American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (10 page)

The Manchurian Candidate
had been a best-selling book in 1958, later made into a movie by John Frankenheimer (who, ironically, was a good friend of Robert Kennedy's and had him as a houseguest right before the assassination). It's about a soldier who gets “brainwashed” by the Communist Chinese during the Korean War, then later is used in a domestic assassination plot against an American presidential contender. This was regarded as pretty wild fiction at the time. Nobody knew until the late 1970s that both the military and CIA had been experimenting for years with drugs, hypnosis, and other means to figure out how to alter human behavior.

Back in 1954, a CIA study had raised the question: “Can an individual of (deleted nationality) descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily, against a prominent (deleted) politician or if necessary, against an American official.” After being drugged, the subject would perform the deed “at some later date,” after which “it was assumed the subject would be taken into custody by the (deleted) government and thereby ‘disposed of.'”
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In June of 1960, the CIA under the MK-ULTRA program had “launched an expanded program of operational experiments in hypnosis in cooperation with the Agency's Counterintelligence [CI] staff.” The program had three goals: “(1) to induce hypnosis very rapidly in unwitting subjects; (2) to create durable amnesia; and (3) to implant durable and operationally useful posthypnotic suggestions.”
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So what do we have in the case of Sirhan? A year before the government's mind control efforts became public, a nationally-recognized expert in hypnosis, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, had this to say: “I've gone over the data very carefully on Sirhan and my hypothesis is that someone... programmed him to be there and fire that gun. ... I know from his lawyer that he appeared at another political rally that night in the Ambassador Hotel, for some right-wing school superintendent. Here's what Sirhan reports: ‘I'm in this rally and I ask myself, what am I doing here? So I leave. Then I go back to my car and the next thing I know there's a gun on the seat. And I don't know where that gun came from. Then all of a sudden, I'm in the kitchen.' And he has no recall of how he went from that car into the hotel kitchen. If he was drunk or under drugs, which is possible, it would not be as easily recoverable. But if he were in a trance state and programmed, it is recoverable.”
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Meaning, an expert like Spiegel could still “unlock” Sirhan's mind today, if he were allowed into Pleasant Valley State Prison.

Sirhan showed a number of signs of being in some weird zone that night at the Ambassador. A Western Union operator had seen him standing transfixed in front of a teletype machine.
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Other witnesses observed his intense concentration in the pantry, and his almost super-human strength when being wrestled down, despite a “very tranquil” look on his face. Policeman Art Pacencia noticed that the pupils of Sirhan's eyes were dilated, which is another indication of a hypnotic state. Just as Oswald was when questioned about the assassination of JFK, Sirhan was oddly detached during that first long night of interrogation.

It could be, of course, that Sirhan was in a state of shock after the assassination. But Dr. Bernard Diamond was hired by Sirhan's defense team to check out his mental state, and Diamond put him under hypnosis. Sirhan turned out to be such an easy subject, “going under” so fast and so deeply, that Diamond had trouble keeping him awake. (I've learned that a rapid induction like this is a sure sign of someone having been hypnotized before.) Diamond could actually get Sirhan to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey, or sing a tune in Arabic. When he once asked Sirhan who killed Senator Kennedy, the response came back: “I don't know I don't know I don't know.” Yet strangely, on the opening day of the trial, Sirhan got up and started shouting how he wanted to be executed because he'd killed the senator “willfully, premeditatedly, with twenty years of malice aforethought.” Which was the real Sirhan?

On the witness stand, Dr. Diamond testified that he was surprised how easy it was to hypnotize Sirhan, but believed Sirhan had basically programmed himself through studying texts on self-hypnosis. The “automatic writing” found in Sirhan's notebooks, he said, “is something that can be done only when one is pretty well trained.”
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Another expert called in was Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, the chief psychologist at San Quentin when Sirhan was being held there. Simson-Kallas thought Sirhan was an ideal “Manchurian Candidate”: “He was easily influenced, had no real roots, and was looking for a cause.”
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Once, Sirhan told him: “Sometimes I go in a very deep trance so I can't even speak ... I had to be in a trance when I shot Kennedy, as I don't remember having shot him.”
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But after Sirhan asked Simson-Kallas to hypnotize him and see what he could find out, the San Quentin warden terminated their visits. Simson-Kallas ended up quitting his job at the prison. Even Roger LaJeunesse, the FBI's liaison to the L.A. County prosecutor, told journalist Robert Blair Kaiser: “The case is still open. I'm not rejecting the Manchurian Candidate aspect of it.” J. Edgar Hoover told the
Washington Post
that the interviewer had “manufactured” the quote, but Kaiser had it on tape.
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Dr. Spiegel thinks there were probably “one senior programmer and many accessories.”
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A couple names of hypnosis experts have surfaced over the years as being possible Svengalis behind Sirhan. Both did work for either the CIA or FBI and claimed to have been technical advisers on
The Manchurian Candidate
movie. Both are now dead. One was Dr. William J. Bryan, who phoned the KABC radio station not long after the assassination and said that the suspect had probably been acting under post-hypnotic suggestion. Bryan, the founder and executive director of the American Institute of Hypnosis, was known for hypnotizing the Boston Strangler, Albert De Salvo, after his arrest, to see what the mass murderer might reveal. (Strangely, again, De Salvo's name appears in Sirhan's notebook, even though Sirhan didn't have the foggiest idea who he was.) In 1977, Bryan is said to have told a researcher who asked him about Sirhan and programming, “I'm not going to comment on that case because I didn't hypnotize him.” After Bryan was found dead in his Vegas hotel room in 1977, supposedly of natural causes, some call girls came forward saying he'd once bragged of having hypnotized Sirhan.
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In the same league as Bryan was Dr. William Kroger, a world authority on hypnosis who consulted for the FBI and the LAPD, and who died in 1996 at almost ninety. While alive, he was referenced in Philip Melanson's book on the assassination under the pseudonym of Jonathan Reisner. Kroger and Bryan each “had an interest in the links between mystical orders and hypnosis, as well as in the uses of auto-hypnosis.”
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Melanson made it clear that he suspected “Reisner” as the man who programmed Sirhan. In the two years before Kroger died, my coauthor on this book conducted a couple of interviews with the man. Although Kroger denied having anything to do with Sirhan, he did admit knowing Jack Ruby and Sam Giancana, as well as George White, the chief field officer for the CIA's MK-ULTRA program.
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One clue to Sirhan's “handlers” might be the lawyers who took his case for free. One was Grant Cooper, a well-known L.A. criminal attorney. Sirhan selected his name, and that of Russell Parsons, right away from a list provided by the ACLU—a list Sirhan had asked for. Parsons did legal work for the mob, having been Mickey Cohen's counsel. Cooper, at the time, was defending one of mobster Johnny Rosselli's pals in a cheating scandal at the Friar's Club.
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Cooper gave Sirhan the motive that he was angry at RFK for giving jets to Israel. Prior to this, there was “not a single reference to Zionism, Israel, Palestine, [or any of] the terms Sirhan would spout at his trial as propelling him to murder.”
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Years later, Sirhan said that “Cooper sold me out.”
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During conversations with his attorney, Sirhan once asked Cooper, “If I got the money, where is it?”
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In the strange notebooks he kept before the assassination, there were references to a figure of $100,000. Also, at least a dozen times, the notation: “Please pay to the order of Sirhan,” always on the same pages where he scrawls things like “RFK must be be be disposed of.”
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So it looks like somebody was telling Sirhan he'd be getting paid handsomely for the deed. One fellow he knew by an alias of Frank Donneroumas had hired Sirhan to exercise and groom horses at the racetrack. The first place he worked was “a Syndicate meeting place,” and another track where Sirhan worked “was frequented by some of the nation's most infamous racketeers.” Donneroumas's real name was Henry Ramistella, with a record of narcotics violations in both New York and Florida.
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It's been long known that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa had made threats against RFK. Joseph Marcello, brother of New Orleans Mob boss Carlos Marcello, can be heard telling an informant on tape, when the subject of the Kennedys came up: “We took care of ‘em, didn't we?” There's also a file on a Roy Donald Murray, who was overheard by cops saying that he'd pledged some Vegas funds for a Mob contract on Robert Kennedy.
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Same as with his brother's assassination, it's hard to conceive that the Mob had enough power to pull this off without government help. Of course, it's possible they knew of MK-ULTRA and of the hypnosis experts, and paid one of those guys to program Sirhan—knowing the CIA and FBI would want to keep that from being exposed. But it still smells to me like there was intelligence involvement. CIA agent David Morales, who hated the Kennedys, allegedly once told his attorney: “I was in Los Angeles when we got Bobby.” Morales had once come up with a similar scenario for assassinating Castro in a pantry.
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Can we still get to the bottom of what happened? Maybe, if Sirhan's mind can be “de-programmed.” That's what his new attorney, William Pepper, wants to do. He was James Earl Ray's last attorney, too, and he's pushing to start new psychological evaluations of Sirhan with an expert in regression therapy.
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I'd like to be a fly on the wall for that one, because recently I had a personal experience with a guy who claims to be a programmed “Manchurian Candidate.”

I was filming an episode about “Big Brother” for my new TV series when I met with him in the basement of a parking garage, very much like Deep Throat in
All the President's Men
. He says that his father was in the CIA, and he was taken as a “candidate” at the age of six, selected partly because of his nationality (he's an American Indian). He says his parents didn't have a choice. The only reason he knows today is, he was in a bad car wreck. He had to get a full-body MRI, where they discovered four different implants.

The accident also jostled him to the point where he's getting his memory back about what was done to him, and what
he's
done. I asked him point-blank, “You have killed people?” He said, “Yes, I have.” He told me he was fourteen when he was first sent to do “ops.” He keeps referring to “we,” meaning that there are way more than him. He said, “We're all getting together now because we want our lives back.” They're going to go public. “That's one of the reasons I did the interview with you, because we think we might want to have you with us,” he said. I told him, “I don't know if I've got
that
much courage.” He said, “Well, we just feel that we need someone with credibility to stand there with us and say, ‘Listen to what these people have to say, they're not all crazy. Or if they are, they were made to be that way.'”

Is this man a real “Manchurian Candidate”? Or is he nuts and making it all up? Like my son said, maybe he had something traumatic happen to him as a kid that set this off. Well, maybe, but whatever happened,
he
believes it. There's no doubt in my mind about that, from the stories he told me. Also, he had a handler, a girl who accompanied him. She said, “I'm one, too. I know his case, and I'm also here to control his multiple personalities. We get strength through each other.”

Being left with the impression of how strongly he believes this, then clearly I could see him being able to perform an act of violence. How do I feel about the government—or whoever it is—doing something like this to someone? They should be in jail. These are evil people who don't belong out in society, because obviously they have no regard for another human life. Or are these people so callous that, looking at the “big picture,” they view a body or two as simply collateral damage? They're beyond human feelings? If some have to be destroyed to achieve the goal, it's better for the mass of humanity. I don't fit into that mold. These are the types of things you attribute to the Nazis. Sure, some were exceptionally intelligent, but they were an empire based and designed on evil.

If Robert Kennedy had survived the first attempt on his life, and tried to implement all that he wanted to do, he'd have been “killed again.” All the people making money off the Vietnam War, would they let the golden goose be stopped? And to reopen his brother's case? I compare this to President Obama's inaugural address. When I heard him give that dynamic speech the day he took office, I turned to my wife and said, “If he attempts to do all this, he's going to be killed.” Where he wanted to tread, the same as Bobby Kennedy—you're talking about powerful forces involved in evil, who don't sweat one more piece of collateral damage.