knew what kind of president he was going to be. There was only one man who could bring out a million people on demonstration in protest at his policies — and that was Lennon.” (Bresler, p. 1)
Under the circumstances, questions about Hinckley’s stability, and allegiances started growing in official circles. On January 13, 1981, Mae Brussell noticed a white sedan, with a man and woman sitting inside, parked across the street from her house.
Reagan Waves - Just Before Hinckley Begins Shooting
The conspiracy theorist, as she explained in a 14-page letter to FBI Director Clarence Kelly, thought that the pair were conducting a surveillance on her, and she characteristically confronted them about it.
While the woman in the car explained that they weren’t, the man hardly said anything.
“When Reagan was shot, Mae recognized photographs of the accused assailant as the same quiet young man she had seen parked in front of her home.” (Vankin and Whalen, p. 64)
After the Bureau checked out this claim, and others by the noted conspiracy theorist, it concluded conveniently in a memo that she was “mentally unstable”, whose theories were not to be taken seriously.
Of course, the FBI might have concluded differently if it had realized that the person, probably his former handler, in the while sedan with Hinckley was trying to rekindle his hatred of Brussell for having stopped his romance with her daughter a few years before rather than conducting a surveillance on her. Obviously, it didn’t work as Hinckley increasingly had the President or the Vice President in his sights.
Reagan Takes a Hit From the Fluke Ricocheted Bullet off the Door.
Then there were stories in the Washington press that someone was stalking the Vice President, causing the city’s police and the Secret Service all kinds of concerns which Bush was denying as quietly but as angrily as he could.
Then there was the dinner date that his son Neil had scheduled with Hinckley’s older brother Scott on the night after John’s assassination attempt on Reagan. (ibid., pp. 332-3)
People in the know about John’s state of mind and intentions were obviously concerned about what he was up to.
Despite further attempts by John’s handler to prevent him from doing anything drastic, though she did not report the risk to law-enforcement officials for fear of disclosing the whole covert operation, he was among the small group awaiting Reagan’s exit from Washington’s Hilton early on the afternoon of March 30, 1981.
He started firing his .22 caliber pistol, armed with “devastator” bullets, at the rather loosely protected President, the last of which ricocheted off the limousine’s door, and deeply penetrated the President’s thorax, narrowly missing his aorta.
As All Secret Service People Know - It Happens Very Quickly
The Secret Service had apparently not followed its usual formation in protecting Reagan, apparently not to highlight its increased concerns about his safety in apparently such a risk-free area, and was slow to react to his wound, thinking it still impossible for any assassin to actually have hit him.
YouTube - Veterans Today - – Reagan Shooting
Hinckley's Devastator Bullets Did a Lot of Damage
These miscalculations almost cost Reagan his life, and a new batch of data for conspiracy theorists to work with.
The Agency, though, did not need any new revelations to mend its ways somewhat.
Its trials and tribulations with Hinckley taught it to avoid the use of any kind of Manchurian Candidate in future.
But it was willing to use other means to silence its enemies and to lend out its expertise to allied services, particularly Israel’s Mossad, if necessary, as we shall see.
Trowbridge Ford
Trowbridge Ford, now 81 …Military family, Army Counter Intelligence during the Korean War, reporter, Columbia Phd, and assassination survivor, now living in Sweden under the protection of their security services.
These are the kinds of writers that VT is laboring to bring our readers, people who have put not only their labors but lives on the line to bring stories to our readers that have been hidden for all the various reasons.
While this longer, magazine format of presentation is generally not viewed as suitable to short attention span internet readers, the VT board will continue developing this format as the older big stories require more space to frame them properly.
John Hinckley's Four Shots
The Robert Kennedy Assassination
Joseph P. Kennedy, seated center, the head of the United States Maritime Commission and former chairman of the SEC, with his wife Mrs Rose. Kennedy and their children at their home in Bronxville, N.Y. in 1937. Seated left to right, are Eunice, Jean, Edward, Mr. Kennedy, Patricia and Kathleen. Standing are Rosemary, Robert, John F., Mrs. Kennedy and Joseph, Jr. (New York Times Studios)
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Nov 1963 - Following John Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, the relationship deteriorated almost immediately. Clark Clifford recalled that " Bobby Kennedy seemed at the beginning very much to resent President Johnson. It was a curious attitude, completely ...The incidents that occurred there simply punctuated Bobby's dislike for the majority leader. Following John Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, the relationship deteriorated almost immediately. Clark Clifford recalled that " Bobby Kennedy seemed at the beginning very much to resent President Johnson. It was a curious attitude, completely illogical, wholly emotional. It seemed to irritate Bobby Kennedy when he saw President Johnson as President."15 One immediate ...
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From Liberalism's last hurrah - Related web pages
books.google.com/books?id=CaVlR7gQiOEC&pg ...►
1968 - I was crushed by the accumulation of tragedies in 1968. The assassination of King, and the racial conflagration that followed it; the dashed hopes of the Poor People's Campaign; theassassination of Bobby Kennedy and the prospects of a Nixon Presidency all ...I was crushed by the accumulation of tragedies in 1968. The assassination of King, and the racial conflagration that followed it; the dashed hopes of the Poor People's Campaign; the assassination of Bobby Kennedyand the prospects of a Nixon Presidency all combined to plunge me into a deeper state of depression. At first I ran- took a flight to Hawaii to put some distance between me and the Kennedy assassination in June. A week or so on the beaches of Hawaii didn't pull me ...
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From April 4, 1968: Remembering the Murder of Our King | The Defenders … - Related web pages
www.thedefendersonline.com/2009/04/03/april-4 ...Jun 1968 - Oh, and about June 1968. Bobby Kennedy's assassination didn't happen in a vacuum . It happened almost exactly two months after Martin Luther King was assassinated. For anyone who was conscious of events in the world then (even as young as 4th grade), the two ...Oh, and about June 1968. Bobby Kennedy's assassination didn't happen in a vacuum . It happened almost exactly two months after Martin Luther King was assassinated. For anyone who was conscious of events in the world then (even as young as 4th grade), the two were linked. If this was some sort of monstrous ( mis)calculation, the fear and pain it would be intended to invoke compasses the assassination of a great black leader too.
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From It's time for Oregon's uncommitted Superdelegates to step up and speak … - Related web pages
www.blueoregon.com/2008/05/time-for-oregon/Jun 4, 1968 - First-time director Estevez has definitely bitten off more than he can chew here , though by recounting the day of Bobby Kennedy's assassination through the singular & not-so-singular lives of the guests & staff of LA's Ambassador Hotel on June 4 th , 1968, he ...First-time director Estevez has definitely bitten off more than he can chew here , though by recounting the day of Bobby Kennedy's assassination through the singular & not-so-singular lives of the guests & staff of LA's Ambassador Hotel on June 4 th , 1968, he does manage to churn up some Altman-esque moments now & again. While attempting to juggle 20 or more characters & the weight of history would probably have given the old ensemble master pause, Estevez barrels ahead ...
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From Guadalupe After Dark: The DVDs of 2006 (And Before) - Related web pages
guadalupeafterdark.blogspot.com/2009/09/dvds ...Jun 5, 1968 - Rosey Grier and Robert Kennedy staff try to get the gun away from Sirhan Sirhanafter the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel Los Angeles California, Sirhan Sirhan held by RFK staff and Rosey Grier, Robert F. Kennedy, RFK, Bobby, Bobby Kennedy ...Rosey Grier and Robert Kennedy staff try to get the gun away from Sirhan Sirhan after the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel Los Angeles California, Sirhan Sirhan held by RFK staff and Rosey Grier, Robert F. Kennedy, RFK, Bobby, Bobby Kennedy, assassination of RFK, assassination, assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, June 5 1968, Sirhan Sirhan, Ambassador Hotel Los Angeles California, Rosey Grier, George Plimpton, Rafer Johnson, Sirhan Sirhan ...
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From Rosey Grier and Robert Kennedy staff try to get the gun away from Sirhan … - Related web pages
ronbennett.photoshelter.com/image?_bqG=10&_bqH ...Jun 6, 1968 - Bobby Kennedy's assassination on June 6, 1968, shocked Jamaica. At the office, everyone from Ivy McGhic to the messenger offered condolences. The Deputy Minister of Healthopened a high-powered meeting the day of Kennedy's death with condolences to the ...Bobby Kennedy's assassination on June 6, 1968, shocked Jamaica. At the office, everyone from Ivy McGhic to the messenger offered condolences. The Deputy Minister of Health opened a high-powered meeting the day of Kennedy's death with condolences to the Americans present. As the program expanded, I spent most of my time at the Bureau of Health Education office, which I loved, mostly because of the people. The 100-year-old building sat on the edge of the slums, next to ...
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From My 17 years with USAID - Related web pages
books.google.com/books?id=kRliM42bgVYC&pg ...Jun 20, 1968 - On June 20, 1968, one day after his 46 th birthday (I have just turned 46, so this is significant to me), and just two weeks after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, my father received his naturalization papers from this United States, his United States – He ...On June 20, 1968, one day after his 46 th birthday (I have just turned 46, so this is significant to me), and just two weeks after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, my father received his naturalization papers from this United States, his United States – He was a Citizen of these United States! He celebrated the fourth of July that year with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
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From Fortune's Pawn » Memoir - Related web pages
www.fortunespawn.com/category/letters/memoir ...Oct 20, 1968 - On October 20, 1968, less than five months after Bobby Kennedy's assassination,Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis. The Greek Orthodox ceremony was held on Onassis's private Aegean island, Skorpios. Jackie had kept her plans so secret that her mother ...On October 20, 1968, less than five months after Bobby Kennedy's assassination, Jackie Kennedy marriedAristotle Onassis. The Greek Orthodox ceremony was held on Onassis's private Aegean island, Skorpios. Jackie had kept her plans so secret that her mother. she sAid . . . “She of all people was the one who encouraged me. She's been extraordinarily generous. I was married to her son and I have his children, but she was the one who was saying, if this is what you think is ...
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From The Everything Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Book - Related web pages
books.google.com/books?id=YeBEGDDohb0C&pg ...Jun 4, 1993 - Still holding the . of Robert Kennedy on Thursday at the cemetery in Arling ton, Va. Today is the 25th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination. A ceremony Sunday will mark the anniversary. phone I leaned around a pillar and saw a phalanx of police rushing a swarthy young man down the ...
From Kw Assassination Story Retold .Continued .From . - Related web pages
news.google.com/newspapers?id=SFlGAAAAIBAJ ...Nov 22, 2006 - By The Edmonton Journal November 22, 2006. A critic left a press screening the other day of the Emilio Estevez film Bobby -- a multi-character drama set on the eve of the Bobby Kennedy assassination -- and gave his thumbnail critique: "Bad Robert Altman."By The Edmonton Journal November 22, 2006. A critic left a press screening the other day of the Emilio Estevez film Bobby -- a multi-character drama set on the eve of the Bobby Kennedy assassination -- and gave his thumbnail critique: "Bad Robert Altman." It was an assessment that summed up both Bobby and Altman.
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From Innovative director of MASH, Gosford Park dead at 81 - Related web pages
www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/culture ...Starting Points »
A defining event in modern history, JFK's murder signaled the end of a country's innocence, and set the stage for the modern political landscape.
The 1968 murder of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was the opening act in a year rife with violence and turmoil.
1968 The RFK AssassinationFor many, the murder of Robert Kennedy following his California primary victory silenced the last best hope for peace in a country divided.
1972-74 Watergate
A "third rate burglary" soon escalated into a scandal which brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.1975-76 Intelligence Agency Investigations
Nixon's resignation ushered in the era of the "reform Congress," bringing investigations into the past abuses of the intelligence agencies.
Iran-Contra Special Collection
Reports and transcripts from the Iran-Contra investigations.
DocumentsThe MFF Archive is the largest searchable electronic archive of information relating to the assassinations of the 1960s and their larger historical context, including over 1,000,000 pages of declassified government documents.
EssaysSearch our online portal of essays on the assassinations and related topics, hosted here and on sites across the internet.
JournalsThe MFF is host to electronic copies of several prominent journals related to the JFK assassination, unlocked for reading and searching.
PhotosThousands of online photos from the JFK and RFK assassination investigations and the National Archives, plus JFK White House photos.
AudioPresidential recordings, taped interviews with assassination witnesses, and recorded interviews with authors & experts.
VideoA portal to online video clips related to the JFK, MLK, and RFK assassinations, plus the MFF's own unique productions.
The 1968 murder of Martin Luther King, under close examination, seems equally spurious with reexaminations of the case and mock trials favoring the direct involvement of police and intelligence agencies in the killing.
When you add the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy into the mix, something emerges that is far more than a simple pattern. What you have is an epidemic of carefully conceived political killings with one theme that runs throughout, that of the “patsy.”
James Earl Ray, John Hinckley Jr., Sirhan Sirhan and Lee Harvey Oswald are more than just ‘unlikely’ killers. They were ideal candidates for “framing.”
It was 1968 and Robert F. Kennedy was a shoo-in for president. He had just won the California primary and was at a party function at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Shots rang out, and Sirhan Sirhan was wrestled to the ground by footballer Rosy Grier. Sirhan, if we can call him by one name only, was not the shooter, this has been long established and easily proven even without heading into the area of conspiracy. The shooters were pursued out of the building, reportedly a woman screamed out, “We killed Kennedy!” as she ran out the rear exit.
Police had an “all points bulletin” out for suspects, there were descriptions and witness statements, it was in the newspapers then, for some strange reason, as though the hand of G-d reached out, reality was erased and the manhunt was as though it had never happened.
Forensic evidence showed Kennedy was shot from behind and that Sirhan Sirhan could not have been the shooter. This has never been disputed.
Court documents allege what can only be described as “mind control.” Nothing attributed to the defense claim, as submitted by attorney William Pepper, who also represented James Early Ray, departs from the strict definition of “hypnosis,” though the CIA had spent millions on programs that strayed into that region, mind control and, in fact, well beyond. “Mind control” was considered pretty tame stuff compared to the “remote viewing” and “psycho-kinetic energy” studies that went on for over a decade.
The CIA became obsessed with mind control after prisoners of war held by the Chinese, Russians and North Koreans returned showing symptoms of something far beyond simple indoctrination. Some had been successfully programmed as deep cover agents. Because of the classification level of all documents and studies involving this threat, even to this day there is only fiction to draw upon, films such as the Manchurian Candidate and Telefon or the recent blockbuster video game, Call of Duty Black Ops (spoiler alert) which “alleges” Kennedy’s murder was directly tied to “mind control.”
Is “pop culture” bridging the gap between disinformation and reality?
Political legacy: The Kennedy brothers, from left, JFK, Robert and Edward. Conspiracy theorists have claimed the mob and the CIA were involved in JFK's killing
Assassinated: Robert Kennedy leaving Downing Street in 1968. He was shot dead in Los Angeles later that year. Right, President Kennedy was infamously killed in Dallas in 1963
The man who assassinated Robert Kennedy says he was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot and that it was not his bullets that killed the presidential candidate.
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who shot RFK dead in a crowded hotel kitchen in Los Angeles in June 1968, made the claims in court documents filed this week.
The papers detail extensive interviews with Sirhan during the past three years, some done while he was under hypnosis.
Assassin: Sirhan Sirhan claims he was manipulated by a seductive girl in a mind control plot and that it was not his bullets that killed RFK
The murder changed the course of U.S. history. Kennedy was on course to win the Democratic nomination and may well have beaten Richard Nixon to the White House.
The court files point to a mysterious girl in a polka-dot dress as the ‘controller’ who led Sirhan, now 66, to fire a gun in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel.
But the documents suggest a second person shot and killed Kennedy while using Sirhan as a diversion.
Under hypnosis, he remembered meeting the girl that night and becoming smitten with her. He said she led him to the pantry.
‘I am trying to figure out how to hit on her. That's all that I can think about,’ he says in one interview cited in the documents.
Caught: Sirhan is charged with the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy
‘I was fascinated with her looks. She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability.’
Sirhan said under hypnosis that on a cue from the girl he went into ‘range mode’ believing he was at a firing range and seeing circles with targets in front of his eyes.
‘I thought that I was at the range more than I was actually shooting at any person, let alone Bobby Kennedy,’ Sirhan was quoted as saying during interviews with Daniel Brown, a Harvard University professor and expert in trauma memory and hypnosis.
He interviewed Sirhan for 60 hours with and without hypnosis, according to the legal brief.
Sirhan maintained in the hypnotic interviews that the mystery girl touched him or pinched him on the shoulder just before he fired then spun him around to see people coming through the pantry door.
‘Then I was on the target range ... a flashback to the shooting range ... I didn't know that I had a gun," Sirhan said.
The story of the girl has been a lingering theme in accounts of the events just after midnight on June 5, 1968, when Kennedy was gunned down in the hotel pantry after claiming victory in the California Democratic presidential primary.
Witnesses talked of seeing such a female running from the hotel shouting, ‘We shot Kennedy.’ But she was never identified, and amid the chaos of the scene, descriptions were conflicting.
Through the years, Sirhan has claimed no memory of shooting Kennedy and said in the recent interviews that his presence at the hotel was an accident, not a planned destination.
Under what Brown called the condition of hypnotic free recall, he said Sirhan remembered seeing the flash of a second gun at the time of the assassination.
Without hypnosis, he said, Sirhan could not remember that shot.
Pepper, a New York lawyer with an international practice, previously tried to prove that James Earl Ray was not the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.The lawyer said he is convinced that Sirhan was a victim of a mind control project such as those used by the CIA in the 1960s. He is seeking an evidentiary hearing to exonerate Sirhan in Kennedy's killing.
A large portion of the new documents seek to prove the bullets that hit Kennedy came from a different direction than the spot where Sirhan was standing. The papers do not name any other possible shooter.
Sirhan was denied parole in March by a panel that said he had not shown sufficient remorse for the killing.
Sirhan Sirhan claims not to remember killing
Lawyer claims he was 'brainwashed' and memory erased
The man who assassinated Robert Kennedy says he was ‘hypno-programmed’ into carrying out the attack.
The claim is at the centre of the latest appeal by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, who shot RFK dead in a crowded hotel kitchen in Los Angeles in June 1968.
The murder changed the course of U.S. history. Kennedy was on course to win the Democratic nomination and may well have beaten Richard Nixon to the White House.
Freedom: Sirhan Sirhan will begin his bid for freedom in California on Wednesday
Caught: Sirhan is charged with the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy
His lawyer is expected to argue in a California parole hearing that he was a 'Manchurian Candidate', brainwashed into assassinating RFK in June 1968.
After years of hypnotherapy and psychological examination,attorney William Pepper said there was, 'no doubt he does not remember the critical events.'
Mr Pepper, who will argue for Sirhan's parole on Wednesday said: 'He is not feigning it. It's not an act. He does not remember it.
'It was very clear to me that this guy did not kill Bob Kennedy.'
Sirhan was convicted of shooting Robert Kennedy in the crowded kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Kennedy was there after claiming victory in the California presidential primary.
According to the New York-based lawyer, who also is a British barrister, there was a second gunman who shot and killed RFK.
Proponents of the second gun man theory contend that 13 shots were fired at RFK while Sirhan's gun held only eight bullets, and that the fatal shot appeared to come from behind Kennedy while Sirhan faced him.
Mr Pepper also suggests Sirhan was 'hypno-programmed,' turning him into a virtual 'Manchurian Candidate,' acting robot-like at the behest of evil forces who then wiped his memory clean.
The claims are however not expected to have any bearing on the outcome of the parole hearing.
The board is not being asked to retry the case and lawyers are not allowed to present evidence relating to guilt or innocence.
At issue is whether Sirhan, 66, remains a threat to others or to himself, whether he has accepted responsibility for the crime and expressed adequate remorse and whether he has an acceptable parole plan if he is released.
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