book on mental projection, and a large brown envelope
from the Internal Revenue Service on which someone had
written, "RFK must be disposed of like his brother was."
At the bottom of the envelope was scrawled "Reactionary."
In one of the notebooks there was a page which was
used later in the trial to prove premeditation: "May 18
9:45 A.M.—68. My determination to eliminate RFK is becoming
more the more of an unshakable obsession . .
RFK must die—RFK must be killed Robert F. Kennedy
must be assassinated RFK must be assassinated RFK must
be assassinated . . . Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated
before 5 June 68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated
I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of
of of of of of this or that please pay to the order of . . ."
Also drawn on the page were spirals, diamonds, and doodies.
While Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty ignorantly told the
press Sirhan was "a member of numerous Communist organizations,
including the Rosicrucians," Sirhan's neighbors
told a different story. One said he was "very religious." Another
reported that he was "just a normal kid. He took cars
and bikes apart and put them back together again." Neighborhood
kids said he was "nice." When asked if Sirhan was
the angry type, a black girl in his neighborhood said, "Her
didn't show it." Arthur Bean, another neighbor said,
"Someone talked that kid into gunning down Kennedy."
When Irwin Garfinkel, a deputy attorney in the public
defender's office, asked Sirhan about the shooting, he said,
"I don't remember much about the shooting, sir. Did I do
it? Well, yes, I am told I did it. I remember being at the
Ambassador. I was drinking torn collinses. I got dizzy. I
went back to my car so I could go home. But I was too
drunk to drive. I thought I'd better find some coffee. The
next thing I remember I was being choked and a guy was
twisting my knee."
George Plimpton, editor of the Paris Review, was in the
hotel pantry when Kennedy was shot. He was one of the
men who wrestled Sirhan down. According to Newsweek,
Plimpton "offered some eloquent testimony that appeared
to some to support the defense's contention that Sirhan
Bishara Sirhan had, in fact, been in a 'trance' during the
shooting. 'He was enormously composed', recalled Plimpton.
'Right in the midst of this hurricane of sound and feeling. he seemed to be almost the eye of the hurricane. He
seemed purged.'"
The chief counsel for the Los Angeles chapter of the
American Civil Liberties Union, A. L. Wirin, went to Sirhan's
defense within hours of his arrest. On his second
meeting with the accused, Wirin brought the local papers
with him. Sirhan read the headline "KENNEDY'S
DEAD," then he dropped his head in grief. After fighting
to control his emotions, he looked at Wirin through tearfilled
eyes and said, "Mr. Wirin, I'm a failure. I believe in
love and instead of showing love. . . ." Then, Wirin recalled,
"he muttered something about having betrayed his
own primary beliefs."
That night, Sirhan complained of being sick. He became
very dizzy and had severe stomach cramps, just as had
Castillo and Candy Jones. For several weeks Sirhan was
given a half grain of phenobarbital at night to help him
sleep.
The Los Angeles police went through the motions of
looking into the possibility that a conspiracy was behind
the RFK assassination. They looked for the girl in the
polka-dot dress who witnesses said had been standing next
to Sirhan, smiling and talking to him just before he began
shooting in the pantry. Sirhan also said he'd been talking to
the girl after he'd drunk several torn Collinses. The girl in
the polka-dot dress was not found, and conflicting statements
cast doubt on whether there had ever been such a
girl. Forty-five "top men" from the Los Angeles Police Department
(LAPD) were assigned the job of tracking down
all leads to a conspiracy, but incredibly, they came up
empty-handed.
A bag of women's clothing, which included a polka-dot
dress and new undergarments, was found by the LAPD in
an alley, but police could not find out who'd bought them
or who'd worn them. According to Sirhan's biographer
Robert Blair Kaiser, ". . . The police and FBI hardly did
all they could [to find the owner of the polka-dot dress].
They used faulty logic and browbeat witnesses to eliminate
the girl in the polka-dot dress."1
To penetrate Sirhan's amnesia, the defense decided to
call in an expert hypnotist, Dr. Bernard L. Diamond of the
University of California. Diamond was the associate dean
UCLA's School of Criminology and a professor of both law and psychiatry. No one knew more about law, psychiatry,
and hypnosis than Diamond.
In a prehypnosis interview, Diamond asked Sirhan to tell
him about his notebooks, and Sirhan said he couldn't recall
writing them.
Diamond asked if he thought that what he had done
helped things, and Sirhan said, "I'm not proud of what I
did."
"What do you mean, you're not proud of it?" Diamond
asked him. "You believe in your cause, don't you?" (Sirhan
had been contacted by Arab sympathizers and others
who insisted that the reason he'd killed Kennedy was out of
sympathy for the PLO.)
"I have no exact knowledge, sir, that this happened yet.
I'm all, it's all in my mind, but goddamn it, when my body
played with it . . . I couldn't understand it. I still don't
believe it. My body outsmarted my brain, I guess."
"What did your body do?" Diamond asked.
"Pulled that trigger," Sirhan said.
"Does your body remember it, even if your mind
doesn't?"
"I don't give a damn, sir, in a way. Now I don't even
care," Sirhan said.
Diamond asked Sirhan if he'd thought about suicide.
"Hell, no," Sirhan said, "I couldn't do that."
Then Diamond expressed a thought which contained a
significant "Freudian slip." "Why didn't you turn the gas
on yourself, ah, why didn't you turn the gun on yourself
after you killed Kennedy?"
Sirhan waved his hand in front of his face. "It was all
mixed up. Like a dream."
Diamond hypnotized Sirhan on six of eight visits. At one
point, reliving the killing, Sirhan grabbed at his belt on the
left side. Until then police had no idea where he'd carried
the weapon. Under hypnosis Sirhan also created writings
similar to those in his notebooks.
In one session Diamond had Sirhan climb the bars of his
cell like a monkey. After he'd been brought out of trance,
Sirhan explained the reason for his climb. He said he was
only getting exercise. Then Diamond played the tape to
prove to Sirhan that he, Diamond, had given the instructions
to Sirhan to climb the cage. But Sirhan denied that
he'd done it because he'd been hypnotized. At the trial Dr. Diamond, acting as the director of Sirhan's
defense, testified that Sirhan was a paranoid schizophrenic.
His testimony was supported by several other doctors
who had examined the psychiatric "evidence" obtained
from tests, interviews, and hypno-interviews conducted by
Diamond.
Dr. Diamond did not consider that Sirhan had been
other than self-programmed. Having worked for the Army
Medical Corps in World War II, he did not realize that the
U.S. cryptocracy could develop mind control and use it to
control the political destiny of the nation.
Sirhan was given yet another battery of tests by Dr. Eric
Marcus, a court-appointed psychiatrist for the defense.
Among the tests was the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI), which contains more than 500
questions requiring true-false answers. Psychologists interpret
the answers to the MMPI according to a set of statistical
norms. Two of Sirhan's nonresponses were significant,
since usually nonresponses are considered to be more important
than the "yes-no" responses. The questions Sirhan
did not respond to were: "291. At one or more times in my
life, I felt that someone was making me do things by hypnotizing
me . . ." and "293. Someone has been trying to
influence my mind."
By the second visit, Dr. Marcus had had time enough to
familiarize himself thoroughly with Sirhan's notebooks. On
one page of the notebooks Sirhan had written: "I advocate
the overthrow of the current President of the fucken United
States of America. I have no absolute plans yet, but soon
will compose some. I am poor—this country's propaganda
says that she is the best country in the world—I have not
experienced this yet—the U.S.—says that life in Russia is
bad . . . I believe that the U.S. is ready to start declining,
not that it hasn't—it began in November 23, '63, but it
should decline at a faster rate so that the real Utopia will
not be too far from being realized during the early seventies
in this country."
In one of the notebooks the name "Peggy Osterkamp"
was written over and over. "I love you, Peggy," in one
place and in another, "Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Osterkamp
Peggy Osterkamp Peggy Sirhan."
When Dr. Marcus asked Sirhan who Peggy Osterkamp
was, he said that she was just a girl he'd met a few times at the ranch where he'd worked as an exerciser of horses. Dr.
Marcus asked Sirhan if he'd ever dated her, and Sirhan
told Marcus the story he'd told the public defender about
the night of the assassination.
That night, Sirhan said, he had gone to a shooting range
and practiced with his pistol until the range closed. Then
he went with a friend, a foreign student named Mistri, to
get a hamburger at Bob's Big Boy Restaurant. While eating,
they talked about horses. For some reason Sirhan
showed his friend a pocketful of bullets. He then was given
a current newspaper and in it he read a news item about a
Zionist rally in Hollywood. He became very angry over this
and made up his mind to go to the rally. When he could
not find that rally, he wandered into the campaign headquarters
of Senator Kuchel and there heard that there
would be a party at the Ambassador Hotel nearby.
When he got to the hotel he was fascinated by the television
lights. He went to the bar and ordered two torn collinses.
He got dizzy and said to himself that he'd better go
home. He was reluctant to drive in his drunken condition,
and the next thing he remembered was being choked in the
Ambassador pantry.
Dr. Marcus didn't buy Sirhan's amnesia. He thought that
it was only a convenient cover-up, and that Sirhan was a
paranoid. In his testimony at Sirhan's trial, Dr. Marcus selected
another page from Sirhan's notebook to illustrate his
psychological evaluation. On June 2, 1967, Sirhan had
written:
A Declaration of War Against American Humanity
. . . when in the course of human events it has
become necessary for me to equalize and seek revenge
for all the inhuman treatment committed against me
by the American people. The manifestation of this
Declaration will be executed by its supporter(s) as
soon as he is able to command a sum of money (2,000)
and to acquire some firearms—the specification of
which have not been established yet.
The victims of the party in favor of this declaration
will be or are now—the President, vice, etc.—down
the ladder. The time will be chosen by the author at
the convenience of the accused. The method of assault
is immaterial—however, the type of weapon used should influence it somehow. The author believes that
many in fact multitudes of people are in harmony with
his thoughts and feelings.
The conflict and violence in the world subsequent
to the enforcement of this decree shall not be considered
likely by the author of this memoranda, rather he
hopes that they be the initiatory military steps to WW
III—the author expresses his wishes very bluntly that
he wants to be recorded by history as the man who
triggered off the last war. . .
In mid-August Sirhan's notebooks were analyzed by the
FBI crime lab in Washington. The pages were subjected to
photo and chemical analysis to establish when each had
been written and in what order. The FBI experts concluded
that Sirhan had penned the notes in a haphazard fashion,
skipping around in the books. The two pages dated June 2,
1967, and May 18, 1968, the lab said, had actually been
written on those dates.
An overview of the notes shows that Sirhan had been
concerned with three things that appeared over and over in
the writing: money, the girl Peggy Osterkamp, and a new
Mustang, in that order of importance—as determined by
the number of times each was mentioned.
Several times he had written, "please pay to the order
of. . . ," but when asked about this he could not remember
what it meant. He had written, "Today I must resolve to
come home in a new Mustang. Today I must resolve to
come home in a new Mustang. Mustang. Mustang."
The FBI and the LAPD located Peggy Osterkamp. She
was a tall, willowy blonde, the attractive daughter of an
affluent dairyman. A horse lover, she had once worked at
the ranch where Sirhan worked. She said she knew him
only slightly and had been introduced to him at the Pomona
Fair in 1966. She said she had never dated him.
On one page of the notebooks Sirhan had written, "Tom,
my wannest salutations. I do not know what has prompted
you to write to me. . ." And on another page he'd written,
Hello Tom perhaps you could use the enclosed $Sol perhaps
you could use the enclosed $." On yet another page
Sirhan had written: "11 o'clock Sirhan 11 o'clock Sirhan
Sirhan Sirhan 11 o'clock Sirhan Livermore Sirhan Sirhan Pleasanton . . . Hello Tom racetrack perhaps you could
use the enclosed $."
The FBI guessed that Sirhan had been writing about
Walter Thomas Rathke, his first employer at the racetrack.
The FBI found him working as a groom at the Pleasanton
Race Stables, just east of Oakland.
Rathke told investigators that he had known Sirhan, and
that they'd compared notes on the occult. He said he'd
written Sirhan twice and had asked him if he needed any
money. Later it was discovered that Rathke had far more
influence over Sirhan than he cared to admit, but the
LAPD and FBI dropped him as uninteresting.
In addition to examining the bizarre notebooks, investigators
also made note of Sirhan's unusual behavior after
the assassination. Sirhan, like Candy Jones, had a "thing"
about mirrors. In his cell he'd stare into a little mirror for
hours on end. He also practiced concentrating on candle
flames, trying to turn them from red to blue to green. And
he was apprehensive about drugs.
When asked by his biographer Robert Blair Kaiser if he
thought he'd get the death penalty, Sirhan shrugged and
said, "A death penalty would only be vengeance. What
would it gain?" After another pause he added, "I know I've
killed a man. At least, I'm told of it. I have nothing in my
conscience about it, but . . . I'm told I killed a man, so I
deserve some punishment, but maybe I could serve humanity
by working ten years in a hospital, to pay my debt you
might say." Later Sirhan said flatly, "I don't regard myself
as a criminal."
Kaiser reported, "Sirhan talked about Gandhi, and the
black revolution." He identified with both. "The Negroes,"
he said, "can see everything, but they can't eat it. Their
only solution is to dig in and eat it." Immediately Sirhan
added: "I wanted a new car. I always wanted a Mustang. I
said, 'All I need is money and how am I gonna get it?'
They're not giving Mustangs away."2 Was Sirhan implying
that he killed Kennedy for money?
The court ordered that Sirhan be fully tested psychologically
to see what his mental state really was. They gave
him an electroencephalogram to see if by chance his brain
had been damaged by a fall he'd taken from a horse two
years earlier. The EEG showed that Sirhan had a normal
brain-wave pattern. Then, just to determine if alcohol had any effect on the pattern, the doctor, who'd obtained the
recipe for the Ambassador Hotel's torn collins, gave Sirhan
the equivalent of four drinks and measured his brain patterns
again. Still there was nothing unusual in them.
But even though the EEG showed no unusual brain activity,
Sirhan got very drunk and shivered violently for ten
minutes. He became irrational, agitated, and restless. He
screamed out curses.
When someone told him, "Dr. Marcus is here," Sirhan
screamed, "Get that bastard out of here!" The doctor ordered
Sirhan taken back to his inner cell, and Sirhan
seemed confused. "What the hell is going on here?" he
asked, then grabbed his throat violently (as Castillo had),
and appeared to be choking. The doctor noted that he was
in a state of delirium.
Robert Kaiser again asked Sirhan about his notebooks
and Sirhan explained everything he could about them. He
said that they were writings about the occult, that he had
been studying the objective mind in relation to the universal
mind. "If you give your subjective mind an intense
command by your objective mind, your subjective mind
will gather the information to carry out the commands of
the objective mind. . ."
Sirhan said that he'd been sitting in front of a mirror
after he'd seen a replay of Robert Kennedy on television
reporting in 1948 on the Arab-Israeli war in Palestine. "I
concentrated on RFK in the mirror," he said. "I had to
stop him. Finally, his face was in that mirror instead of my
own. Then I went to my notebook and started writing. It
was part of the auto-suggestion necessary to get my subjective
mind to get my objective mind moving. I read in the
Rosicrucian magazine how if you wanted to do anything,
you should write it down. It automatically works toward
the realization of what you want.
"With that power," Sirhan said with intensity, "I could
have been a millionaire! A millionaire! Ohh shit!"
"Why did I not go to the races that day?" Sirhan asked
Kaiser. "Why did I not like the horses? Why did I go to
that range? Why did I save those Mini-Mags [the highpowered
bullets used on Kennedy]? Why did I not expend
those bullets? Why did I go to Bob's? Why did Mistri give
me that newspaper? Why did I drink that night? It was,"
he said, "like some inner force." "But you wrote in your notebook 'RFK must die,'" Kaiser
said.
"After the bit with the mirror," Sirhan told him, "I forgot
it all. The idea of killing Kennedy never entered my
mind, sir."3 '
During Sirhan's trial for murder, the judge refused to
authorize the use of lie detectors or truth serum. Sirhan,
like Ray, was quickly "put away" for life.
There were those, however, who refused to let the matter
rest. In 1973, while Sirhan sat in prison, Dr. Edward Simpson,
the San Quentin prison psychiatrist, submitted an affidavit
to the California courts requesting that Sirhan be
granted a new trial and that the Robert Kennedy case be
reopened.
Dr. Simpson testified that the "expert" psychiatricpsychological
testimony at Sirhan's trial was full of numerous
factual errors and misleading to the jury. "Most of the
doctors testifying," Simpson said, "saw their role as proving
why Sirhan killed Kennedy, which required a focus on
pathology (mental illness) that I found does not exist,
They failed to consider the real facts in a more objective
light and failed to consider the possibility, clearly suggested
by the ballistic testimony and Sirhan's own testimony under
close scrutiny, that perhaps Sirhan did not kill Robert F.I
Kennedy."
"Sirhan's trial," Dr. Simpson wrote, "was not handled
properly by the mental health professionals. In retrospect, a
close study of the trial testimony and my own extensive
study of Sirhan leads to one irrevocable and obvious conclusion:
Sirhan's trial was, and will be remembered, as the
psychiatric blunder of the century."
Dr. Simpson knew whereof he spoke. For six years he
had worked at San Quentin Prison and had made a study of
men on Death Row. For two years he'd been in charge of
the prison's psychological testing program. In 1969 he interviewed
and tested Sirhan extensively during twenty
weekly visits. After these visits were terminated, Sirhan requested
that his family contact Simpson for the purpose of
reviewing the psychiatric testimony that had been given at
his trial.
After examining Sirhan, and reviewing the "expert" psychiatric
testimony, Dr. Simpson discussed his findings with the prison's chief psychiatrist, Dr. David G. Schmidt. Together
they concluded that their findings did not confirm
"but, in fact, were strictly in conflict" with the findings reported
at Sirhan's trial.
"Nowhere in Sirhan's test response," Dr. Simpson said in
the affidavit, "was I able to find evidence that he is a 'paranoid
schizophrenic' or 'psychotic' as testified by the doctors
at the trial . . . The fact is, paranoid schizophrenics are
almost impossible to hypnotize. They are too suspicious
and do not trust anybody, including friends and relatives,
not to speak of a hypnotist from, for him, the most hated
race. Psychotics in general are among the poorest subjects
for hypnosis. They cannot concentrate, they do not follow
instructions and basically do not trust. Sirhan, however,
was an unusually good hypnotic subject. Sirhan asked me
to hypnotize him, which I did not do, in order not to contaminate
my test findings with fantasies. He himself had
manufactured a hypno-disk, and was practicing selfhypnosis
in his cell, an activity requiring considerable selfcontrol
which no psychotic has. The fact that Sirhan was
easy to hypnotize, as testified by Dr. Diamond, proves he
was not a paranoid schizophrenic.
"Dr. Diamond," Simpson continued, "used hypnosis in
six sessions out of eight with Sirhan. What was the purpose
of it? To plant ideas in Sirhan's mind, ideas that were not
there before? To make him accept the idea that he killed
Robert F. Kennedy?
"When Dr. Diamond was unable to get Sirhan to admit
that he wrote the notebooks, he testified: '. . . so I undertook
some experiments on possible hypnotic suggestion.'
This admission strongly suggests the possibility of hypnosis
being used for implanting hypothetical ideas in Sirhan's
mind, rather than uncovering facts . . . A lie detector, not
hypnosis, should have been used in finding out whether Sirhan
killed Robert Kennedy.
'Why was a lie detector not used? It should have been,
as it is much more reliable than hypnosis, which often provideo
contaminated results . . . Dr. Diamond's testimony
is wrong, as he states: 'I have very little or no faith in the
accuracy [of a lie detector].' The truth is, the polygraph
exceeds in accuracy certain techniques, such as hypnosis,
that tend to fuse and contaminate experiences from past
and present and also can be influenced significantly by the operator [hypnotist]; it makes a significant difference who
the hypnotist is. . ."
In 1975 when the California investigation into the RFK
killing was briefly reopened, the public learned that crucial
physical evidence, such as ceiling tiles from the hotel pantry
and bullet fragments, had been destroyed or lost by the
LAPD. And, as in the Oswald case, critical testimony had
been ignored. [The above testimony, of Dr. Simpson,
pointed to the possibility that Sirhan was a hypnoprogrammed
assassin.]
Also in 1975, seven years after the crime, former highranking
U.S. intelligence officer and one of the developers
of the PSE Charles McQuiston analyzed recordings of Sirhan's
interview with psychiatrists in San Quentin.
Sirhan said, "To me, sir, he [Kennedy] is still alive . .,
I still don't believe what has happened . . . I don't believe
that he is dead. I have no realization still that I killed
him, that he is in the grave." McQuiston's PSE analysis
showed that on this statement Sirhan exhibited very little
stress.
"After analyzing the tapes," McQuiston said, "I'm convinced
that Sirhan wasn't aware of what he was doing. He
was in a hypnotic trance when he pulled the trigger and
killed Senator Kennedy . . . Everything in the PSE chart
tells me that someone else was involved in the assassination—
and that Sirhan was programmed through hypnosis
to kill RFK. What we have here is a real live 'Manchurian
Candidate.' "4
After examining Sirhan's PSE charts, Dr. John W.
Heisse, Jr., president of the International Society of Stress
Analysis, agreed with McQuiston. Dr. Heisse, who had
studied hundreds of people under hypnosis using the PSE,
said, "Sirhan kept repeating certain phrases. This clearly
revealed he had been programmed to put himself into a
trance. This is something he couldn't have learned by himself.
Someone had to show him and teach him how.
"I believe Sirhan was brainwashed under hypnosis by the
constant repetition of words like 'you are nobody, you're
nothing, the American dream is gone' until he actually believed
them. At that stage someone implanted an idea, kill
RFK, and under hypnosis the brainwashed Sirhan accepted
it."
Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who wrote the introduction to The Control of Candy Jones, has been billed as one of the country's
leading medical experts on hypnosis. Spiegel said of
Sirhan's case: "It's very possible to distort and change
somebody's mind through a number of hypnotic sessions. It
can be described as brainwashing because the mind is
cleared of its old emotions and values which are replaced
by implanting other suggestions . . . This technique was
probably used with Sirhan. From my own research, I think
Sirhan was subjected to hypnotic treatment."
Even in the early days of the investigation, there were
those who found it easy to believe the hypno-programming
theory. Among them was writer Truman Capote, who had
for a long while been a friend of Jacqueline Kennedy and
her sister, Lee Radziwill. After writing his best seller In
Cold Blood, Capote was regarded as something of an expert
on murder. On the NBC "Tonight" show Capote suggested
that Sirhan and his accomplices had been intensively
trained and brainwashed trigger men. Their purpose, Capote
proposed, was to drive the United States to its knees
by assassinating all its leaders.
According to Robert Blair Kaiser, "With a little more
diligence than they exercised, and a great deal more intelligence
than they had, the police might have established
links between Sirhan and the underworld, between Sirhan
and the right wing, between Sirhan and the left wing, between
Sirhan and the Al Fatah. . ."5
But neither the police nor the FBI showed any interest in
Sirhan's "connections"—perhaps because there were so
many. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan was a contradiction.
He could be linked to many different groups, all of
which could easily have had a political motive to kill Robert
Kennedy. So the LAPD did the same thing the Warren
Commission did; it took what evidence it needed to prove
its case for a "lone nut" and ignored the rest.
Defense director Diamond, subsequently explaining his
tactics in Sirhan's trial, said he was surprised when he first
tried to hypnotize Sirhan. "Most people may take an hour
or more to go under hypnosis the first time," Diamond
said. "A schizophrenic usually takes much longer, if he
goes under at all. But it took less than ten minutes for Sirhan
to go into a deep authentic sleep."
Sirhan, Dr. Diamond concluded, had obviously had experience
with hypnosis before. He found that Sirhan w write without being posthypnotically blocked. "Writing under
hypnosis is called automatic writing," Diamond said,
"and the term aptly describes the way Sirhan would write
like a robot and keep on repeating a word or phrase until I
stopped him."
Taking a sheet off a legal pad lying nearby, Diamond
asked Sirhan to write his answers to the questions put to
him in the hypnotic trance. He showed Sirhan a sample of
his diary page.
"Is this crazy writing?" Diamond asked.
"YES YES YES," Sirhan wrote.
"Are you crazy?" Diamond asked.
"NO NO," Sirhan wrote.
"Well, why are you writing crazy?" Diamond asked.
"PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE," Sirhan responded.
"Practice for what?" Diamond asked.
"MIND CONTROL MIND CONTROL MIND CONTROL"
is what Sirhan wrote."6
Perhaps now, looking back, we can understand more
about Sirhan from David. David was a good Air Force
candidate for mind-control: He was an obedient soldier,
penitent, and patient. His amnesia, you'll recall, was so total,
so complete, that it took years of psychotherapy to restore
his memory. This is what he had to say on the subject of
forgetting and remembering:
"The air force used hypnosis for opening up my subconscious
mind. It's the subconscious mind that remembers everything.
That was the way it was explained to me. The
subconscious mind must trust the person who is conditioning
it. So if a person gets another's subconscious mind to
trust them, then that subconscious mind will tell them everything
that it has seen or heard from the day it was born
even back to when it was in its mother's womb.
"So under a voice or word command the information
can be brought out once the subconscious has been conditioned
to respond to the right command. It might respond
to one voice or a group of voices. I'd be given a certain cue
and I would remember what I was supposed to remember.
I was tested constantly. And then, when the meeting was over, I would be unable to remember, and automatically
my subconscious would close.
"The cue command would be at the beginning of a meeting.
I don't think you need a dual command. I think you
need only a command to start, then once something is finished,
the process stops automatically. During the training
period I'd do whatever I wanted for a couple of days, then
go back and the next thing I knew I was remembering the
computer numbers again. A word would be said and I'd
just begin remembering. They'd give a command, and if
your subconscious has really trusted the person conditioning
you, that triggers the memory. I don't know who the
person I trusted was, because I was usually only talking to
the tape recorder. I was actually thinking I was talking to
someone that was very close. That would be the person
who'd listen to the tape, I guess.
"Really I was talking to myself, but behind this was that
person—no name, no face, just that friendly, trustworthy
person who had conditioned me. And at the same time it
was myself. Who would I trust more than myself?
"They must have told me that after I got out of the service
I'd be unable to remember anything of a sensitive nature.
I suppose they told me in a way that made it acceptable.
But I don't think I ever thought I would have the
problems which resulted from loss of my memory . . .
When you can't remember things in sequence about your life,
you have no idea what that does to you. It interferes with
your whole identity."
Considering the connections between Cuba or Cubans
and Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, James Earl Ray's
Latin accomplice 'Raoul,' and Luis Castillo's Cuban intelligence
training one cannot help but wonder whether a variation
on a scenario written in 1943 by hypnotist George
Estabrooks wasn't being played out in the assassinations.
In his book Hypnotism, Estabrooks outlined a plan in
which suddenly the Cubans had become belligerent and
were "building a great naval base at Havana, an obvious
menace to our overseas trade." He suggested that a Cuban
oil executive be hypno-programmed to spy on the Cuban
government. "Neither he nor the group in question (his oil
company) need know anything of the arrangements. The instructions to his unconscious in hypnotism are very definite.
Find out everything possible about the naval base. He
is shown maps of this before he goes and coached as to just
what is important. Nor is he ever allowed to submit written
reports. Everything must be handed on by word of mouth
to one of the very few individuals who are able to hypnotize
him . . . Under these circumstances we may count on
this man doing everything in his power to collect the information
in question."
Estabrooks explained: "There are certain safeguards if
we use hypnotism. First, there is no danger of the agent
selling out, but this would probably not be of great importance
in this particular case. More important would be the
conviction of innocence which the man himself had, and
this is a great aid in many situations. He would never 'act
guilty' and if ever accused of seeking information would be
quite honestly indignant. This conviction of innocence on
the part of a criminal is perhaps his greatest safeguard under
questioning by authorities. Finally, it would be impossible
to 'third degree' him and so pick up the links of a
chain. This is very important, for the most hardened culprit
is always liable to 'talk' if the questioners are but ruthless
enough."
Then Estabrooks expanded his point: "Far more useful
than the foregoing purpose, however, would be that for a
counterespionage service, built along the same lines. This
would require both care and time to perfect, but once
working it might prove extremely effective. Here the best
approach would probably be through those of enemy alien
stock within our own gates. Once again let us choose the
aggressive Cubans as examples. In the event of war, but
preferably well before the outbreak of war, we would start
our organization. We could easily secure (say) one hundred
or one thousand excellent subjects of Cuban stock
who spoke their language fluently, and then work on these
subjects.
"In hypnotism we would build up their loyalty to this
country; but out of hypnotism, in the 'waking' or normal
state we would do the opposite, striving to convince them
that they had a genuine grievance against this country and
encouraging them to engage in 'fifth column' activities.
Here we would be coming very close to establishing a case
of 'dual personality.' There is nothing at all impossible in this. We know that dual, and even multiple, personality can
be both caused and cured by hypnotism. Moreover, that
condition, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde combination, is a
very real one once it is established.
"They would, as we before said, be urged in the waking
state to become fifth columnists to the United States, but
we would also point out to them in hypnotism that this was
really a pose, that their real loyalty lay with this country,
offering them protection and reward for their activities.
Through them we would hope to be kept informed of the
activities of their 'friends,' this information, of course being
obtained in the trance state."
As to the possibility of hypno-programming assassins,
Estabrooks wrote: "Strange to say, most good subjects will
commit murder. In the writer's opinion there can be very
little doubt on this score. They commit a legal, but not an
ethical murder, so to speak. For example, we hypnotize a
subject and tell him to murder you with a gun. We hand
him a loaded revolver. In all probability he will refuse.
Frankly for very obvious reasons, the writer has never
made the experiment. Corpses are not needed in psychological
laboratories."
That, Estabrooks suggests, best be left to the intelligence
agencies.7

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