A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  Whether related to Nasser, Ambassador Goldberg or something entirely unrelated, Sirhan was apparently already being programmed for some other operation when Senator Kennedy announced his intention to run for President. At this point, Sirhan’s mission appears to have been redirected.

  Was Sirhan programmed to be an assassin? Or was he programmed to be a patsy only? As crazy as it sounds, there is a template for using a patsy in this manner in the CIA’s ARTICHOKE files. ARTICHOKE was an outgrowth from the CIA’s first mind control project, called Project Bluebird. ARTICHOKE’s programs eventually were folded in the larger MKULTRA project umbrella. ARTICHOKE focused extensively on the issue of hypnotic control of another.

  In 1954, the ARTICHOKE team’s first assignment was to answer the following question: “Can an individual of ***** descent be made to perform an act of attempted assassination involuntarily under the influence of ARTICHOKE?”745 Note the words “involuntary” and “attempted assassination.” The goal of this particular exercise was not to program someone to kill, but to see if the Agency could compel an individual to attempt an act of assassination. The document noted this act would be a “trigger mechanism for a bigger project.”

  The description is a near match for the scenario Sirhan seemed programmed to perform: an act of simulated, attempted assassination, involuntarily. Sirhan’s act of “attempted assassination” was the trigger mechanism for the “bigger project,” which was, in 1968, the actual assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the subsequent right-wing takeover of the government.

  The 1954 ARTICHOKE document described how the individual would be “surreptitiously drugged through the medium of an alcoholic cocktail at a social party, ARTICHOKE applied and the SUBJECT induced to perform the act of attempted assassination at some later date.” This also closely matches what appeared to happen to Sirhan. It’s possible that Sirhan’s drinks were laced with another substance.

  The CIA document’s author added that “All of the above was to be accomplished at one involuntary uncontrolled social meeting.”746 After the unwitting SUBJECT carried out his act of “attempted assassination,” according to the CIA document, “it was assumed the SUBJECT would be taken into custody by the *** [sic] Government and thereby ‘disposed of.’”

  Was there a back-up plan in case Sirhan managed to escape that involved putting him on a horse? Remember that Angleton once said you plan for the failure of an operation as much as for its success. One of the oddest parts to the Sirhan story was Rev. Jerry Owen’s assertion that he picked up Sirhan the day before the primary and that Sirhan wanted to buy a horse, which was to be delivered to the Ambassador Hotel the night of June 4. If Sirhan had somehow managed to escape the crowd at the Ambassador Hotel after the shooting, putting him on a horse pretty much guaranteed he would be shot and killed by police. Owen may have played a prior role in Sirhan’s life as well, as you will see shortly. But first, we need to figure out who programmed Sirhan.

  Only one hypnotist besides the defense and prosecution experts ever claimed to have hypnotized Sirhan: Dr. William J. Bryan. According to Bill Turner and Jonn Christian, two prostitutes who serviced Bryan regularly said he liked to talk about his famous clients and had mentioned Sirhan. They had assumed he meant he had hypnotized Sirhan after the assassination. But Bryan did not have access to Sirhan then. If he hypnotized him, it would have been before the shooting, not after.

  Bryan’s name came up in other contexts in this case as well. Bryan called in to the Ray Briem show on KABC shortly after the assassination to suggest that Sirhan had been hypnotized. This would not have been out of character for the egotistical, self-promoting Bryan. In addition, Herb Elsman, who had been in the Venetian Room at the hotel attending the Rafferty party when Kennedy was shot, stated that Joan Simmons, a programmer for KABC Radio, and Hortence Farrchild had information that Sirhan “belonged to a secret hypnosis group.” Farrchild said she belonged to a group that practiced self-hypnosis but did not know Sirhan. Simmons said “she stated she knew nothing of a Doctor Bryant [sic] of the American Institute of Hypnosis or Hortence Farrchild.” What’s interesting here is that the LAPD appears to have deliberately omitted the reference to Dr. William Bryan that Simmons was responding to. Why? Did the LAPD know he was involved and therefore removed all references? This one reference might have slipped through because the name was misspelled “Bryant.”747

  On June 18, 1974, Betsy Langman interviewed Bryan in his office. Langman had a serious interest in the anomalies of this case. She co-wrote an article on the evidence of conspiracy with Alex Cockburn for Harpers in 1974. To Langman, Bryan emphatically denied ever having hypnotized Sirhan.

  During the interview, Bryan—who was never known for his modesty—told her he was “probably the leading expert in the world” on hypnosis. When she asked if someone could be programmed to kill, Bryan’s response was interesting. “They program people to kill all the time—they enlist them in the army, and they tell them that’s for their country’s own good, and they don’t use any hypnosis. They just … close order drill and so on—but these people believe it—it’s for real.”748 Bryan then talked about the Hardrup case and said the reason the hypnotist had such control is the level of access he had to Hardrup, locked up physically. Bryan said to completely brainwash someone involved “a certain amount of physical torture,” “long-term hypnosis” and “probably drugs.” Under that combination, Bryan explained, “yes, you can brainwash a person to do just about anything.”749

  Bryan talked about Henry Busch, the so-called “Hollywood Strangler,” and stated “he was programmed very definitely,” and discussed how he had hypnotized him to determine his motive. Busch had been a Korean War veteran and was working at an optical firm when he was arrested as a purse snatcher. But he “suddenly broke down and started babbling to police of strangling three women.”750 One of Busch’s strangled victims was found, strangely enough, with a blue polka dot scarf around her neck.751

  Bryan talked about the Boston Strangler case as well. When Langman asked if someone could be made to commit a murder without their knowledge, Bryan responded by describing a scenario whereby someone could be tricked into being a suicide bomber without their knowledge. The person would be told they were safeguarding important files and to deliver them to a certain person in a certain building. But as soon as they got inside the building, the bomb inside, which the courier had no knowledge of, would be remotely triggered. After the fact, it would appear to the world the person had committed suicide. Interestingly enough, Estabrooks described a similar scenario in his book Hypnosis, begging the question of how many such stories we have read about in the media were not “suicide” stories at all.

  Bryan got agitated when Langman turned the conversation to Sirhan. She asked if Sirhan could have hypnotized himself. Bryan said the word hypnosis was “meaningless” in the case of self-hypnosis because one could talk oneself into doing anything. Bryan had been so loquacious until Sirhan came into the conversation. “This has been gone over 50 million times,” Bryan said, although it hadn’t. Only Kaiser’s book had been published by that point suggesting Sirhan might have been hypnotized. “If that is all that you have got to interview me about, you are wasting my time and yours. … It just irks me to hear all this old shit … that is just ridiculous.”752

  Langman changed the subject until Bryan calmed down a bit, and then she returned to the subject of Sirhan. “Do you feel that Sirhan could have been self-hypnotized?” she asked Bryan. “I’m not going to comment on that case, because I didn’t hypnotize him.” (No one had suggested at that point that he had.) “Why don’t you ask Bernie Diamond? He is the guy who did it.” Langman asked again whether he felt Sirhan was self-hypnotized but Bryan somehow saw that as another accusation and responded, “I just told you that I didn’t hypnotize him.”

  “I am asking what is your opinion,” Langman pressed.

  “I don’t have one, because I didn’t treat him,” Bryan said. “You got a lot of mi
sconceptions about hypnosis, and you are going around trying to find some more ammunition to put that same old crap out, that people can be hypnotized into doing all these weird things and so on … the old Svengali stuff … and I am not going to be a party to it … all I say is please don’t use my name. I don’t want to be quoted by you at all. … I don’t want to be in your article. Because eventually it is going to be laughed at.”753

  And with that, Bryan stormed out of his own office, yelling, “This interview is over,” leaving Langman behind, puzzled at this extraordinary outburst. If he hadn’t programmed Sirhan, why was this such a sore spot with him?

  And why wasn’t Bryan asked to hypnotize Sirhan? Bernard Diamond lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and had to be flown in to testify. Bryan, on the other hand, lived and worked in Los Angeles. Was Bryan initially approached? Did he reject the chance for fear something might give away a connection between him and Sirhan?

  One special clue in Sirhan’s notebook suggests that whatever Sirhan was writing on some pages in his notebook may have been at the instigation of another. Upside down on the edge of one page of writing is, in the handwriting of another person, the words, “Electronic equipment this appears to be the right amount of preponderance.”754 Whoever was working with Sirhan appeared to be using a machine in connection with the hypnosis. The only hypnotist in the Los Angeles area to have been pictured in a local paper in front of electrical equipment that allowed him to hypnotize people was Dr. William J. Bryan. In 1972, Bryan was pictured by the Associated Press at a console into which he inserted tapes that allowed him to hypnotize and monitor three people at once through the use of closed circuit TV.755 A book review mentioned Bryan’s “offices in San Diego and Los Angeles” and further described Bryan’s invention, a hypnosis machine that allowed him to hypnotize several people at once:

  Despite his impressive credentials, Bryan comes off as a kook. He is noted for his BEAR, Bryan Electronic Automated Robot hypnotist, which can “simultaneously hypnotize seven patients in two cities, plug them into and out of their trances, and provide each with personalized therapeutic suggestions while Bryan plays golf or does whatever else turns him on.”756

  The most significant clues, however, are the phonetic references to DeSalvo in Sirhan’s diary. On one page in Sirhan’s notebook can be found the phrase “God help me” followed by “Salvo Di Di Salvo Die S Salvo.” In the middle of the “Long live Nasser” scribblings on another page, “DieSovo”—in quotes—appears between phrases. The word “cabbage” is nonsensically scribbled above “DieSovo.” I suspect “DieSovo” is another phonetic reference to Alberto DeSalvo.

  Bryan loved to brag about people he had hypnotized, and Albert DeSalvo, the so-called “Boston Strangler,” was one of his most famous subjects. If Bryan hypnotized Sirhan, it would not be out of character in the least for Bryan to have talked about DeSalvo. Adding credence to the notion that Sirhan was hypnotized by Bryan was the fact that he did not recognize “Di Salvo” as referring to anyone or anything when he was outside of a hypnotic state. In the wee hours of the morning after the assassination, Sirhan had asked if the Boston Strangler had been identified. It was not like Sirhan, who followed politics and public events closely, not to know the name of the Strangler. What makes more sense is that Bryan told Sirhan to forget whatever was said in their sessions, so outside of hypnosis, the name was obliterated from Sirhan’s mind by Bryan’s suggestion, forcing him to ask for the name.

  When Bryan died in 1977, the year the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed to investigate the JFK and MLK assassinations, John Miner, the Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who tried to get Noguchi to change the distance of the head shot from an inch to a foot, was the executor of Bryan’s will. Pallbearers included Henry Rothblatt (a key lawyer for the Watergate burglars) and Melvin Belli. If ever there was someone connected enough to pull off a hypnotic tour de force in the Los Angeles area, it was the national-security-state-connected Bryan.

  It’s curious that two figures often linked to Sirhan’s case, Dr. Bryan and Jerry Owen, are linked to the Manson case as well. Bryan was hired to help Linda Kasabian, one of Manson’s cult followers, and Owen told police that the day before the killing, he had picked up the caretaker of the property of one of the victims. According to Turner and Christian, Owen had injected himself into the Manson case in a similar fashion to the RFK case:

  [LAPD Captain Hugh] Brown suddenly revealed that the preacher had also injected himself into the Tate-LaBianca murder case. He reported to the Hollywood Division that the day before the killings he had picked up a hitchhiker named William Garretson—the nineteen-year-old caretaker of the Tate estate whom the police held for several days as a suspect before releasing him. Owen said that Garretson was looking for extra work as a dishwasher, and he took the young man to the Carolina Pines restaurant to introduce him to the management.757

  And in what appears to be a disturbing pattern, both Bryan and Owen had links to the 1972 assassination attempt on George Wallace by Arthur Bremer as well.

  After her upsetting interview with Bryan, Langman had coffee with one of Bryan’s secretaries, who told Langman that right after Arthur Bremer shot at George Wallace, in a case where there appeared to be too many bullets to have come solely from Bremer, and where some of the shots came from positions nearly impossible for Bremer to have attained,758 Bryan received a call from Maryland related to the shooting.

  Bremer’s half-sister Gail Aiken was a friend of Jerry Owen, the one who claimed he made a deal to sell a horse to Sirhan the night of the California primary. Los Angeles County Supervisor and former newsman Baxter Ward wrote a letter to his fellow supervisors in 1975 discussing his own encounter with Owen:

  In the summer of 1971 as a broadcaster, I attempted unsuccessfully to contact Owen for an interview. In the spring of 1972, while I was campaigning for political office, Jerry Owen left word at my campaign headquarters that he would like to see me the following day. The call was placed just hours after Governor Wallace had been shot. Owen did not keep the appointment the following day.

  A short time after the hearing I conducted last May [1974] into the Senator Kennedy ballistics evidence, Jerry Owen called again, saying he would like to see me to disclose the full story behind the conspiracy.

  He came the following day, and I obtained his permission to tape record his conversation. In my opinion, he provided no information beyond what he had stated in 1968 to the authorities and to the press. However, there was one addition: when I questioned him as to why he did not keep our appointment the day after Governor Wallace had been shot, Owen volunteered that he was personal friends with the sister of Arthur Bremer [sic]. … Owen stated that Gale Bremer [sic—his half-sister was Gail Aiken] was employed by his brother here in Los Angeles for several years and had then just left Los Angeles for Florida because she was continually harassed by the FBI.759

  Just before the assassination of Senator Kennedy, the perennially penniless Jerry Owen came into a large amount of money. A rugged cowboy who had known Owen for years, Bill Powers, testified in Owen’s defamation trial that he had seen Sirhan, or someone who looked remarkably like him, on June 3, the day before the 1968 primary, in the back of a truck he had sold to Jerry Owen previously (but for which Owen had not yet fully paid him). Powers was surprised to see Owen, who never seemed to have much money, driving a fancy Lincoln Continental and carrying a roll of what looked like thousand-dollar bills. When asked whether Owen might have just been carrying a “Montana bankroll” of ones covered by a bill of a higher denomination, Powers had told the jury, “No. Being in the horse business, that is what I carry. No, it wasn’t one of those.” He told Bugliosi he thought there were 25 to 30 $1,000 bills. “There was a lot of serious money there, yes.”760

  Powers, who managed the Wild Bill Stables in Santa Ana, testified that Jerry Owen had referred to a man named “Sirhan” when discussing getting help for the breaking in of some of his horses. Unimpressed
with the work Powers’ stable-hand Johnny Beckley had done, Powers told Bugliosi that Owen had mentioned Sirhan to him:

  “Well, he didn’t like the way Johnny was handling the horses and was cowboying around,” Powers recounted, “and he said he had other people at the [race] track and stuff that could handle horses in the right manner, and the name Sirhan was mentioned.”

  Q [Bugliosi]. By whom?

  A [Powers]. By Mr. Owen.

  Q. Are you positive about this?

  A. I am very positive. [Emphasis in the original.]761

  Asked how he could be so certain, Powers said it was an unusual name, and it was only a short time before Sirhan’s name was all over the news. That truck was dusted for fingerprints, as Sgt. Hank Hernandez confirmed to superlawyer George T. Davis, who had a longtime friend and client in Jerry Owen. Powers told Jonn Christian that two men representing themselves as police officers told him Sirhan’s fingerprints had been found on the glove compartment and the rear window. This would match Owen’s story that Sirhan jumped in the back of Owen’s truck (where he presumably touched the rear cab window) and later moved to the passenger seat next to the driver (where he presumably touched the glove compartment). At the time, Sirhan was accompanied by a man in a yellow turtleneck shirt and a “dirty blonde girl.”762