by Lisa Pease
After encountering the man behind the stage, according to Dr. Brown’s notes of Sirhan’s sessions, Sirhan followed the girl into the pantry “like a puppy.” He had wanted to go back downstairs to hear the mariachi band but felt compelled to follow the girl instead. In earlier sessions with Diamond, Sirhan had remembered pouring coffee for a girl who looked “Armenian” or of some other Mediterranean nationality. But Sirhan did not at that time remember if the woman was wearing a polka dot dress. Nowhere in Dr. Brown’s declaration does he substantiate that the girl who intercepted Sirhan at the bar was wearing a polka dot dress in the statements he quoted, so it is unclear if that was Dr. Brown’s assumption or something Sirhan said.
Sirhan followed the girl into the pantry. It was not well lit in there, and she sat on one of the steam tables. He faced her. According to Dr. Brown’s declaration, Sirhan remembered:
I’m still sleepy … very sleepy … I was flirting with her. … Then she sat up on the table facing with her back to the wall…her thighs and legs are right here…I am just looking at her, trying to take her beauty in…I am trying to figure out how to hit on her. That’s all I can think about … I was fascinated with her looks … She was sitting. I was standing. … She was busty, looked like Natalie Wood. She never said much. It was very erotic. I was consumed by her. She was a seductress with an unspoken unavailability.”707
The next thing Sirhan remembered was the girl tapping or pinching him on the shoulder, an unnaturally harsh pinch. “It snapped me out of my doldrums,” Sirhan said under Dr. Brown’s hypnosis. “She says, ‘Look, look, look.’” At this point the woman directed his attention to the back of the room, where Kennedy was entering.
The woman put her hand on him and Sirhan at first “thought it was romantic.” But he saw the woman was not looking at him but “way above my head.” Was she looking at the shooter standing on the table that Harold Burba, George Green and Nina Rhodes-Hughes had seen during the shooting? Sirhan continued:
I think she had her hand on me…I am not sure if it was her hand or somebody else’s…Then I was at the target range…a flashback to the shooting range…I didn’t know that I had a gun…there was this target like a flashback to the target range…I thought that I was at the range…I think I shot one or two shots…Then I snapped out of it and thought, “I’m not at the range” … Then, “What is going on?’ Then they started grabbing me…I’m thinking, “the range, the range, the range.” Then everything gets blurry… I think that’s when Uecker grabbed me…after that first or second shot…that was the end of it…It was the wrong place for the gun to be there…I thought it was the range…Then, they broke my finger…Next thing I remember, I was being choked and man-handled. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t realize until they got in a car…later when I saw the female judge I knew that Bobby Kennedy was shot and I was the shooter, but it doesn’t come into my memory.708
If this is an accurate memory of what Sirhan experienced at that moment, if a jury could be made to understand this, it seems unlikely a jury would find him guilty. Sirhan was like a wind-up doll. At a given signal he believed he was back at the target range, shooting.
Laurie Dusek, an attorney working closely with William Pepper on Sirhan’s case, observed with Dr. Brown Sirhan’s spontaneous exhibition of “range mode” behavior. Brown described how “Mr. Sirhan automatically took his firing stance, and in an uncharacteristic robot-like voice described shooting at vital human organs.” Brown noted that “Following brief re-enactments of ‘range mode,’ Mr. Sirhan remained completely amnesiac for the behavior.”709 According to Dan Brown’s declaration, the first time Sirhan realized he was being charged with killing Robert Kennedy was when he went to the Judge, which fits the scenario I proposed earlier—that Sirhan had been programmed not to come out of his trance until he had been arraigned.
It’s not only possible but probable that Sirhan was as much a victim of this crime as Robert Kennedy. He was used in someone else’s assassination plot without his conscious knowledge. Here was a man who had come to America to escape the horrible Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to pursue a better life, only to have his background used against him to set him up as a patsy in the assassination of Senator Kennedy. Given that Sirhan didn’t kill anyone in the pantry, given that he didn’t even wound anyone in the pantry (because remember, not even one bullet from the victims could be linked to Sirhan’s gun), I believe if the case were retried, a jury might find Sirhan “not guilty” of any criminal act that night.
If the conspirators wanted to ensure Kennedy didn’t leave the hotel alive, were there other possible patsies there that night as well? People who might also have been programmed to forget their role? I have two candidates for alternate patsies: Luis Angel Castillo and Crispin Curiel Gonzales. Gonzales committed suicide in jail, or so we were told, after leaving a note indicating possible foreknowledge of the assassination. And Castillo had apparently already been used by the CIA in a previous assassination attempt against a political figure.
In April 1967, numerous papers around the country ran a UPI story out of Manila that announced that the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) had in custody a man who claimed, under truth serum, to have been part of the plot to kill President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. The 24-year-old man was named Luis Angel Castillo. According to the UPI story, Castillo was a “Cuban-trained Communist agent sent to the Philippines to contact Communist guerrillas.” Under “hypnotic grilling” and truth serum, Castillo “admitted” that he was in Dallas the day President Kennedy was shot. He had been given a rifle by a man he did not know and told to shoot at the man in the open car. Out of the trance, at a news conference in the Manila NBI office, when asked if he was involved in the JFK assassination plot, Castillo said only, “I don’t want to answer that question.”710 Castillo said he was a Cuban agent, sent to the Philippines to contact Communist Huk guerrillas.711 But in a hypnotic session, Castillo revealed that he worked for the CIA. This part, of course, was never reported in the mainstream media and only came out later due to the research of UCLA professor Richard Popkin, author Dick Russell, author and media activist Jeff Cohen, and a small handful of others.
As ridiculous as this story must have sounded to the general public, CIA officials thought there was possibly some truth to Castillo’s story. Castillo was mentioned in the CIA’s Inspector General (IG) report in connection with the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro. When one of the authors of the IG report, Scott Breckenridge, was questioned about Castillo’s name being in there by the Rockefeller Commission, according to a memo from former Warren Commission and Rockefeller Commission attorney David Belin:
In the opinion of Breckenridge, Castillo’s story, as documented in these files, probably cannot be dismissed out of hand as inherently incredible. Breckenridge still has no present memory of how the team preparing the 1967 IG report on assassination came to be aware of Castillo or what follow-up action, if any, was taken on the basis of these documents. He suggests that another person who worked on the 1967 IG report, Ken Greer, may have worked on this Castillo angle and would be the person to contact for such information. He stated that Greer is now retired and living in Wisconsin. [Emphasis added.]712
The mention of Wisconsin was interesting because Castillo claimed to have been programmed by a woman named Jean Bolf (now deceased) in Wisconsin.
Breckenridge also stated that these files do not indicate whether or not Castillo was ever actually deported to the United States and if so whether the FBI ever interrogated him. (But see item below, which indicates Castillo returned to Chicago on February 10, 1968, and evaded the authorities.) Apparently the Agency has no knowledge of Mr. Castillo’s present location.713 [Parenthesis in the original; emphasis added.]
Castillo’s story, and the effort to surface it, is worthy of a book on its own. I will only give it scant treatment here. I talked to the man who hypnotized him while he was in prison in the Philippines, Victor Arcega. I asked Arcega how he
even got access to this prisoner, and he explained that his brother worked for the NBI and had brought him in to see what he could find out.
Castillo was born in Puerto Rico to Cuban parents, according to the FBI, although a family member said the FBI report was wrong and the father was born in Mexico and the mother in Pennsylvania, and that they met in Chicago. Castillo was in and out of prisons in places that included, besides the Philippines, New Jersey and Missouri.
According to Belin’s memo, one of Castillo’s arrest reports contained this statement: “There were strong indications of homosexual tendencies on the part of Castillo, and he was described as being of low average intelligence with an unstable personality.” Homosexual or not, Castillo married a woman he met when he returned to the United States in February of 1968. When he told her he worked for the CIA, she asked him, “Why use someone as erratic as you?” “That’s the point,” he told her.714 And he’s right. The CIA’s goal when developing assets was always “plausible deniability”—the ability to instantly distance themselves credibly. Unstable conmen and criminals make excellent recruits for this reason. They know how to evade the law and not get caught, and if caught, the CIA can simply use their past crimes to discredit them.
In 1967, Castillo used the name of a criminal wanted in the Philippines, Antonio Eloriaga-Reyes, and committed a crime. Because he was arrested as Eloriaga-Reyes, he was then deported to the Philippines. (Curiously enough, Crispin Curiel Gonzales used someone else’s identity and got himself deported to Mexico. Is this a common intelligence agency technique? A cheap way to get into a foreign country?)
Once his actual identity had been verified, the NBI knew they had someone strange on their hands. The NBI asked Arcega to hypnotize Castillo to see if he could uncover what he was really doing in the Philippines. The NBI feared Castillo might have been sent to kill their president, Ferdinand Marcos.
The CIA had at one time controlled the President of the Philippines. Edward Lansdale, who worked for the CIA in a number of sensitive covert operations, controlled Ramon Magsaysay as a CIA asset and helped propel him to the presidency in 1953. When Magsaysay died in a plane crash in 1957, CIA officer Joseph Burkholder Smith was sent to the Philippines with the admonition to “find another Magsaysay.”715 But the CIA was outspent by political forces in the Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos came to power in 1965. Marcos knew how to play the anti-Communist tune to America to get foreign aid, but then he used that money for other purposes. The CIA had not been able to control Marcos, and given their pattern abroad, this would have been reason enough for the CIA to attempt to assassinate him.
In his book Gold Warriors, Sterling Seagrave suggests the CIA discovered gold and other treasures plundered by the Japanese during World War II that had been hidden in the Philippines. The gold and other treasures were used to fund secret “off-the-books” CIA operations through a trust named the Santa Romana Foundation in Lichtenstein. But the CIA wasn’t the only one to find the hidden Japanese treasures. Ferdinand Marcos had found some sites too and was busy pilfering the riches for himself. If true, that gave the CIA two reasons to want to take Marcos out. Not only was he not playing by their rules, he was depriving them of future funding. Both reasons give credence to the notion the CIA was trying to assassinate Marcos.
In a “Secret/Sensitive” memo from the CIA’s files, from Henry Kissinger to President Nixon, dated March 15, 1973, which is still largely redacted, we find this text:
You will recall that when the Vice President stopped briefly in the Philippines, President Marcos gave him a file of documents which alleged that several Americans were involved in plotting his assassination. At your direction, CIA has completed its analysis of the documents. Director Schlesinger’s conclusions are as follows:716
A full page of text is redacted at this point, followed by this:
We will ask [FBI] Director [L. Patrick] Gray to investigate on a close-hold basis what, if anything, can be done about the American citizen who escaped to this country. We will also send a message to President Marcos informing him that we are investigating the involvement of our citizens.717
This appears to be an oblique reference to Luis Castillo and the possibility that he went to the Philippines to kill Marcos. After several more wholly redacted pages, there’s a “Secret/Sensitive/Eyes Only” memo from Brent Scowcroft to Mike Dunn titled “Alleged Assassination Plot Against President Marcos.” The fact that “Assassination Plot” is singular indicates this is not likely a set of plots but a single plot, and the text confirms this:
The file of documents which President Marcos gave the Vice President on the alleged plot against his life has been evaluated by the CIA ….718
The CIA cleared itself of all responsibility, but that means nothing, as that is what they would have done had they been directly involved.
In extensive notes of his sessions with Castillo, Victor Arcega described how the repetitions of certain words, phrases, letters and numbers would send Castillo immediately into automatic behaviors that were wholly repeatable. Common words like “sand” and “flowers” would elicit strong behaviors. But when words and sequences were chained, new behaviors would appear. If Castillo had been faking everything, he would have had to have had a prodigious memory, able to remember which behavior to exhibit upon which clue. Arcega believed Castillo’s behavior was indicative of intense and prolonged hypnotic programming. One coded phrase caused Castillo to put an imaginary gun to his head and pull the trigger, a sight Arcega found highly disturbing. His hypnotic sessions with Castillo took place over the course of several months. When shown a picture of Marcos, Castillo would switch into his own version of “range mode” and fire an imaginary pistol at Marcos. If the picture was marched around the cell Castillo would follow it, shooting his imaginary gun at it, according to Arcega’s notes.
The woman in Wisconsin, Jean Bolf, appeared to play a large part in Castillo’s programming. Awake and unhypnotized, Castillo suggested Bolf was an attractive woman whom he enjoyed being around. But under hypnosis, Castillo appeared to hate her and felt she was controlling him. Arcega found that when he put Castillo under hypnosis, Castillo awakened at the word “flowers.” Bolf’s husband Gerald had, at the time of their engagement in 1958, been “stationed in Milwaukee with the Navy.”719
Castillo seemed to fit the “split personality” described by Estabrooks. The first personality to come out under hypnosis believed himself to be a communist agent. But the deeper personality under hypnosis understood he worked for the CIA.
Castillo returned to the United States in February 1968 and apparently disappeared. Did he reappear in the pantry? Castillo looked so much like Sirhan that J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director, received an urgent telegram from the Philippines after the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy that read:
PHOTOS OF SIRHAN SIRHAN AND [CASTILLO] ALMOST IDENTICAL STOP [CASTILLO] DEPORTED FROM PHILIPPINES 1967 FOR FALSIFICATION OF PASSPORT STOP WHILE IN PHILLIPPINES HE CLAIMED TO BE PART OF JOHN KENNEDY ASSASSINATION PLOT STOP PLEASE INFORM PRESENT RESIDENCE AND LOCATION OF [CASTILLO] STOP SEND FINGERPRINTS OF SIRHAN FOR COMPARISON WITH [CASTILLO] STOP720
At the time of the assassination, Arcega, who had moved his family to Los Angeles, was working as a proofreader at the Los Angeles Times. The night of the assassination, someone showed up at his doorstep to ask if the shooter in the pantry had been Filipino. Arcega briefly considered offering Sirhan’s defense team his services as a hypnotist, but feared what he might find. He moved his family to Canada and was still living there when I talked to him years later.
Castillo was clearly programmable. And he had already been exposed in the media, although not as a CIA asset. That part of the story never made the news. It would have not been out of character, then, for the CIA to consider setting him up to be a patsy in the crime.
Another person who may have been set up to be a patsy or participant in the crime was a young man named Crispin Curiel Gonzales. On July 6, 1968, an AP story reported th
at a 17-year-old named Crispin Curiel Gonzales had hung himself in a cell in a Juarez hospital. The AP reported that Mexican Federal District Attorney Norberto Salinas had said “the youth was arrested June 17 [1968] after a letter or manuscript fell from his pocket at a concession stand in Juarez. The paper included writings to the effect that the youth had prior knowledge of the slaying of Sen. Kennedy in Los Angeles.”721 Gonzales also indicated he had known Sirhan.
Sirhan’s brother Sharif said Sirhan went to the library a lot, that there were two or three libraries he’d visit afternoons or evenings.722 One of these may have been the Santa Monica Library, because Gonzales claimed to have met Sirhan there. But before he could be questioned extensively on this matter, he allegedly hung himself in a prison cell. Given that not long before this, Gonzales had written his father hinting he might soon be coming into a lot of money, his death may not have been a suicide at all.
Kaiser showed a picture of Gonzales in the newspaper to Sirhan and got no reaction. “Who is he?” Sirhan had asked, and Kaiser told him the story. “Where is he now?” Sirhan asked. When Kaiser explained he had hung himself, Sirhan said “He didn’t have to die,” leading Kaiser to think Sirhan knew him, although I think Sirhan just felt bad that anyone else had to die for a crime he, at the time, believed he had committed.723 The FBI’s Roger “Frenchy” LaJeunesse confirmed there was some association between Gonzales and Sirhan,724 but perhaps Sirhan had been in a hypnotic state and therefore didn’t remember him.
If Sirhan, Castillo, Gonzales or anyone were programmed to be a patsy by the CIA in an actual assassination plot, would the CIA ever admit to that? No agency of the United States government would leave a paper trail if such an effort was undertaken. No one who might talk would be allowed to live. Witting participants would be threatened, blackmailed or killed to prevent such a secret from leaking. When the CIA was drawing up “Executive Action” plans against Castro and Lumumba, one of the notes they left, that the Church Committee discovered years later, was to put “nothing on paper.” So if you are of the mind that if there’s no official record, it didn’t happen, you are in the naïve segment of the population that can be too easily persuaded to believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Absence of physical, confirmatory evidence is exactly what you’d expect in a covert operation. But there’s no absence of circumstantial information, and remember, judges will tell you to treat this the same as you would hard evidence in any case.
