A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  “I told you not to bring those two girls in here,” screamed Sirhan. It was not so much the revelation of his IQ of 89 that triggered Sirhan’s rage. Somehow, it was the presence of two girls who had nothing to do with the case.

  “Who are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Those two girls sitting next to you.”

  “Who are they?”

  “As if you didn’t know!” cried Sirhan. “One of them is Gwen Gumm and the other is Peggy Osterkamp.”

  I was dumbfounded. Miss Gumm had visited Cooper’s office only the day before. I told him neither of the two ladies was Miss Gumm. Sirhan called me a liar. One was Peggy Osterkamp and the other was Gwen Gumm, said Sirhan, forcing me to judge that Sirhan was in a kind of paranoid, dissociated state there and then. I went back out to the courtroom and asked the two girls for their identification. One was Sharon Karaalajich, a clerk-typist for the Los Angeles Police Department, and the other was Karen Adams, a beautician from Columbus, Ohio, who was visiting her sister in Los Angeles.612

  Kaiser wrote the girls’ names down and showed them to Sirhan. “Sirhan read it, looked back at the girls and shook his head furiously. He wouldn’t be fooled,” Kaiser added.613

  Something about the two girls appeared to trigger something in Sirhan that might have been related to his programming. A similar weirdness happened when Kaiser questioned Sirhan about a random girl from his background:

  “And then another time, when that girl was running for campus queen—”

  “Don’t talk about that, please,” said Sirhan.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t talk about women to me.” I was taken aback at the strength of Sirhan’s objection to an apparently innocuous question. “Don’t talk about women to me.” It seemed significant enough to warrant a further probe, and I asked why. “This is political,” said Sirhan. “This is politically motivated—” He started to giggle nervously. “This is, heh heh, political, heh heh, politically motivated.”

  I hadn’t implied that Sirhan’s relations with girls had had anything to do with the crime, but in Sirhan’s mind there was a connection he felt compelled to deny.614

  Given how the girl in the polka dot dress appeared to be Sirhan’s handler at the Ambassador Hotel, this makes sense. Even outside of hypnosis sessions, Sirhan seemed to be acting out a post-hypnotic suggestion not to answer specific questions about women, perhaps because the hypnotist feared if Sirhan answered questions about a woman he might also talk about the woman who had controlled him in his final moments before the shooting. In fact, Sirhan’s very first words under full hypnosis by Diamond were, “I don’t know any people!”615 What a strange exhortation to make, unprompted. But it makes sense if Sirhan were hypnotized and the hypnotist had given Sirhan a post-hypnotic instruction to never mention any of the other people connected with the plot, especially the woman in the polka dot dress who appeared to be his handler at the Ambassador Hotel.

  Given the evidence that Sirhan was hypnotized, we have to be careful about reading too much into anything Sirhan wrote, said, or did before and after the assassination. We also have to avoid assumptions about what Sirhan would or wouldn’t have done around the time of the assassination as Sirhan clearly was being manipulated. When I talked to Munir about what Sirhan had done the Monday before the primary election, he said that Sirhan would never have hitchhiked, that he would be too proud to do that, and therefore either Jerry Owen had been lying about picking up a hitchhiking Sirhan or he had picked up a lookalike instead. Sirhan denied this as well to his defense team. But if Sirhan were under a hypnotist’s control, wasn’t it possible the hypnotist compelled Sirhan to hitchhike? When I put the question to Munir in that context, Munir agreed that was perhaps possible and that he had never considered that before.

  If someone had the power to hypnotize Sirhan to fire a gun in the pantry when Senator Kennedy came through, they had the power to make Sirhan commit a series of actions that would make him look guilty after the fact. Perhaps it wasn’t Sirhan’s idea at all to go buy a gun, to fire a gun at a range for hours on June 4, to go to the Ambassador Hotel that night. Perhaps all of that that had been suggested to Sirhan by a hypnotist.

  This is also exactly what a veteran of the CIA’s mind control programs described to State Department officer John Marks for his seminal book on the government’s mind control programs, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Mark’s confidential CIA informant described to Marks how a hypnotist could, through the skilled application of hypnosis, walk a chosen “patsy” through a series of events, such as “a visit to a store, a conversation with a mailman, picking a fight at a political rally,” to lay in a history that could make him look guilty after the fact:

  The subject would remember everything that happened to him but be amnesiac only for the fact that the hypnotist ordered him to do these things. … The purpose of this exercise is to leave a circumstantial trail that will make the authorities think the patsy committed a particular crime.616

  So we have to look at the evidence of Sirhan’s so-called acts of premeditation with new eyes. Yes, he wrote in his diary, on one page, “R.F.K. must die” over and over, followed inexplicably by “pay to the order of” and “I have never heard” among other gibberish. Yes, he went to a shooting range the day of the primary (and a few times prior). Yes, he claimed to have killed Kennedy (a claim he made in the absence of evidence to suggest otherwise, triggered by the presence of two women whom Sirhan thought were two other women). Yes, he had a gun in the pantry. But was any of this entirely of his own volition? It seems not just possible but likely that someone gave Sirhan the hypnotic suggestion to take a gun to the Ambassador Hotel that night.

  Over the course of my research, I became fascinated by the question of whether someone could or could not be made to do something through hypnosis that they wouldn’t normally do. I not only read a large amount of literature on the subject, but I also sought out and attended various hypnosis demonstrations looking for clues.

  In the first act I ever saw, the hypnotist warned the audience afterward not to talk to the people who had been on stage, hypnotized. Why, I wondered? After the show, I immediately sought one out. One tall young man had done all kinds of ridiculous things onstage, so I looked for him afterward. I found him talking to his friends, who had just seen the show. To my surprise, he denied being hypnotized and thought his friends were delusional to suggest he had been. He claimed he’d just been faking going along with the suggestions. But then he denied having done a few of the things we had all just seen him do, and I realized he was the one suffering from a delusion.

  An unnerving aspect of hypnosis is its ability to cause people to see hallucinations of things that aren’t there. And what’s worse is this can happen not only in the hypnotic state but in the waking, post-hypnotic state as well.617 Apparently, Sirhan entered a hallucination upon a physical cue in the pantry, and what he saw in his hallucination did not match what was really going on. His hallucination prevented him from seeing the reality of what he was doing, as you’ll soon see.

  At the San Diego County Fair, I personally witnessed an example of someone experiencing a hypnotically induced hallucination. I grabbed a seat early and started chatting with the woman already there in the next seat. During the show, the hypnotist chose her as one of the many people he invited up on the stage. I knew that would be interesting, because after 20 minutes of chat I had a sense of who she was, and she was as normal as could be. During the show, the hypnotist at one point gave her a fake $100 bill that looked like it had come from a game of Monopoly. The hypnotist told her, however, that this was a $25,000 check that she had won. She was very excited on stage, as one might expect in such a stage show. But it’s what I saw after the show that really disturbed me.

  At the end of the show, the hypnotist appeared to awaken his subjects from hypnosis. But in this case, the woman was still plagued with what could only be called a hallucination. I had not seen her when she came off
the stage as I wanted to chase down the hypnotist and ask him to comment on the Sirhan case. (The hypnotist got visibly uncomfortable, refused to comment and hurried out of the area.) As I started to leave the area I spotted the woman I had been seated next to. She was wandering around, looking for something or someone. She looked distressed. I went up to her to see if I could help her. She was still holding the fake $100 bill and mumbling to herself. When I got near her I heard her saying, “I have to give this back. I can’t keep this.” I asked her what she meant. She said, “He gave me this $25,000 check, but I can’t keep this. I have to return it to him.” I told her to look at what she was carrying. “Can you see this is only play money?” I asked her. She looked right at it and said, “No, this is a $25,000 check. That’s too much. I have to return it.” I tried for a few minutes to persuade her of the fact that she was carrying only play money, but I was unsuccessful.

  It was a frightening sight to behold. She was not a plant. This was not for effect. In all other aspects she appeared to be entirely normal. The show was over and the hypnotist had actually left the area. I had noticed her again after the show only at a distance, and quite by accident. She had not sought me out. Her inability to accurately describe what was in her own hand, long after the show was over and after the hypnotist had already departed the area, convinced me some people could be made to believe just about anything, under hypnosis.

  And that’s the key to getting people to do something “against their will.” If you want someone to do something they wouldn’t normally do, you don’t suggest it straight out. You don’t tell the other person, “take this gun and kill your mother.” Hardly anyone would respond to such a direct suggestion. But you could trick the person into believing they are in a different circumstance altogether. You might tell your deeply hypnotized subject instead, “your mother has been kidnapped and an imposter has been substituted in her place. The imposter will look and sound just like your mother. She will know your history, just like your mother. She has even been taught to cry just like your mother. But you must not believe the imposter. Only by killing the imposter can you rescue your real mother.” With one of those one-in-five people who are the most susceptible to hypnosis, and with a hypnotist far more skilled than I, conceivably, a person could be made to kill a loved one not so much against their will but without understanding what they were doing.

  The CIA’s hypnotists, after a number of experiments, came to this same conclusion, as reported in the aforementioned CIA document “Hypnotism and Covert Operations”:

  [S]uppose that while under hypnosis a subject is told that a loved one’s life is in danger from a maniac and that the only means to rescues is to shoot a person designated as the maniac? Three expert practitioners (two from universities and the Agency consultant quoted above) say that there is no doubt on the basis of their experience that in such circumstances murder would be attempted. The only requirement is that the proposal be put “in a form and manner acceptable to the subject.” Most modern authorities feel that a subject will carry out any suggestion which he can rationalize within the framework of his moral code.

  (Currently, there is a murder trial in [redacted] in which the murderer has been judged to have been under hypnosis at the time of the crime. He has been retried, released and the hypnotist tried and convicted. The case is now under appeal. The comment of the three knowledgeable informants was that the hypnotist must have been a rank amateur to have been found out since any experienced operator would have known how to suggest away the fact that he had arranged the crime.) [Parentheses in the original.]618

  The murder trial the CIA document referred to was that of Palle Hardrup. In 1951, during a botched robbery, Hardrup shot and killed two people. He escaped on a bicycle that belonged to Bjørn Schouw Nielsen. After being arrested, Hardrup insisted for weeks that he had acted alone. But eventually Hardrup realized he had been hypnotized by Nielsen to commit the crimes.619

  The court-appointed psychiatrist Paul Reiter, “one of Denmark’s leading psychiatrists and an expert in hypnosis,”620 hypnotized Hardrup to get him to remember how he came to commit the crime. He discovered in this manner that Nielsen had been coercively hypnotizing Hardrup over a long period of time and had convinced Hardrup under hypnosis to commit the robbery. In attempting to fulfill the robbery command, Hardrup shot and killed two people.

  At first, the police and other authorities thought this was preposterous. To demonstrate how easily hypnotized Hardrup could be, Reiter conducted a hypnotic demonstration in front of law enforcement, doctors and court officials. Nielsen, who had asked to be present, asked Reiter to make Hardrup’s arm stiff. Nielsen then stuck a needle under Hardrup’s fingernail, presumably to invoke pain and bring Hardrup out of his trance, but Hardrup did not react. Nielsen explained this away by saying Hardrup had Yogi training and noted that the death penalty was at stake. But the jury believed Reiter, and Nielsen was proclaimed guilty of “having planned and instigated by influence of various kinds, including suggestions of a hypnotic nature, the commission of the two robberies and homicides by Hardrup.”621 Nielsen was sentenced to death, and Hardrup was sentenced to a mental institution.622 Nielsen appealed his case to the Danish Supreme Court but lost.

  But Nielsen had planted a strong suggestion in Hardrup that would nearly free him. The relationship between the two men had been cemented over a period of years together in prison prior to the robbery, and Nielsen had given Hardrup the hypnotic suggestion that if they were ever separated, he must seek him out again. True to his programming, Hardrup reinitiated contact with Nielsen. Shortly thereafter, Hardrup wrote a letter to Nielsen’s lawyer saying he had never been hypnotized and had just fooled everyone. Nielsen sought a new trial based on this evidence, and the matter “came before a special court in Denmark which finally rejected his appeal that new, vital evidence had turned up.”623 The special court “held the charge of hypnosis to be unfounded but held that the applicant [Nielsen] had planned the crimes and had influenced Hardrup to commit them.”624 In other words, the court held Nielsen responsible for coercing Hardrup, even if they doubted this was due to hypnosis. Nielsen’s subsequent appeal to the European Commission on Human Rights in Strasbourg was also a bust. In 1961, that body rejected Nielsen’s appeal and said that Nielsen’s human rights had not been violated.625 In 1966, Hardrup, the hypnotized one, was released on probation. Nielsen, the hypnotist, spent the rest of his days in an institution for the criminally insane.626 Hardrup, like Sirhan, was, according to Reiter, in that “highly hypnotizable” segment of the population.627

  BEYOND THE HARDRUP CASE, NUMEROUS AUTHORITIES ON THE subject of hypnosis agree that with the right subject and crafty suggestions, someone could indeed be induced to conduct criminal acts, including murder, under hypnosis. These authorities include, but are not limited to, George Estabrooks; Emile Franchel, who had a television show in California in the 1950s called Adventures in Hypnotism; Dr. Daniel Brown, who co-wrote one of the modern textbooks on hypnosis; and Santa Clara University law school professor Alan Scheflin, who also has a degree in Counseling Psychology and who has received numerous awards for his work with various psychiatric and psychological organizations. There are now a number of studies showing people will do extreme things to themselves and one another under hypnosis. For this and other reasons, it is illegal to broadcast a hypnotic induction on television, as some members of audience could be inadvertently hypnotized. In fact, stage hypnosis was illegal in several states and countries in the 1960s.628

  In their book Snapping, authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman explained the shift in modern thinking about hypnosis:

  As scientists have come to understand hypnosis a little better, most of their earlier beliefs about it have been rudely overturned. The myth of the somnambulant trance state has been shattered—the old notion that a person must be put to sleep to be hypnotized has been categorically disproved. Similarly, the dangling watch fobs and swirling spirals of the stage mesmerist have been sho
wn merely to distract their subjects’ attention, rendering them more susceptible to suggestion and command. Gone, too, are the naïve convictions that hypnosis cannot be put to harmful use and that a person will not perform an act under hypnosis that is contrary to his conscious nature. Historically, hypnosis practitioners have exercised extreme caution and responsibility in the use of their mysterious skill, but many admit that, through lies and carefully contrived suggestions, a hypnotist could prompt his subject to commit any action, even a crime, in the firm belief that he was performing the act to accomplish some greater good. [Emphasis added.]629

  Scheflin elaborated on this point in his declaration for Sirhan’s appeal, which was recently denied by the California State Supreme Court. Given that Scheflin also has a degree in Counseling Psychology and has received 14 awards from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, among several others, and given that he has studied the government’s experiments into this subject in depth over a period of years, we must give substantial credence to his assertions as stated in his declaration:

  People who disbelieve, as I once did, the possibility, under certain special circumstances of enhanced control of the mind do so because 1) they sensibly fear, and thus do not want to accept, the idea that it is possible to control the mind of another person, and 2) they are unfamiliar with the extensive overt and covert scientific literature on this controversial subject. However, those of us who for several decades have studied the scientific research on mind control, and studied the literature on brainwashing, have become reluctant believers.630