A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  In a letter to Milton Erickson, Rowland asked:

  When are you coming around to the notion that hypnotized persons can be made to harm themselves and others? I think my experiment on this point is conclusive, and I wish that you would duplicate it.”671

  It’s worth noting that Erickson, who refused to accede to the notion that someone could be made to do something under hypnosis they would never otherwise do, had also done contract work for the CIA, according to author Hank Albarelli in his book A Terrible Mistake. In other words, Erickson may well have had a career-serving reason to advocate this position.

  Shaw then turned to Orne and Bryan to refute Rowland, without making his readers aware (if he was even aware himself) of their agency connections. Shaw quoted “Dr. Martin Orne of the Harvard Medical School” as saying, “A subject in an experiment knows he’s in a laboratory, no matter what the hypnotist tells him. … He knows, at least subconsciously, he won’t be allowed to kill anyone.”672

  Bryan, then the president of the American Institute of Hypnosis and living in Los Angeles, was even more emphatic on this matter:

  The instant a hypnotist suggests something contrary to your moral code, the rapport between you will be broken. You’ll snap out of the trance.673

  Shaw added Bryan became “infuriated” at the notion that someone could be made to do something against their will under hypnosis:

  “I’m the best hypnotist in the world,” he shouts. “Don’t you think I’d hypnotize me a bank president and make him give me a couple of million dollars if I could? It just can’t be done.”674

  Beyond any possible CIA motive, Bryan’s comments were also provably self-serving. Just three months later, Bryan was placed on probation by the California State Board of Medical Examiners “after having been found guilty of having sexual relations” with four women he had hypnotized.675 Clearly, the Board thought Bryan had some power over the women through hypnosis they would not have given to Bryan outside of hypnosis. Had Bryan admitted that a hypnotist could manipulate others into doing something against their will or moral code, he might have had to face multiple charges of rape.

  Bryan was hardly the only one to take advantage of someone under hypnosis. In 1991, psychological examiner Thomas David Remsen received a ten-year prison sentence for raping and fondling a woman he was supposed to be treating for back pain. Clearly, the jury felt she had been hypnotized to participate in acts outside her morality and against her will.

  In 2014, a woman wore a hidden camera to her lawyer’s office and captured Michael Fine, a 59-year-old divorce attorney, hypnotizing her and then making sexual advances on her. He was given a 12-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to assaulting five other women under similar trances.676 The defense attorney said these were “strong, intelligent women” to suggest they were consciously participating in the sexual activity. But that just proved that even strong, intelligent people can be hypnotized to do things they would not normally do.

  A pharmacy assistant who was an amateur hypnotist pleaded guilty in 2015 to fourth-degree assault with sexual motivation after having sexual contact with a woman under hypnosis.677

  It’s clear from all these cases that some people can be made to do things under hypnosis that they wouldn’t normally do, enough to sue when they figure out how they’ve been manipulated.

  Sex was not the only thing Bryan coerced under hypnosis. Bryan was brought into the Boston Strangler case to hypnotize the only suspect the police had been able to come up with, Albert DeSalvo. Using hypnosis, Bryan apparently coerced the confession of a likely innocent man, according to the research of Susan Kelly in her book The Boston Stranglers:

  On March 20 and 21, 1965, [F. Lee] Bailey had brought in hypnoanalyst William Jennings [sic – his middle name was Joseph] Bryan to Bridgewater for the purpose of putting Albert [DeSalvo] into a trance in order to elicit further details of the murders that might be buried in his subconscious mind. In their respective books, Gerold Frank and Bailey offer partial transcripts of these sessions. According to both, Bryan urged Albert to think of the strangling victims as substitutes for his wife, Irmgard, and his daughter, Judy—the true targets of Albert’s homicidal rage, Bryan opined. As Frank himself wrote, “those who witnessed the hypnoanalysis wondered how much DeSalvo had been led or influenced by Dr. Bryan, so forceful and domineering.” And indeed, Bryan’s questions seem to have been highly suggestive: “Each time you strangled, it was because you were killing Judy, isn’t it? You were killing Judy ….”678

  It’s not clear if Bryan knew or cared if DeSalvo was innocent. What is clear, after reading both Frank’s and Bailey’s accounts, is that Bryan essentially put words in DeSalvo’s mouth through hypnosis that formed the basis for his so-called “motive.” Kelly’s book makes a very strong case that another person was instead responsible for these stranglings, not DeSalvo.

  If someone can be tricked into confessing to a crime they didn’t commit, can someone be tricked into committing a crime without understanding that’s what they are doing?

  The CIA employed a master magician named John Mulholland who taught operatives the tricks of magic and deception correctly referred to as “the dark arts.” People with no literacy in covert operations do not understand the amount of planning and preparation that goes into a covert operation. The original covert operations arm of the agency was called the directorate of “Plans” for this reason. Coups and assassinations require careful, long-term planning. CIA Counterintelligence Chief Angleton said it was as important to plan for the failure of an operation as well as its success. Nothing could be left to chance. The best foil for an operation was a patsy who didn’t know he was one. That was the best way to guarantee the success of an operation. Was that Sirhan’s real role, unbeknown to him?

  Sirhan has repeatedly been assessed by both defense and prosecution experts as being in the 20% of people who can be the most deeply hypnotized. But was Sirhan programmed to kill? Even apart from the physical evidence which proves Sirhan fired no bullets, it appears Sirhan was tricked, through hypnosis and possibly drugs, into being a patsy in the conspiracy to kill Senator Robert Kennedy without his knowledge or consent.

  Two TV shows in recent years did experiments designed to parallel Sirhan’s case to trick people into being part of an “assassination” plot. While blanks were loaded into the guns, both productions did all they could to convince their hypnotized subjects that the guns in their experiments were loaded and dangerous.

  One of the programs was by Derren Brown, an extraordinary British mentalist and hypnotist who has demonstrated over several years the numerous ways someone could be conditioned or programmed to do something extraordinary. As I described in a Salon.com article:

  On Channel 4 in the U.K. … hypnotist Derren Brown tested this scenario on his TV show “The Experiments.” He took a highly hypnotizable subject and, over a two-month period, trained him to shoot and “kill” a celebrity. The subject, however, did not know this was the experiment’s goal. Brown gave his subject a two-part trigger that would send him into a hypnotic state: a polka dot pattern and a unique cellphone ring tone. When he saw this pattern and heard the tone, the young man was taught to touch his head to focus his concentration, and then fire a gun at a target on a range. But his final test occurred not at a range, but at a taping of British entertainer Stephen Fry’s show. As the subject watched the show from a back row, a hidden camera showed a girl in a polka dot dress enter and sit in front of the subject. The cellphone rang. The girl turned to the subject and whispered, “The target is Stephen Fry.” The subject hesitated a moment, then touched his forehead, opened the case, pulled out a gun loaded with blanks, stood, and fired. Stephen Fry, who was wired with squibs (the exploding fake blood packets used in movies to simulate gunshots), fell down “dead.” The hypnotized man showed no reaction at the time. When shown a video of his act later, the subject seemed genuinely surprised at what he had done.679

  The Discovery Channel subsequen
tly conducted a similar experiment in 2012. After finding a highly hypnotizable person, in a segment called “Brainwashed,” experienced hypnotist Tom Silver took an actor and programmed him to “kill” someone. The gun was not loaded, but the actor was told that it was. The actor had also been told the episode was over and that they were done. But then the post-hypnotic trigger was given to pick up a gun and shoot a person. The actor picked up the loaded gun as instructed under hypnosis and fired it at the designated target. As Tom Silver noted:

  I believe hypnosis does have the potential to control someone’s mind and actions. … That’s something that a lot of hypnotherapists don’t want to talk about—it’s something they’re scared of.680

  Silver’s comments reflect uncommon candor and bravery. Every hypnotist has a vested financial interest in repeating the canard that one cannot be made to do something under hypnosis that they wouldn’t normally do. Otherwise, hypnotists could potentially be financially or criminally liable for the actions of their subjects.

  There will always be those who refuse to believe the evidence, who insist the subjects in these shows were faking because to believe otherwise makes them personally uncomfortable. But even if the subjects in both shows were faking, what if the gun had been loaded, as the subjects in both cases were told? In that case, one could argue, both shows proved you could trick someone into participating in an assassination plot without their knowledge or consent.

  In 2017, we had a dramatic real-world example of how people could be tricked into participating in an assassination plot without their knowledge. Two women, thinking they were doing a stunt for a TV show, murdered Kim Jong-nam, the exiled brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Siti Aisyah, a 25-year-old Indonesian woman, and Doan Thi Huong, a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman, were told they were participating in a prank for TV. They were recruited separately. Both had served as escorts and were open to making a quick $100. They were given bottles of water to spray in people’s faces as the cameras rolled and towels to wipe the water off. They had done this to a few people without harm. But someone had apparently put VX, a highly toxic nerve agent, on the towel with which Thi Huong, according to airport surveillance video, wiped Jong-nam’s face.

  Aisyah was apparently set up to be the distractor so Thi Huong could get behind Jong-nam to catch him unaware, or so it appears. In video footage, Thi Huong appeared to put a towel over Jong-nam’s face. According to Malaysian Police Chief Khalid Abu Bakar, “the woman who accosted Mr. Kim immediately went to wash her hands,” suggesting to Bakar that Thi Huong was “very aware” she had used a toxic agent.681 While this was taken as a sign of guilt, it’s also possible she washed her hands simply because she instantly felt the effects as something unpleasant and tried to wash it off without knowing it was fatally toxic. And although the police thought Thi Huong was witting, she showed up two days later at the airport believing she was supposed to do this again for the television show. Would a guilty person do that? Neither woman appeared to know that Jong-nam had died from the attack until after their arrests.682

  If Thi Huong or higher-level plotters set up Aisyah to take part in an assassination plot not “against her will” but rather “without her conscious knowledge” or understanding of her true role, what level of guilt should be assigned?

  Was Sirhan similarly set up, but with the added layer of hypnosis and possibly a drug, to participate in an assassination plot without having any clue that’s what he was doing?

  Sirhan’s current lawyer, William Pepper, gave Dr. Daniel Brown prolonged access to Sirhan to answer that question. Dr. Brown, who co-wrote one of the widely used texts on clinical hypnosis, was allowed to hypnotize Sirhan in a way that had never been done before. Instead of trying to get Sirhan to remember a crime he didn’t commit, Brown’s technique involved asking open-ended, non-leading questions to encourage Sirhan simply to remember all he could about what happened at the hotel that night.

  Various tests have shown that while people may not remember being hypnotized, they do remember what they learned under hypnosis. As Professor Kihlstrom noted, the brain is still recording, even if a hypnotic suggestion to forget has been given:

  Upon termination of hypnosis, some subjects find themselves unable to remember the events and experiences which transpired while they were hypnotized.… This posthypnotic amnesia does not occur unless it has been specifically suggested to the subject, and the memories are not restored when hypnosis is reinduced; thus it is not a form of state-dependent memory. However, it is temporary: upon administration of a pre-arranged cue, the amnesia is reversed and the formerly amnesic subject is able to remember the events perfectly well. Reversibility marks posthypnotic amnesia as a disruption of memory retrieval, as opposed to encoding or storage ….683

  Accordingly, Dr. Brown had good reason to believe that whatever happened at the hotel was recorded inside Sirhan’s mind, and that a good portion of that could be recovered. After six two-day sessions over a three-year period, for a total of 60 hours, using hypnosis, Dr. Brown uncovered a scenario that fits all the known evidence. In the course of his psychological assessment, Dr. Brown noted in a statement for the court:

  I directly observed Mr. Sirhan a number of times switch into at least one distinctively different alter personality state, a personality state that responds in robot-like fashion upon cue and adopts the behavior of firing a gun at a firing range. The alter personality state is heretofore referred to as “range mode.” This altered personality state only occurs while Mr. Sirhan is in an [sic] hypnotic or self-hypnotic state, and only in response to certain cues. This state never spontaneously manifests. While in this altered personality state Mr. Sirhan shows both a loss of executive control and complete amnesia.684 [Emphasis in the original.]

  Dr. Brown explained that because there was only one state that appeared only on a specific cue and never spontaneously, Sirhan could not be diagnosed as having “dissociative identity disorder,” adding the state was “likely the product of coercive suggestive influence and hypnosis.”685 Brown also noted:

  His post hypnotic amnesia for suggestions given in or actions performed under hypnosis is dramatic. I have written four text books on hypnosis, have taught hypnosis to over 3,000 professionals, and have hypnotized over 6,000 individuals over a 40-year professional career. Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met, and the magnitude of his amnesia for actions not under his voluntary [control] in hypnosis is extreme, more than I have observed in many other highly hypnotizable individuals.686

  Dr. Brown noted that Sirhan does not have schizophrenia and that the diagnosis at the trial was incorrect. Dr. Brown retested Sirhan and applied a “modern, scientific approach” to the results to come to this conclusion. He also submitted Sirhan’s Rorschach test responses to an associate “blind,” so that the person didn’t know it was Sirhan’s results being evaluated. That associate also agreed that there was no evidence of a mental disorder.

  Dr. Brown wrote that Dr. Diamond’s sessions with Sirhan had been “unduly suggestive.”687 On January 11, 1969, Diamond visited Sirhan in his cell. It was his third visit, and Robert Kaiser was there to observe. Kaiser watched Diamond hypnotize Sirhan and stick a pin in his hand, which did not appear to cause Sirhan pain, indicating he was likely deeply under at this point. Kaiser recounted what happened next:

  “Did anybody pay you to shoot Kennedy? Yes or no.”

  Sirhan sighed.

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “No.”

  “No? No one paid you to shoot Kennedy. Did anybody know ahead of time that you were going to do it, Sirhan?”

  “No.”688

  Diamond didn’t ask Sirhan an open-ended question like “what happened?” He assumed that Sirhan was the shooter, and that if there were conspirators, Sirhan would have known them. But we saw in the earlier chapters neither of these assumptions proved correct. After a few other questions, Diamond asked Sirhan questions which someone may have programmed Sirhan
to specifically avoid answering, as indicated by the pauses, which Kaiser timed.

  “Did you think this all up by yourself?”

  Sirhan paused for five seconds. “Yes,” he said.”

  “Yes. You thought this up all by yourself. Did you consult with anybody else, Sirhan?”

  “No.”

  “Are you the only person involved in Kennedy’s shooting?”

  Sirhan blocked again with a three-second pause. “Yes.”

  “Yes. Nobody involved at all. Why did you shoot Kennedy?” Sirhan had no answer. “Why did you shoot him, Sirhan?”

  “The bombers,” mumbled Sirhan.

  “What? The bombers? You mean the bombers to Israel?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you decide to shoot Kennedy?”

  “I don’t know.”689

  The pauses Sirhan gave after being asked if he thought up the plan by himself and if others were involved can indicate programming designed to help the person avoid the questions. “Blocking” is an observed phenomenon of what happens when a person has a conflict between what they want to do and what a hypnotic command has ordered them to do.

  In his last session with Diamond, in which the prosecution’s hypnotist Seymour Pollack took part, after taking Sirhan through a traumatic childhood scene under hypnosis where Sirhan saw a man shot to death in front of him, Diamond turned to the night of Kennedy’s assassination, with Pollack and Kaiser listening. He rehypnotized Sirhan, but Sirhan fell so deeply into a trance that Diamond had to work hard to keep Sirhan conscious enough to respond.