For decades, even centuries, mind control techniques have been intrinsic to covert intelligence operations.
A former CIA assassin reveals his view of it all.

Mind Control is not needed to motivate assassins; it is however, most useful to protect assassins and their employers from their own incriminating memories. In the course of researching this book, I talked with a number of retired intelligence personnel (from various government agencies) who had either committed assassination or admitted having heard tales of assassins in their work. Few had heard of an assassin being mind-controlled. One man I consulted, however, took a special interest in the stories of David and Castillo. A chemist who had worked for one of the intelligence research labs, he developed new ways for killing quickly and quietly. And he had met several of the killers who were to use his formulas.

Over a three-year period I talked with this chemist on a number of occasions. He came to trust that I would reveal no names and endanger no lives in telling the story of mind control. After hearing details of my research, he offered to introduce me to a man he had met while working at the lab. This man had been a high-ranking officer in the military, retired after thirty years of service. He had served as an officer in World War II and Korea. During the Vietnam conflict, because of his special knowledge of 'black science' he was induced to sign on after he retired from military service as a private contractor for the cryptocracy During the next eighteen years, he accepted several simple assassination jobs. He told the chemist about some of his friends having come back from similar missions with "holes in their memories".

The chemist had arranged a meeting in a noisy public restaurant in a small New Mexico town. Having promised to take no notes, I had secreted in my pocket the smallest tape recorder made, which allowed me to record three hours of the assassin's talk, amid clanking glasses and the general restaurant noise.

When I finally sat across from him, my heart raced. The retired assassin was a sixty-year-old man, grey-haired but as strong as a man twenty-five years his junior. He had a .357 magnum revolver strapped to his side, as did the man he introduced as his bodyguard. As a cover for the guns, he and the bodyguard both wore National Rifle Association patches sewn prominently to the pockets of their crisply pressed khaki clothes.

The chemist had already informed his friend about the book I was researching. As we sat down and were introduced by first names only, I told the assassin I was especially interested in finding out why men had been returned to civilian life with amnesia.

I mentioned the ad I had placed and the number of men who had responded. I mentioned also that the majority of those who responded, and who had reason to believe their minds had been tampered with, had been enlisted men.

Career officers, he explained, were legally bound by security oaths and economically dependent upon pensions and the privileges of rank, but enlisted men, while perhaps bound by an oath, were likely to separate from the service knowing more than they needed to know. Somebody had to man the high-technology instruments of war, and those who were merely computer fodder had to be protected against their knowledge - they could not be trusted. Patriotism, especially during the Vietnam era, was a waning motivation. Their memories had to be erased. But, he explained, mind control was not needed to make a killer. Professionals didn't usually need to be motivated. Most members of search-and-destroy or "executive action" teams were already willing to kill men, women or children if their superiors ordered it.

I concluded that he meant a career killer didn't need to be debriefed by mind control. When I said that, he contradicted me. "You want to bet?" he said. "They'd all kill, but they might not be able to keep the secret. It would depend entirely upon what activities they were involved in, whether the assignment was combat, mop-up, search-and-destroy, political assassination, or whatever…"

This debriefing is done in such a way, in many cases, as to cause actual memory damage. As things have gone along and progressed, the techniques have been smoothed out, but memory damage still occurs. In certain cases memory recall is so critical that they bend over backwards to be damned sure that you can't remember."

"Many of the things that occur are not as pretty as you'd like the public to think," he said.

"So you've witnessed many atrocities of war?" I asked.

"I don't call them atrocities", he countered. " I call them military actions. There's a lot of conflict of interest there - the politicians against the military…" I let him rail a while about the evils of the government and then brought him back to my point of interest. "Okay, who killed JFK, RFK, King, and who was behind Bremer?" I asked. He didn't remember who Bremer was, so I explained that he was the man who'd shot Wallace.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Bremer was just a kook. Wallace was shot just by a kook. But whoever got the Kennedys and King probably got a gold medal.

"We were set up to wipe Castro out. Kennedy interfered at the last minute. You want to take a guess at who killed him? Oswald was just a patsy. I've fired the same kind of rifle Oswald was supposed to have used. You can't rapid-fire that thing like he was supposed to have done. Now who do you suppose killed Kennedy?

"Don't kid yourself. This country is controlled by the Pentagon. All the major decisions in this country are made by the military, from my observations on the clandestine side of things.

"The CIA's just the whipping boy. NSA [the National Security Agency] are the ones who have the hit teams. Look into their records - you won't find a thing. Look into their budget - you can't. For the life of you, you can't find any way they could spend the kind of money they've got on the number of people who're supposed to be on their payroll. Even if they had immense research and development programs, they couldn't spend that kind of money.

"The CIA's just a figurehead. They are more worldwide - like the FBI is. They're accountants, lawyers, file clerks, schoolboys. They are information-gatherers. They've pulled a lot of god-damned shenanigans - I'm not going to deny that - but as far as intelligence goes, the NSA's far, far superior to them - far in advance in the 'black arts'.

"The CIA gets blamed for what NSA does. NSA is far more vicious and far more accomplished in their operations. The American people are kept in ignorance about this - they should be, too."

"In other words", I responded, "what you're saying is that the military is more dangerous to our democracy than the CIA or other intelligence groups?"

"The CIA gathers information, but the military heads the show. Look at how many former military officers work for the CIA. Look at how many former high-ranking military officers work for the multinational corporations. Can't you figure it out?"

"What are you suggesting, that there is an invisible coup d'état which has occurred in the United States?" I asked.

"Okay. There is a group of about eighteen or twenty people running this country. They have not been elected. The elected people are only figureheads for these guys who have a lot more power than even the President of the United States."

"You mean that the President is powerless?" I asked. "Not exactly powerless. He has the power to make decisions on what is presented to him. The intelligence agencies tell him only what they want to tell him, however. They don't tell him any more than they have to or want to.

"You have to wonder at American stupidity. How much does it take to get people to wake up to what has happened? It's public knowledge that the CIA has falsified documents and given Presidents fake intelligence reports so that they can only arrive at one conclusion - the conclusion they want them to arrive at. The "Pentagon Papers" revealed that fact.

"What people don't know is that the global corporations have their own version of the CIA. Where they don't interface with the CIA, they have their own organisations - all CIA-trained. They also have double-agents inside CIA and other intelligence organisations who are loyal to those corporations - I mean where's the bread buttered? Would you rather take the government pensions, or would you rather work a little for the corporation on the side and get both government pensions and corporate benefits after you retire? Most men retire after twenty years, and they're only in their mid-forties, then they go to work for the corporation they've been working for while they were in government service. They get both the pension and the corporate paycheck that way!

"Together with what the corporations do on their own, they have a worldwide espionage system far better than the CIA's. There is a network of what amounts to double agents - they do work for the government, and may appear to be government agents, but they are first loyal to the corporations. They report to those corporations on the government and on what foreign governments might be planning which would interfere with those corporations' foreign investments. These guys are strictly free enterprise agents."

"You call these guys contract agents?" I wondered.

"Oh, no, no, no. Take, for example: we develop a new death ray. We've got all the security the government can think of on it We've got the best security in the United States on it, which is tied for second place for the best security in the world. Tied for first place are the Russian and Chinese security systems.

"Now even with all this security, before FACI [First Article Configuration Inspection, the government's checking system on the manufacturing of military hardware] on a government contract, that death ray is up for grabs in every nation in the world. Any amount of military security can't keep it secret."

"What you're saying," I interrupted, "is that American people are selling secrets, wholesale, to the highest bidder? That is to say, I assume, if the highest bidder is an American company?"

"And even if it's not," he said. "Usually it is another nation. I've dealt with weapons and usually the nation that wants it most will pay the most for it. Once in a while these companies, these government contractors, will find that someone has stolen one of their secrets and there'll be a big flap. But the big boys that are in the military are an entirely different ball of wax: the big guys get away with it.

"When one of these companies finds someone inside it that's selling secrets, they take him on a fishing trip, a boat ride, and get rid of him. It's quite common," he said. "For example, if I was tied in with one of these companies where money is no object and they wanted me to get rid of you, I'd obtain a passport or a duplicate passport with your smilin' face on it. After I'd obtained it, I'd put whoever's face on it I wanted. Then after we dumped you, that 'someone' whose face was on your passport would take a trip to Australia.

"Later, your friends or family would notice you were missing and people would begin to inquire as to your whereabouts. Eventually they'd check with the Australian customs who'd say, yes, this guy entered the country on such and such a date. By then the guy who'd travelled over there on your passport would have already come back on his own, and as far as the best detective could tell you've gone to Australia and you've never come back."

"What you do know about the military or the intelligence agencies' use of pain-drug hypnosis?" I asked.

"They use hypnosis and hypnotic drugs. They also use electronic manipulation of the brain. They use ultrasonics, which will boil your brain. When they use hypnosis, they'll at the same time be using a set of earphones which repeat, 'You do not know this or that', over and over. They turn on the sonics at the same time, and the electrical patterns which give you memory are scrambled. You can't hear the ultrasonics and you can't feel it unless they leave it on - then it boils your grey matter."

Unless the assassin had done the same research I had, he could only have known this through first-hand experience. The CIA documents released in 1976 revealed that ultrasonic research was undertaken for a period of more than twenty years. But the documents said that the research had stopped, so I asked him about that.

"Yeah. The research has stopped. They've gone operational. It ain't research any more. They know how to do it." He said.

"Do you mean that it is your opinion that it hasn't stopped, or do you mean that you know it hasn't stopped?" I asked.

"I mean I know it hasn't stopped," he said. "For example, suppose that a dictator in some South American country is setting up real problems and we try to kick him out. We call in some of my former group and say, 'Look, the bastard has got to have a fatal accident, and it's gotta look good - like he fell on a bar of soap and broke his neck in the bathtub or something.' So we go down there and get the job done.

"But it could be quite embarrassing if any of the guys were cross-examined about where they'd been and what they'd done… So the guys who were in on the job suddenly have a cold or something, and they are put in hospital for maybe just a routine check-up. They come out of the hospital in about fifteen days. They're alive. They're well. They're healthy. And they're happy, too. Lots of luck if you question them: they don't remember anything.

"That's one way it's used. The other way is to use it to improve memory - say, with couriers. You want a secret message carried, outside the chain of command. There's no need to have it carried by a person if it's a legal message, because the military's got a thousand ways of sending messages which are unbreakably secret. But if it's outside the chain of command, as so many things are these days, if it's an illegal message - and our Constitution doesn't permit us to do much that is legal - then you have a hypno-programmed guy carry the message. You improve his memory so that he can carry an entire coded book of what appears to be gibberish, and when he's got it down you give him amnesia and seal off that message by a post-hypnotic code-word, and whammo! You got a real good secret courier, because he can be tortured to death but he can't remember. Unless the proper cue is uttered.

"Then if the courier is going to operate against the enemy, who might have the techniques of hypnosis down, you give him several layers of post-hypnotic command. In the first layer, he'll confess a false message. In the second layer, he'll confess another different false message. Finally, maybe on the fourth or fifth layer is the real message."

"Our guy who is supposed to get the message knows that the first three cues, say, are fake, and he gives the fourth cue and out comes the correct message. If the courier was in enemy hands, he could be there for years before anybody will figure out where he was in all those layers… Each identity will probably be that of a real 'cut out' - a person enough like him, so that the enemy will think they've got the real guy.

"Many of the men in my unit were given assignments, after which they were so 'persuaded' that they didn't remember anything. I mean to say, they'd gone in believing that the only thing in life that meant anything to them was completing the assignment - to get it done - and when they got done with it they couldn't remember anything about it."

"Could these guys have been that way without hypnosis?" I asked.

Well, they could have believed that their mission in life was that particular assignment. They usually had no family affiliations, no friends, nothing but their careers. But I don't think they'd have forgotten about those kind of assignments. Not without a little help, let us say."

"What was the conditioning that these guys had? Was it drugs, hypnosis, or something else?" I wanted to know.

"Hypnosis, electrotherapy, programming them by tapes, by voice-over earphones, awake or in trance, or asleep. By a number of methods."

"How widespread was this mind control?" I asked.

"Well, it was - well, that is something I can't really answer. I know of several different groups upon whom it was used. I know that it was used in some of the hairier areas of Korea and Vietnam, and it was started in World War II, but it has been refined far more since then. How much of it was used, I don't know. I know of several groups that I was affiliated with that had it used on them."

"Would you say this kind of thing did not exist before World War II? I asked.

"Oh, it did. But it was not in such a sophisticated form. It's as old as man, but now it is refined to an art. Before, it was torture and psychological pressure - that can accomplish a lot. We've been trained to use it in primitive field situations. But now it's done with the idea that the mind can be put under complete control. Just like they used to use rubber hoses at the police stations. They don't do that anymore. Well, rubber hoses still work, but they don't work as well as some other things which the police now have."

"Are you saying that the police also use mind control?" I asked.

"At the highest levels, yes. The FBI certainly uses it, and they, of course, give a lot of help to the local police. There are certain areas of the brain which control your inhibitions. When they control those centres, then the subject will go on with his assignment regardless. I've seen men whose mother could be sitting there having coffee, and if they'd been instructed to kill her, they'd walk right in and shoot here, and it wouldn't even upset their appetites for supper. They were conditioned to do it in such a way that they have no guilt. They wouldn't have guilt because after they were through they wouldn't even remember it.

"Let me tell you something: the cheapest commodity in the world is human beings. Most assassins don't need to be programmed to kill. They're loyal to command. They're conditioned, first by the circumstances of their own early life, then by a little 'loyalty training'. The command is their only justification for living. It is also their only protection once they're into it…

"When I came out of the service and went to work for the government, I had a colonel assigned to me as a bodyguard. When he retired, I hired him," he said, pointing to his bodyguard. "he's still with me, and that's why we have these…" He pointed to the .357 magnum - the most powerful handgun in the world - strapped to his side in plain sight.

"Who're you worried about? The Russians? The Chinese?"

"Well, I'll tell you. You can demand near put a pin in the map anywhere you want. I got into military security before the Second World War. I was just a kid. Over the years I was assigned to thirty-two different countries. So you can draw your own conclusion."

"But what you've been talking about is a political action, not a military one. How, then, as a military security man did you get involved in political actions?"

"Well, suppose there were countries that were doing technological research on things which could be injurious to the welfare of the United States. I'd be one of the guys assigned to destroy those scientists who were involved in the research. That was with friendly and unfriendly governments. So, naturally, if they found out that I was in on it, even now, they'd come after me.

"In other cases I was involved in knocking off some dictators. Then we'd change the people's voting ideas when they had to elect someone." I returned to the main thread of our conversation. "Okay now, since we have this mind-control technology, what is to keep the guys in the cryptocracy or the military, as you maintain, from programming Presidents as soon as they take office, or immediately after they get elected?"

"I have always wondered about Nixon," he mused. "He was very pro-military. He gave them just about everything they wanted in the world. But he wanted to create a monarchy with himself as king. And, slowly but surely, he tried to take over the military and the CIA through subordinate officers who were loyal to him only.

"All you hear about are left-wing conspiracies to overthrow our government. You never hear about right-wing conspiracies.

"Well, some of these right-wing groups are far more dangerous than the left wing. The left wing's mostly kids with dreams. The right wing is usually retired military. They're hard. They're trained. They've got arms. But if the right wing took over right now, there would be just a military dictatorship, and the military would find that its best plans were not upset at all. I'm saying if a dictatorship took over. Hell, we've got one right now, but it ain't overt, it's subtle."

"You mean those twenty men you were talking about?" I asked.

"Yeah… If the people of this country actually knew that, they would say 'no' the next time they were asked to go to Vietnam. We need the people behind us to fight a war, and if they knew the true facts, who's running things, there wouldn't be the following we'd need to defend the country. That fact alone keeps the sham of politics and 'free elections' going."

"If that is the case, then the results would be different?"

"Yes, If people knew they had a dictatorship. Have you ever heard of a factory slow-down, a strike? Well, Russia has run up against the problem, and so have we in supporting the foreign dictators we support. The American people, like most people, have to feel that they have some right, that they're the 'good guys'. This is the reason we have never lost a war and have never won a peace.

"You've got to maintain the sham of freedom, no matter what. It wouldn't make any difference what party is in charge or whether it was the elected government or what you call the cryptocracy running it; from an operational sense, the government would operate as it presently is. From the point of view of people paying taxes and defending their country, well, we found in Latin America that people won't fight if they think that they have a dictator who is just as bad as the enemy who is attacking.

"That's probably why it would be fairly easy to take over the Soviet Union, short of nuclear war. The Soviets could probably be convinced by psychological warfare that their government is certainly a lot more evil than ours. And if we went to war with them we could eventually win - that is, until the H-bomb started to fall, then nobody'd be the winner."

Changing the subject, I asked, "What area of the military were you involved in?"

"I don't think I ought to answer that. Let's say there was a group which first sought to solve problems politically. If that didn't work, then there was another group which went in and tried to buy solutions. If that failed, then my group was sent in to be damned sure things were accomplished the way we wanted them to be."

"So you were operational, and not research at all?" I asked.

"No. I had been in the lab for a long time. The knowledge edge I developed was very valuable in an operational sense. I was put into the field because of this knowledge."

"You're talking about pretty sophisticated equipment, not commando stuff?"

"Right. For example, I won't say the name of the country, but it was a South American country. We had a leader that we had supported there who suddenly got the idea that he was going to go off on his own. They tried to reason, negotiate, buy off his affections. When all that failed, my team was sent in to correct the situation.

"We went in very quietly and left very noisily. We went in as tourists, but the important material we brought in was the turning point. Let's say we couldn't reason with the man anymore. We were there about six days, and the problem disappeared. Not many bodies, just the important ones."

The assassin was very specific telling about some of the jobs he'd accomplished. Several included actions taken against a well known political figure - that, the assassin said, was the only assassination he'd ever 'blown'. His rifle malfunctioned at the critical moment when he had his target in the crosshairs of his sight.

I cannot say that I had originally believed the assassin's claims, but after running the Psychological Stress Evaluator on all the critical portions of his interview, and finding no areas which unexpectedly or inexplicably produced stress, I believed that the assassin was telling the truth. The newspaper office he had mentioned was bombed when he said it was, but he could have gained knowledge of that from newspaper reports. The target of his unsuccessful hit was subsequently 'taken care of' in another way which did not cost him his life.

The assassin concluded the interview with a chilling prophecy. Jimmy Carter was then a candidate for the presidency.

"I'll tell you something right now," the assassin said. "You've got a man running for office that is expressing the same god-damned philosophy John Kennedy had. Now he could be saying this stuff just to get elected. Matter of fact, if you look into his background, you find that he was a good naval officer. He had top security clearance. He was trained by Admiral Rickover who, he said, had a strong influence on his life. Taking this into consideration, you can assume that he's a loyal member of the old boy net, so he probably will make a good figurehead President for those in power.

"But if he ain't an old boy and if he does believe all those things he's been telling the voters - if he tries to implement those reforms he's talking about, well, it's not a question of whether he's going to be snuffed, it's only a question of when or where."

The assassin confirmed many of my own conclusions which had been based only on research: that an invisible coup d'état had taken place in the United States; that the CIA is only the tip of the cryptocracy iceberg; and that ultrasonic and electrical memory erasure was used to protect 'search-and-destroy' operators from their own memories. I had some indication that the cryptocracy had investigated such techniques (a 1951 CIA document had briefly cited the need for such research), but the assassin's disclosure that the cryptocracy had developed invisible forms of sonics and electronic stimulation of the brain for mind control sent me back to the libraries.