American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  In June of 1960, the CIA under the MK-ULTRA program had “launched an expanded program of operational experiments in hypnosis in cooperation with the Agency’s Counterintelligence [CI] staff.” The program had three goals: “(1) to induce hypnosis very rapidly in unwitting subjects; (2) to create durable amnesia; and (3) to implant durable and operationally useful posthypnotic suggestions.”22

  So what do we have in the case of Sirhan? A year before the government’s mind control efforts became public, a nationally-recognized expert in hypnosis, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, had this to say: “I’ve gone over the data very carefully on Sirhan and my hypothesis is that someone... programmed him to be there and fire that gun. ... I know from his lawyer that he appeared at another political rally that night in the Ambassador Hotel, for some right-wing school superintendent. Here’s what Sirhan reports: ‘I’m in this rally and I ask myself, what am I doing here? So I leave. Then I go back to my car and the next thing I know there’s a gun on the seat. And I don’t know where that gun came from. Then all of a sudden, I’m in the kitchen.’ And he has no recall of how he went from that car into the hotel kitchen. If he was drunk or under drugs, which is possible, it would not be as easily recoverable. But if he were in a trance state and programmed, it is recoverable.”23 Meaning, an expert like Spiegel could still “unlock” Sirhan’s mind today, if he were allowed into Pleasant Valley State Prison.

  Sirhan showed a number of signs of being in some weird zone that night at the Ambassador. A Western Union operator had seen him standing transfixed in front of a teletype machine.24 Other witnesses observed his intense concentration in the pantry, and his almost super-human strength when being wrestled down, despite a “very tranquil” look on his face. Policeman Art Pacencia noticed that the pupils of Sirhan’s eyes were dilated, which is another indication of a hypnotic state. Just as Oswald was when questioned about the assassination of JFK, Sirhan was oddly detached during that first long night of interrogation.

  It could be, of course, that Sirhan was in a state of shock after the assassination. But Dr. Bernard Diamond was hired by Sirhan’s defense team to check out his mental state, and Diamond put him under hypnosis. Sirhan turned out to be such an easy subject, “going under” so fast and so deeply, that Diamond had trouble keeping him awake. (I’ve learned that a rapid induction like this is a sure sign of someone having been hypnotized before.) Diamond could actually get Sirhan to climb the bars of his cell like a monkey, or sing a tune in Arabic. When he once asked Sirhan who killed Senator Kennedy, the response came back: “I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” Yet strangely, on the opening day of the trial, Sirhan got up and started shouting how he wanted to be executed because he’d killed the senator “willfully, premeditatedly, with twenty years of malice aforethought.” Which was the real Sirhan?

  On the witness stand, Dr. Diamond testified that he was surprised how easy it was to hypnotize Sirhan, but believed Sirhan had basically programmed himself through studying texts on self-hypnosis. The “automatic writing” found in Sirhan’s notebooks, he said, “is something that can be done only when one is pretty well trained.”25

  Another expert called in was Dr. Eduard Simson-Kallas, the chief psychologist at San Quentin when Sirhan was being held there. Simson-Kallas thought Sirhan was an ideal “Manchurian Candidate”: “He was easily influenced, had no real roots, and was looking for a cause.”26 Once, Sirhan told him: “Sometimes I go in a very deep trance so I can’t even speak ... I had to be in a trance when I shot Kennedy, as I don’t remember having shot him.”27 But after Sirhan asked Simson-Kallas to hypnotize him and see what he could find out, the San Quentin warden terminated their visits. Simson-Kallas ended up quitting his job at the prison. Even Roger LaJeunesse, the FBI’s liaison to the L.A. County prosecutor, told journalist Robert Blair Kaiser: “The case is still open. I’m not rejecting the Manchurian Candidate aspect of it.” J. Edgar Hoover told the Washington Post that the interviewer had “manufactured” the quote, but Kaiser had it on tape.28

  Dr. Spiegel thinks there were probably “one senior programmer and many accessories.”29 A couple names of hypnosis experts have surfaced over the years as being possible Svengalis behind Sirhan. Both did work for either the CIA or FBI and claimed to have been technical advisers on The Manchurian Candidate movie. Both are now dead. One was Dr. William J. Bryan, who phoned the KABC radio station not long after the assassination and said that the suspect had probably been acting under post-hypnotic suggestion. Bryan, the founder and executive director of the American Institute of Hypnosis, was known for hypnotizing the Boston Strangler, Albert De Salvo, after his arrest, to see what the mass murderer might reveal. (Strangely, again, De Salvo’s name appears in Sirhan’s notebook, even though Sirhan didn’t have the foggiest idea who he was.) In 1977, Bryan is said to have told a researcher who asked him about Sirhan and programming, “I’m not going to comment on that case because I didn’t hypnotize him.” After Bryan was found dead in his Vegas hotel room in 1977, supposedly of natural causes, some call girls came forward saying he’d once bragged of having hypnotized Sirhan.30

  In the same league as Bryan was Dr. William Kroger, a world authority on hypnosis who consulted for the FBI and the LAPD, and who died in 1996 at almost ninety. While alive, he was referenced in Philip Melanson’s book on the assassination under the pseudonym of Jonathan Reisner. Kroger and Bryan each “had an interest in the links between mystical orders and hypnosis, as well as in the uses of auto-hypnosis.”31 Melanson made it clear that he suspected “Reisner” as the man who programmed Sirhan. In the two years before Kroger died, my coauthor on this book conducted a couple of interviews with the man. Although Kroger denied having anything to do with Sirhan, he did admit knowing Jack Ruby and Sam Giancana, as well as George White, the chief field officer for the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program.32

  One clue to Sirhan’s “handlers” might be the lawyers who took his case for free. One was Grant Cooper, a well-known L.A. criminal attorney. Sirhan selected his name, and that of Russell Parsons, right away from a list provided by the ACLU—a list Sirhan had asked for. Parsons did legal work for the mob, having been Mickey Cohen’s counsel. Cooper, at the time, was defending one of mobster Johnny Rosselli’s pals in a cheating scandal at the Friar’s Club.33

  Cooper gave Sirhan the motive that he was angry at RFK for giving jets to Israel. Prior to this, there was “not a single reference to Zionism, Israel, Palestine, [or any of] the terms Sirhan would spout at his trial as propelling him to murder.”34 Years later, Sirhan said that “Cooper sold me out.”35 During conversations with his attorney, Sirhan once asked Cooper, “If I got the money, where is it?”36 In the strange notebooks he kept before the assassination, there were references to a figure of $100,000. Also, at least a dozen times, the notation: “Please pay to the order of Sirhan,” always on the same pages where he scrawls things like “RFK must be be be disposed of.”37

  So it looks like somebody was telling Sirhan he’d be getting paid handsomely for the deed. One fellow he knew by an alias of Frank Donneroumas had hired Sirhan to exercise and groom horses at the racetrack. The first place he worked was “a Syndicate meeting place,” and another track where Sirhan worked “was frequented by some of the nation’s most infamous racketeers.” Donneroumas’s real name was Henry Ramistella, with a record of narcotics violations in both New York and Florida.38

  It’s been long known that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa had made threats against RFK. Joseph Marcello, brother of New Orleans Mob boss Carlos Marcello, can be heard telling an informant on tape, when the subject of the Kennedys came up: “We took care of ‘em, didn’t we?” There’s also a file on a Roy Donald Murray, who was overheard by cops saying that he’d pledged some Vegas funds for a Mob contract on Robert Kennedy.39

  Same as with his brother’s assassination, it’s hard to conceive that the Mob had enough power to pull this off without government help. Of course, it’s possible they knew of MK-ULTRA and of the hypnosis experts, and p
aid one of those guys to program Sirhan—knowing the CIA and FBI would want to keep that from being exposed. But it still smells to me like there was intelligence involvement. CIA agent David Morales, who hated the Kennedys, allegedly once told his attorney: “I was in Los Angeles when we got Bobby.” Morales had once come up with a similar scenario for assassinating Castro in a pantry.40

  Can we still get to the bottom of what happened? Maybe, if Sirhan’s mind can be “de-programmed.” That’s what his new attorney, William Pepper, wants to do. He was James Earl Ray’s last attorney, too, and he’s pushing to start new psychological evaluations of Sirhan with an expert in regression therapy.41 I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that one, because recently I had a personal experience with a guy who claims to be a programmed “Manchurian Candidate.”

  I was filming an episode about “Big Brother” for my new TV series when I met with him in the basement of a parking garage, very much like Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. He says that his father was in the CIA, and he was taken as a “candidate” at the age of six, selected partly because of his nationality (he’s an American Indian). He says his parents didn’t have a choice. The only reason he knows today is, he was in a bad car wreck. He had to get a full-body MRI, where they discovered four different implants.

  The accident also jostled him to the point where he’s getting his memory back about what was done to him, and what he’s done. I asked him point-blank, “You have killed people?” He said, “Yes, I have.” He told me he was fourteen when he was first sent to do “ops.” He keeps referring to “we,” meaning that there are way more than him. He said, “We’re all getting together now because we want our lives back.” They’re going to go public. “That’s one of the reasons I did the interview with you, because we think we might want to have you with us,” he said. I told him, “I don’t know if I’ve got that much courage.” He said, “Well, we just feel that we need someone with credibility to stand there with us and say, ‘Listen to what these people have to say, they’re not all crazy. Or if they are, they were made to be that way.’”

  Is this man a real “Manchurian Candidate”? Or is he nuts and making it all up? Like my son said, maybe he had something traumatic happen to him as a kid that set this off. Well, maybe, but whatever happened, he believes it. There’s no doubt in my mind about that, from the stories he told me. Also, he had a handler, a girl who accompanied him. She said, “I’m one, too. I know his case, and I’m also here to control his multiple personalities. We get strength through each other.”

  Being left with the impression of how strongly he believes this, then clearly I could see him being able to perform an act of violence. How do I feel about the government—or whoever it is—doing something like this to someone? They should be in jail. These are evil people who don’t belong out in society, because obviously they have no regard for another human life. Or are these people so callous that, looking at the “big picture,” they view a body or two as simply collateral damage? They’re beyond human feelings? If some have to be destroyed to achieve the goal, it’s better for the mass of humanity. I don’t fit into that mold. These are the types of things you attribute to the Nazis. Sure, some were exceptionally intelligent, but they were an empire based and designed on evil.

  If Robert Kennedy had survived the first attempt on his life, and tried to implement all that he wanted to do, he’d have been “killed again.” All the people making money off the Vietnam War, would they let the golden goose be stopped? And to reopen his brother’s case? I compare this to President Obama’s inaugural address. When I heard him give that dynamic speech the day he took office, I turned to my wife and said, “If he attempts to do all this, he’s going to be killed.” Where he wanted to tread, the same as Bobby Kennedy—you’re talking about powerful forces involved in evil, who don’t sweat one more piece of collateral damage.

  That’s a terrible thing to realize. The things I’m learning about, I come home at night and wonder, why do I need to know this? I was better off being ignorant. Meeting with a man who considers himself a “Manchurian Candidate”—what we talked about scares you, whether you believe it or not. It scared me. And I don’t scare easily.

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  If the assassination of Robert Kennedy tells us anything, it’s that even apparently obvious things are not always what they seem. Here we had what appeared to be an open-and-shut case with Sirhan Sirhan as the perpetrator. It’s almost unthinkable, in polite society, to consider that his mind may have been manipulated by unscrupulous people using techniques out of the Dark Ages. But MK-ULTRA’s existence is a proven fact, and should not be forgotten.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WATERGATE REVISITED: THE CIA’S WAR AGAINST NIXON

  THE INCIDENT: The Watergate burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972, were taken into custody by police, and discovered to have ties to the Nixon White House.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: President Nixon authorized the break-in, along with other “dirty tricks,” and then covered this up, leading to his resignation on August 9, 1974, before he could be impeached.

  MY TAKE: Nixon was involved in a power struggle with the CIA, trying to pry loose what their files contained on the Kennedy assassination. He was taken down by “double agents” who were actually working for the CIA, who intentionally got themselves caught. Many of the Watergate cast track back to who killed JFK.

  “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

  —George Orwell

  At this point in my life, I guess the word “astounding” should not be used, because I’ve been astounded by so many other things. But it was astounding to realize that Richard Nixon could actually have been set up by some of the Watergate burglars, whose loyalty was really to the CIA. When you look at some of the data, you realize this possibility exists. Watergate was an attempt to get him out of the White House, because he was going where other powerful people didn’t want him to tread.1

  The official history, of course, is that the break-in on the night of June 17, 1972, into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex, was simply the latest in a long line of “dirty tricks” authorized by President Nixon. It just happened to be the time that his henchmen got caught. Ultimately, Watergate came to refer to the many illicit activities and the cover-up that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. That’s the basic storyline of Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men, and most other accounts. Nixon was the bad-guy who got carried away with his thirst for power, and that’s that. But maybe it’s as Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy once said: “The official version of Watergate is as wrong as a Flat Earth Society pamphlet.”2

  Let’s start with the fact that Nixon had been haunted by the specter of the Kennedys ever since losing the election to JFK in 1960. He even happened to be in Dallas on November 22, 1963, for a Pepsi-Cola Bottler’s Convention! If Robert Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, he’d have been the likely Democratic contender against Nixon in 1968, and quite likely Nixon would have lost. So what if, after his election, his obsession resulted in the beginning of a carefully orchestrated plan to get rid of Nixon?

  What if it all tracked back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy almost a decade earlier? What if the Watergate backstory is really about what Nixon knew, or wanted to know, about who killed JFK?

  Maybe Nixon was determined to find out what the CIA possessed about the assassination, out of curiosity and for his own purposes. He could then use that knowledge against the powerful Agency, if he had to. Or maybe Nixon himself knew something about the assassination, and was paranoid that the CIA might have the same secret knowledge. This knowledge could lead back to him, or people he knew. I’m not sure which it was, but I’ll bet it was one or the other. And the CIA was determined to stop his quest.

  Let’s start with a story that H.R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, related in his memoirs. Soon after taking
office in 1969, the president called him into the Oval Office and officially asked Haldeman to get hold of any and all documents from the CIA that pertained to the Bay of Pigs. This was the first of many occasions that Nixon referred to that historical event, when the CIA sent an invasion force of Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro in April 1961. This plan had been in the works before JFK took office and, when it failed, Kennedy threatened to “scatter the CIA to the four winds.” Now that Nixon was president, why should he desire to learn everything he could about “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” as he put it during one of his taped Oval Office conversations. Haldeman makes the startling assertion in his book that “in all of those Nixon references to the Bay of Pigs, he was actually referring to the Kennedy assassination.”3

  Around the middle of ’69, Haldeman remembers Nixon domestic adviser John Ehrlichman dropping by to talk about Nixon’s demand for CIA records. “Those bastards in Langley are holding back something,” Ehrlichman said. “They just dig in their heels and say the President can’t have it. Period. Imagine that! The Commander-in-Chief wants to see a document relating to a military operation, and the spooks say he can’t have it.... From the way they’re protecting it, it must be pure dynamite.”4 At that same time, CIA Director Richard Helms—who’d been in charge of clandestine ops when JFK was in power—was on his way over to the White House. Ehrlichman believed that “the president is going to give him [Helms] a direct order.”

  But after a long private conversation between Helms and Nixon, Ehrlichman said the president instructed him “to forget all about that CIA document. In fact, I am to cease and desist from trying to obtain it.”5

  That little story is a volume-getter to me. First, it makes me wonder how much stonewalling takes place at the highest levels of government by subordinates? The CIA is supposedly the president’s intelligence-gathering arm and answerable to him. What’s gone wrong with our country when his guys are now keeping information from the boss? What gives them the right to make that kind of command decision? I can understand, in certain instances, giving the boss plausible denial if you’re doing something underhanded. But by the same token, people are going to question who’s actually running the show.