A Lie Too Big to Fail

by Lisa Pease

  Johnny Beckley was terrified of Owen and refused to testify against him, which was a shame, because Beckley appeared to be the source for a sighting of Owen riding horses with Sirhan along the Santa Ana River.

  While Sirhan was being programmed, someone would have had to keep an eye on him. What’s the point of developing a patsy if he moves out of the state, gets arrested before the plot, or falls in love with someone who discovers his programming? What if he had taken a short trip unexpectedly and been out of town when he was supposed to be the patsy in the Kennedy plot? In the weeks leading up to the assassination, someone had to have been keeping Sirhan under a close watch. Maybe Owen was Sirhan’s “babysitter,” keeping track of him until it was time for the plot to unfold. Maybe that would best explain why Owen suddenly came into a lot of money right before the assassination and got his own TV show soon after.

  If Sirhan were being prepared for a very public role in an assassination, it makes sense the conspirators would have staged a sort of “field test” in advance to examine how Sirhan performed under hypnosis. Would he follow instructions? If he were drugged, how much was too much and how much was not enough? Too much and he’d be incoherent and unusable. Too little and he might remember something of what happened. Maybe this explains a strange episode that took place shortly before the assassination.

  On May 26, 1968, ten days before Kennedy was killed, a pastor at Methodist Church in Las Vegas claimed a “mumbling, apparently tranquilized Sirhan” walked into his service and annoyed other Sunday worshippers.763

  “During the service proper, he made loud, unintelligible sounds,” Reverend Douglas Harrell had told the Sun, “and complained to nearby congregation members about some moral issue while I was preaching my sermon.” That sounds exactly like something Sirhan would want to discuss, based on his conversations with the police after his arrest. The pastor said that Sirhan mostly mumbled. “Many times, especially in Las Vegas, odd people happen into the church and try to disrupt things. If the ushers think they are dangerous, they eject them. Sirhan was very tranquil, as if he might have been under the influence of a depressant ….”764

  The Reverend made clear that Sirhan was no threat to the congregation, which is why he was allowed to remain. “He was subdued, it seemed, and didn’t look like the type of person who was capable of harming anyone,” Harrell said.765

  “At a coffee hour after the service, Sirhan came right up to me, his face right up to mine, and introduced himself. He mumbled and tried to say something, but I couldn’t understand him,” Harrell said, explaining why he was so sure of his identification. “The next time I saw him was on television during the coverage of the Kennedy assassination.” The reverend reiterated that he “just didn’t seem like the type of person who could commit such a foul act.”766

  The FBI office in Las Vegas jumped on this story right away and reported it directly to J. Edgar Hoover but not to the LAPD. An FBI agent went to talk to Harrell. Immediately after this, and possibly instigated by the FBI visit, Rev. Harrell “found it necessary to issue a public retraction to be disseminated to all news media.” According to the FBI report, Rev. Harrell met the reporter, Ralph Donald, when Donald was the best man at a wedding the pastor had performed the day before the story ran. They had discussed the assassination, and Harrell said he had not specifically identified Sirhan but had simply relayed the story as an example of “kooks” who sometimes showed up in church. He issued a statement claiming the article was erroneous and that he had never made a positive identification of Sirhan. But his “retraction” actually buttressed the reporter’s version, as Rev. Harrell noted “there seemed a definite resemblance.”767

  The LAPD did not hear of this incident until nearly a month later. The local Las Vegas police chief and his chief detective sent a joint letter to Chief Reddin, copied to Captain Brown, which said, “We think your office should be alerted to this in case defense counsel brings it up at a later date—then you won’t be caught unaware.” The LAPD asked the LVPD to interview Harrell, and the LVPD sent an “intelligence detail” in response. Harrell again essentially confirmed the details of the article, disputing only his level of certainty that it was Sirhan. He added that, despite the man’s incoherence, he seemed to be “in a tranquil condition” and “was positively not under the influence of alcohol.” When shown six photos of various individuals, he picked out a photo of Sirhan and separately, a photo of his brother Adel, but he was not positive of either identification.768

  Despite the provocative story, neither the FBI nor the LAPD pursued this any further, probably for the reasons discussed in earlier chapters. No one wanted to have to deal with evidence of conspiracy, and Sirhan showing up hypnotized at a church in Las Vegas made it harder to argue that he had accidentally hypnotized himself at the Ambassador Hotel. So like all other evidence of conspiracy, this story quietly disappeared into the deep record.

  This chapter is about the manipulation of the mind, and not only Sirhan’s. There is a far more insidious and invisible mind control operation at work in this case that continues to this day. That operation is a war for the public’s mind on this case, on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and other matters where “national security” dictates a story other than the truth must be told.

  The CIA was formed from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was itself formed in response to the rise of Nazi propaganda. The OSS’ initial goal was to counter such propaganda. So from birth, the CIA was, at the very least, a propaganda operation. Covert operations, and eventually military control, came in the decades that followed. But the ability to “play” the media to any tune the CIA desired was and remains one of its primary capabilities.

  During the nascent days of the CIA, the charming, eccentric and deeply disturbed Frank Wisner played the media like an organ so well that people in the CIA referred to his media contacts as “Wisner’s Wurlitzer.” In addition, reporters made great spies. People expected them to ask probing questions. They were expected to show up and poke around at crime scenes. No one knew who really wrote their dispatches. Even the editor might not know the content of an article had been supplied by the CIA. So it should surprise no one that journalists, especially those stationed abroad, were heavy recruitment targets for the CIA.

  According to Carl Bernstein’s landmark exposé “The CIA and the Media,” published in the October 20, 1977 issue of Rolling Stone, the CIA colluded with ABC, CBS, NBC, the Time-LIFE empire, the New York Times, the Copley News Service, AP and other wire services, and other media outlets. The story was met with near media silence. The only organ to address and further the story was the New York Times, which focused heavily on the one party Bernstein had gone easy on, his employer during the Woodward-and-Bernstein articles on Watergate, the Washington Post. Both articles explained in depth how the CIA’s use of the media ran from top to bottom, meaning, sometimes the top executives were in the loop and set the tone for the reporters working below them, but often the CIA’s media assets were not known by upper management to be working with the CIA.

  During the Church and Pike Committee and the HSCA investigations of the CIA in the 1970s, the CIA fought hard to keep its media operations private. In a showdown to determine who really ran the country, the CIA won when the CIA refused to reveal the extent of their media operations to the people who represent the taxpayers who subsidize those operations. CIA made a deal to show Congress the names of only a few of its assets in exchange for keeping the rest of them secret. Congress should have stood up to the CIA and refused such an offer. But Congress is afraid of the CIA, as Nancy Pelosi made clear during the Senate investigation into the CIA’s use of torture (and horrific experiments) on prisoners. When Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has been one of the CIA’s staunch defenders in Congress, called the CIA out in 2014 for breaking into the Senate servers to remove documentation on the CIA’s torture program, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said at a news conference:

  “I’ll tell you,
you take on the intelligence community, you’re a person of courage, and she does not do that lightly. Not without evidence, and when I say evidence, documentation of what it is that she is putting forth.” …

  “You don’t fight it [CIA] without a price because they come after you and they don’t always tell the truth.”

  “[Investigating the CIA’s breaking into the Committee’s computers] may be one of the healthiest things we can do because I know one thing: Whatever it is, the intelligence community writes a report on that, they leave, they write a book on it, all of a sudden it becomes conventional…gossip that that’s what happened there and we really have to have the ground truth.”769

  In January 2017, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer echoed Pelosi’s warnings about tangling with the CIA:

  Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community—they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.770

  Some people mistakenly think the CIA’s use of the media ended after the Church and Pike committee hearings. That’s simply not true. The relationships were simply restructured and kept better hidden. In fact, by 1991, the CIA had become so powerful in the media that pretense was no longer necessary. CIA Director Robert Gates laid out, in a memo titled “Greater CIA Openness,” how its Public Affairs Office “has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation. This has helped us turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success stories, and it has contributed to the accuracy of countless others. In many instances, we have persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”

  As I said at a conference sponsored by the Wecht Center at Duquesne University in 2013, “It should be clear that any organization that brags about its ability to change ‘intelligence failures’ into ‘intelligence success stories’ is, at its heart, an anti-democratic organization. The public simply cannot make intelligent choices about politics when failures are misrepresented as successes. No business could survive such misrepresentation for long. But intelligence agencies get away with it.”

  Whether Ron Kessler was a CIA asset or just a willing volunteer when he misrepresented Harper’s findings in the Robert Kennedy case must remain a matter of conjecture. Whether Dan Moldea’s refusal to believe his own carefully researched evidence of conspiracy was the act of a person who did not want to be ridiculed as a conspiracy theorist or the act of someone who chose for whatever reason to protect the CIA must also remain a matter of conjecture, because vehement denials would be expected in either case.

  If you want to know how a secret can be kept for more than 50 years, look to who controls the media. That there were multiple shooters in the pantry can be easily discerned by any who took a hard, careful look at the evidence. But most people don’t do their own research. They rely on the media to tell them what is true, what they should believe. And faith in the media is a necessary component for a democracy to function.

  But it should be clear to political observers that one of the key waves Donald Trump rode to the White House in 2016 was the anger at the mainstream media. People believe they have been lied to about the assassinations of the Sixties and events like 9/11. They read what independent researchers put out, and those accounts don’t match what has been reported in the mainstream media. That made them, rightly, question the mainstream’s ability to tell the truth about important events.

  Donald Trump’s cries about “fake news” appealed to a significant segment of people on both the right and the left in America. The news has long been, perhaps now more than ever before, a carefully controlled organ of the government’s “soft power.” Soft power is what controls you without your knowledge, as opposed to hard power, like a tank with a gun pointed in your direction. But people who understand they are being propagandized do eventually rebel against it. They want more independent voices.

  We must always ask whether the CIA is manipulating reporting on important, power-shifting events, because they’ve already admitted to doing this. Calling others “conspiracy theorists” for raising provably legitimate questions actually endangers our democracy.

  Disinformation about key events of modern history directly gave rise to Donald Trump, Breitbart, and media organizations that are willing to at least tackle, however inadequately, topics that the mainstream media considers nearly untouchable, i.e., anything that reeks of misdeeds by government actors.

  Fake news, then, is in many ways directly responsible for all flavors of conspiracy theories, from the nuttiest to the most credible. When the truth is kept from people, they will try to put the facts together and draw their own conclusions. Some people do this well, and their efforts should be lauded far more than they are. Others do this very badly, and their theories should be dissected and exposed rather than ignored and ridiculed. Ridiculing or ignoring conspiracy theories gives them power. The appropriate way to attack them is to factually dismantle them, where possible. But those who refuse to believe that anything is a conspiracy are as ridiculous as those who believe everything is a conspiracy.

  The fact that Breitbart and many right-wing media outlets themselves promote fake news is sadly lost on their supporters. But the same happens on the political left. Until both the political left and the political right prioritize truth over fiction in books, in news reports, on the radio and in other places where fictional stories are presented as factual, America’s survival as any kind of people-driven democracy remains in serious peril.

  It was horrible that Robert Kennedy was taken from us far too soon. It is horrible that one man has borne the guilt for an operation he neither planned nor willingly participated in. It’s horrible the conspiracy was so obvious that bullets had to be lost and switched to hide it. And it’s horrible that the mainstream media has never dared to tell the people of this country that the government lied to us about what they really found when they looked into this case.

  Until the media can deal with the truth of the Robert Kennedy assassination, and until the people can be made aware of the CIA’s role in slanting the truth on topics of great importance, America’s very survival is in jeopardy. If, as the Bible quotation on the CIA’s wall says, “The Truth will Set You Free,” then it should be obvious that the lies imprison us. We’ve come perilously close to losing democracy itself because of fake, CIA-sponsored stories about our history. Should America ever become a dictatorship, the epitaph of our democracy must include the role the mainstream media, by bowing to the National Security state, played in killing it.

  589 Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton, Jr., The Mind Manipulators (Paddington Press, 1978), p. 437.

  590 Internal CIA memo titled “Hypnosis and Covert Operations,” from and to redacted names, dated 5 May 1955, CIA Electronic Reading Room, (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 0000140404. Several pages of this document are missing.

  591 George Estabrooks, Hypnotism (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1957), pp. 197–198.

  592 Alison Winter, Memory: Fragments of a Modern History (University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 128.

  593 SUS Final Report, p. 312.

  594 See Joel Whitney’s book Finks, which talks about how the CIA co-opted and in some cases corrupted leading intellectual and cultural leaders to serve nefarious purposes. Tom Braden, another CIA asset in this category, was also in the hotel that night. I don’t believe Plimpton or Braden had anything to do with the events that transpired.

  595 LAPD interview of George Plimpton, June 5, 1968.

  596 Kaiser, p. 89.

  597 Kaiser, p. 90.

  598 Sworn declaration of Robert Blair Kaiser, February 13, 2012.

  599 Ibid.

  600 Ibid.

  601 Declaration of Dr. Daniel P. Brown, Ph.D., Exhibit I, Petitioner’s Supplemental Brief, 23 Apr 2011, www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=146777&search=Exhibit_I#relPageId=43&tab=page.

  602 Turner an
d Christian, p. 201.

  603 Turner and Christian, p. 201.

  604 Turner and Christian, p. 199.

  605 Bernard L. Diamond, “Inherent Problems in the Use of Pretrial Hypnosis on a Prospective Witness.”

  606 Kaiser, p. 238.

  607 Kaiser, p. 238.

  608 John F. Kihlstrom, “Hypnosis, Memory, and Amnesia,” presented at the 75th annual meeting of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease, “Biological and Psychological Perspectives on Memory and Memory Disorders,” New York, December 1995. According to the author’s webpage with this talk, “An edited version of the original presentation was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences as part of a special issue, “Biological and Psychological Perspectives on Memory and Memory Disorders,” edited by L.R. Squire and D.L. Schacter (1997, 372, 1727–1732),” https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jfkihlstrom/.

  609 Estabrooks, Spiritism, p. 47.

  610 Estabrooks, Spiritism, p. 48.

  611 Estabrooks, Spiritism, pp. 50–51.

  612 Kaiser, pp. 406–407.

  613 Kaiser, p. 407.

  614 Kaiser, p. 273.

  615 Kaiser, p. 295.

  616 John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate,” W. W. Norton, Inc. (New York: 1979), paperback version, p. 204.

  617 Estabrooks, Spiritism, p. 50.

  618 Internal CIA memo titled “Hypnosis and Covert Operations,” dated 5 May 1955, CIA Electronic Reading Room, (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 0000140404. This document is missing pages, but the same document with the missing pages restored can be found at The Black Vault (www.theblackvault.com), which houses the entire batch of the CIA’s released MKULTRA files.

  619 Lester Davis, “Murder by Hypnosis: The amazing true story behind an almost-perfect crime,” Salt Lake City Tribune, November 28, 1965.