Kennedy Assassination: Oswald/Manchurian Candidate

KENNEDY ASSASSINATION OSWALD AS MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE CIA Experiments and the Murder of JFK

By Tom Slattery AUTHOR'S PREFACE In November 1979, sixteen years after the untimely death of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, I was living in the Berkeley Inn in Berkeley, California, an old hotel built at the beginning of the 20th century and now torn down. This book grew from loose discussions with a circle of thoughtful hotel residents, street people, and University of California affiliates. At that time, only sixteen years after the assassination, the event was still fresh in the minds of most people living in the United States, and indeed the world.

Most living people in November 1979 could tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news on November 22, 1963.

As I began writing the first draft on a Hermes portable typewriter in those pre-desktop computer days in my room in the Berkeley Inn, it was not even intended as an article. It was just a comparison of three books that lay on the desk. In 1979 there was no search engine to look up data. Indeed there were no PCs, let alone Internet. These three data-rich books were thus invaluable.

The first of these books was The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate"; the CIA and Mind Control, by John Marks (a former CIA employee) Times Books, 1978. It was the first book to be published that revealed the vast secret mind-control experiments by the CIA and had considerable factual material concerning it.

The second book was Legend; Who Assassinated a President, by Edward Jay Epstein, Ballantine Books, 1978. Epstein attempts to show that Oswald was simply a deranged young nut who finally cracked and murdered Kennedy. But in attempting to show this, Epstein researched every little detail of Oswald's life that he could find. His book is thus packed with the minute details of Oswald's life and became extremely useful in placing Oswald in certain places at certain times.

The third book was the data-loaded Assassination of JFK by Coincidence or Conspiracy? It was produced by the Committee to Investigate Assassinations under the direction of Bernard Fensterwald, Jr. and published by Zebra Books, 1977. It contains details of every aspect of the assassination and the various people with some kind of knowledge of it who became peripherally involved. Many of these people died mysteriously.

Much of the material in the book was investigated by no one else, not even the Warren Commission. It became an invaluable data bank for comparing where people other than Oswald were before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination.

Most of the uncited material in my book is drawn from these three books. Due to the fact that my book was begun merely as a probing first-look comparison of data revealed in these three and other books and was never meant as a formal theory or paper, I did not

scrupulously make notations. When I wrote the first draft, which was mostly several pages divided into two columns comparing details of Oswald's and others' lives and the available data on the CIA experiments, I was living rent-free in an old hotel room in exchange for desk-clerking on weekends. I was without adequate living resources let alone research resources.

That 1979 first draft was largely meant to see for myself if there might be anything to this rather unique assassination theory. Writers with intellectual and financial resources and/or research backing and advances from publishers were still turning out new and interesting JFK assassination books. For a while it seemed to have become an industry unto itself. I was not seeking to compete with them, only to demonstrate my unique theory to a small circle of Berkeley friends.

When I bought my first desktop computer in the early 1990s, a discount storedemonstration Emerson with a Korean-made monochrome green screen and partial Word Perfect software installed for demonstration purposes, I rewrote it into an article that might be published in a magazine. It was intended for a paper magazine since the Internet was still in its very early years. When no magazine was interested, I arranged it into a format for a small self-published pamphlet and gave it to friends and interested parties.

These pamphlets assumed that most people knew the history and the context of the Kennedy Assassination first hand. They were thus short and to the point. But as I begin this expanded and intended book-length version in the year 2008, I realized that most people now living on our tiny blue planet had not even been born in 1963, forty-five years earlier.

So I added a short history of events and context at the beginning.

A QUICK LOOK AT HISTORY When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President of the United States of America in November 1960, his country had not quite emerged, mathematically or functionally, from the fifth decade of the twentieth century. Moreover, most of the people who voted to chose a president in that election were either born in the nineteenth century or not long after the turn of the century. And the president that they chose would become the first President of the United States born in the twentieth century.

Those voters had been raised and educated in a world where people still mingled with horses and horse-drawn vehicles on the streets. In the world of their childhood, paved streets were a luxury for the better sections of cities. Household water was hand-pumped from wells and outhouses were out in back. Electricity was a luxury, and most houses used oil lamps or gaslights for lighting after dark. Radios and radio stations had yet to come into existence, and news was read in newspapers.

When those voters were young, veterans of the awful Civil war that had torn the country in two and resultantly left half of it an occupied territory were still alive in large numbers. External combustion steam engines powered almost everything and internal combustion gasoline and diesel engines were novelties slowly coming into their own.

Airplanes had just been invented, and steam-powered trains were the way to travel between cities and towns. Home refrigerators were not available to most people, and fresh food was

kept cool at home in iceboxes. An iceman delivered a large block of ice to these homes several times every week, the name surviving now only in literature. Other home deliveries included a newspaper, returnable glass quart bottles of pasteurized but un-homogenized milk, and loaves of bread wrapped in waxed paper, the only practical wrapping available.

When most of those voters were young a great war had broken out in Europe that involved, for the first time in history, the whole world. It used the best technology available to massively kill the enemy and any civilians caught in it. It would end not in genuine victory but in an armistice and would be called, for much of their lives, The Great War, the War to End all Wars. And a good number of those voters had fought in that war and celebrated its ending with Armistice Day. John F. Kennedy was younger than most voters when he ran for President. He was born in 1917, in the midst of that Great War. Others in his administration or who may have played some part in his untimely death had also been born during the Great War, one notable among them being E. Howard Hunt, born October 9, 1918, just weeks before the Armistice.

The Great War would be relegated to World War One in 1939. Only two decades after it ended in that awesome armistice, another even greater and more spectacularly awful, world war broke out. As far as Americans were concerned, World War Two, the most awful and all-encompassing global war in human history broke out with a surprise attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Lax and poor quality American military leadership was responsible for the success of the surprise by the powerful and competent Japanese military. But the citizens and voters of the United States were sensitized to the idea that a surprise attack by a powerful military could seriously cripple the country's defenses and leave it vulnerable to being overpowered.

With an awful national will and sacrifice to win that war against the most cruel and unsavory dictatorships that the modern world had ever experienced, victory came not with a gentlemen's armistice but with total unconditional surrender of the thoroughly despicable and unforgivable enemy nations in 1945. That was only fifteen years before Kennedy would be elected President, and much of the world was quite literally still recovering from the warcaused physical damage. In the United States there were no physical scars, no gutted cities, no relics of mass-murder death camps to mock all civilized values. But the images had been seen on movie screens, in mass-circulation magazines, and very recently on black-and-white television screens, and the emotional scars of fear and loathing affected everyone.

As the 1940s disappeared into the 1950s, the four victors on World War Two divided into two powerfully armed camps, each fearing a potential surprise attack by the other and guarding against it. On one side there was the Communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, largely Russia but also containing recently absorbed nations of eastern Europe, and on the other the non-Communist other three victors of World War Two, Britain, France, and the United States.

Another victor of World War Two, China, had been given a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council but was in a state of civil war between the so-called

Nationalist government and the Communist government. And as the 1940s ended, that civil war took a turn for the better for the Communist armies and a turn for the worst for the Nationalist armies, and the latter fled to the island of Taiwan, recently restored to China from occupation by the defeated Japanese Empire. On most maps Taiwan was still called by its earlier name, Formosa, and the United States Navy patrolled the Straight of Formosa to frustrate the Communist armies on the mainland from totally defeating the remnant Nationalist armies on Taiwan.

With the effective collapse of Nationalist China and the absorption of much of eastern Europe into the Communist-controlled sphere of influence, new fears arose of a spreading monolithic Communist empire. On the new 1950 map, most of the land area of Eurasia was now colored red to show that new conjectural monolith. So ten years prior to Kennedy's 1960 election campaign and election, the 1950s began with a slogan for American voters to stop the spread of Communism.

Fear became acute when Communist-controlled North Korea suddenly invaded American-allied South Korea on June 25, 1950, and to American eyes the Cold war suddenly became a hot war. It was not, however, officially a war. It was called by the euphemism of a police action. This bypassed the absolute necessity spelled out in the Constitution of the United States that Congress declare all wars. As a result of this precedent, no American-involved war since World War Two has been an official war. The last war that Congress declared was in December 1941.

The unprepared American military entered this new form of undeclared war on July 5 and suffered heavy losses. From there the American military situation deteriorated until September, when American and South Korean forces held only ten percent of the Korean peninsula. But by then constant re-supplying across the Pacific had brought American and allied forces to greater strength than the North Korean forces and a counterattack ensued that nearly drove the North Korean forces entirely out of Korea. At that point the Chinese Communist armies became involved and pushed the American allied forces out of North Korea. The seesaw war up and down the Korean peninsula lasted for the first three years of the 1950s.

With some overtones that the United States could use a military leader, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the war-hero Army general who had led U.S. and allied forces to defeat Nazi Germany, was elected president in the midst of the Korean police action that was in every way a war. On July 27, 1953, fulfilling a pledge made by Eisenhower during the election, an armistice was signed and the military dividing line across the Korean peninsula was effectively where it was when the war – or officially police action—began three years earlier.

The fears generated by the growing hot and cold conflict between the Communist bloc and the non-Communist bloc, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Communist bloc, and growing ability to deliver them to American targets in a matter of extended minutes by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) led to bizarre American behavior.

Notable among other things were the execution of so-called atomic spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg on questionable evidence and hysterical anti-Communist witch-hunts by the House Un-American Activities Committee and by Senator Joseph McCarthy. The American voters of the mid-twentieth century, who had been raised, and educated, and drafted, and employed in the early twentieth century were still 1950s people when John F. Kennedy, war hero among many of World War Two and an United States Senator, began putting out feelers for his 1960 presidential campaign.

In the presidential election of November 1960 Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy beat sitting Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon by the narrowest margin in U.S. history. In the end, Mayor Richard J. Daley (not to be confused with his son Richard M. Daley, who also became mayor of Chicago) had delivered the Chicago votes. Chicago, always jokingly suspect with folklore jokes about the dead being resurrected to vote early and often, was perhaps the worst place to decide a very close election. From the far-right came bitter allegations of election fraud.

The Cold War had shown its frightening potential to become a hot war. Hot spots had grown out of World War Two in Occupied Germany and in divided Korea. Huge armies of the Communist bloc faced armies of the non-Communist bloc across borders only as wide as present Interstate highway widths. And on both sides these armies were backed by enormous nuclear bomb arsenals, enough of them that if they all detonated at once it would have probably ended human life on the whole planet. In Korea the Communist bloc and the non-Communist bloc had fought a proxy hot war up and down the Korean peninsula for several years, only to have it end in a temporary truce and a dividing line about where it had been before it began.

Defeated Germany had been divided up between the four nations that had opposed Hitler's mighty military machine and defeated it, Britain, France, the United States, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR)

In Occupied Germany the USSR had split off from the other three occupying powers and had allowed the German Democratic Republic to be established in its occupation zone and it was commonly called East Germany. The occupying western powers, Britain, France, and the United States, countered this by allowing the Federal Republic of Germany to be established in their occupation zone, and it was commonly called West Germany. But at the end of World War Two the four powers had agreed that the former capital and largest city in Germany, Berlin, should be shared between the four powers. Thus there was a western powers presence smack in the center of East Germany. And through this loophole talented Germans desperately needed to run the new country of East Germany were fleeing dictatorial controls and low pay for greater personal freedom and higher pay offered in West Germany. East Germany was hemorrhaging useful and vital citizens at an intolerable rate.

While the only "hot" war aspect of the Cold War confrontation that involved American military forces had ended in Korea six years before Kennedy was elected, two huge hair-triggered military machines faced each other across a narrow strip of land that had been established to divide them. Korea, like Germany, had effectively become two separate nations, North Korea and South Korea.

And a civil war had been fought in China between the Communist forces of the People's Republic of China and the non-Communist forces of the Republic of China. The latter had been effectively defeated on the Chinese mainland and had fled to the Chinese territorial island of Taiwan, out of reach of military forces on the Chinese mainland and protected from invasion by the United States Navy.

And there was one more established country that had become divided between a Communist bloc affiliate and a non-communist bloc affiliate, Vietnam. It had been a French colony. The French forces were defeated by the fiercely nationalist forces under Ho Chi Minh who was able to establish the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in the north, with a capital in Hanoi. The remnant colonial forces with western, and especially U.S., backing were able to establish the Republic of Vietnam in the south. And a line was arbitrarily drawn across Vietnam just north of the old imperial capital of Hue. These two opposing political and military entities became popularly known as North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

In November 1960 there was no real Vietnam War as such. The conflict had not completely materialized to become the second proxy "hot" war between the Communist bloc and the non-Communist bloc. It was still the simmering confrontation between the nationalist forces in the north and the remnant colonial forces increasingly backed by the U.S in the south. The simmering conflict was largely a guerilla war between the nationalist forces from the south and in the south, called the Viet Cong, and the former colonial politicians, business people, and military forces that had reorganized to become the Republic of Vietnam.

There was one more country that was still in the process of becoming a player in the East-West military and political confrontations, Cuba. Unlike Puerto Rico, Cuba had been granted nominal independence after the Spanish-American War. In many ways, however, it was still an American colony.

In January 1959, a year prior to Kennedy's first steps for the 1960 presidential elections, Cuban guerilla forces under the leadership of Fidel Castro had defeated the American-oriented, but unpopular and reputed Mafia-affiliated, President of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista. Americans gambling in the casinos watched as Castro's troops took over Havana and no doubt thought that it was just another of those perennial banana republic coups. They might have had good reason. Batista was an archetype banana republic dictator.

He had served as president in the 1940s and then had retreated into the background to be a major power broker. He had come to power in a military coup in 1952 and had run unopposed (or else?) in 1954 and of course had won. Batista had been instrumental in inviting Mafia-associated gambling into Cuba, had made Havana into a new Las Vegas, and had become wealthy from it. In 1959 Cuban affiliates of the overthrown Batista regime, including Batista himself, fled to Florida but Batista went on to live out his life in Spain.

Shortly this flight into Florida by Cubans would make Greater Miami the second largest Cuban city in the world, second only to Havana itself. In that way one might also regard Cuba as a country divided in two by the Cold War. The constant clamor by the exiled Cubans to return to Cuba and by leaders of expropriated businesses, including gambling casinos, to retake their Cuba, moved the Castro forces increasingly into the Communist bloc. Eventually Fidel Castro claimed to be a Communist and began receiving massive support from the Communist bloc countries, but this was not entirely the case in November 1960.

Yet even as Kennedy was preparing to take office as President of the United States, outgoing President Eisenhower, whose Vice President, Richard Nixon, had just been defeated by Kennedy, was continuing a clandestine military invasion preparation against the Castro government of Cuba. This CIA-controlled planning, training, and equipping for a military invasion of Cuba was kept hidden from the incoming Kennedy presidency people and apparently from Kennedy himself.

Kennedy would inherit a country struggling with real and imagined Cold War fears, an economy heavily burdened by Cold War spending, and nasty Cold War problems surfacing here and there to keep the fears alive and the military budget burdensome. As World War Two hero and Army general Eisenhower was about to leave office, he warned of the growing strength of the "military-industrial complex" that could undermine American democracy and freedoms.

One hot spot was the former German capital city of Berlin in Occupied Germany. In March 1949 the "People's Congress" in the USSR-occupied zone of Germany had voted to create the Soviet-styled German Democratic Republic, an independent country more commonly called East Germany. The Soviet-controlled sector of the city of Berlin was eventually made its capital. For all of the previous year the Russians had tried to isolate the city of Berlin with a land blockade. A defiant airlift into Berlin's three main airports had frustrated this blockade, and the Russians had backed down.

In May 1949 the West responded to the effective creation of the German Democratic Republic and allowed the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in the zones occupied by Britain, France, and the United States, more commonly called West Germany.

Bonn, a small town in the center of the three zones, the British, French, and American zones, became the capital of this independent country.

Ten years later, as Kennedy was about to assume the presidency of the United States, the two independent German states were permanent political fixtures and divided by an almost impenetrable militarized barbed-wire separation line. But one large loophole remained. And this was the city of Berlin. People could move with relative ease between the East-controlled and the West-controlled sectors of Berlin. It was, after all, one city. This made it possible for people in East Germany wishing to flee to more prosperous and less restrictive West Germany to do so easily. As a result, East Germany was hemorrhaging talented, educated, and skilled people necessary to keep society functioning.

The East German government could not, of course, allow this to continue. Various devices were attempted to prevent this drain but none worked. Finally, exactly seven months after Kennedy had been sworn in as President of the United States, the East German government began building a high wall all around the Western Sector of the City of Berlin with guards posted who would shoot anyone attempting to climb over it.

So as Kennedy became President in January 1961 there were a number of flash points that could turn the Cold War into a hot and possible nuclear war. There was German, and especially the Berlin problem. There was Korea, only in a state of temporary armistice between the governments of North Korea and South Korea and the Chinese and American forces backing them and facing each other across a demilitarized zone. There was the smoldering Chinese civil war with two large Chinese armies facing each other across the Straight of Taiwan, neither presumed foolish enough to attempt to launch an invasion force against the other, but with the caveat of the always unknown possible foolish military decision. And there was the smoldering civil war in Vietnam. All of these kept citizens stirred up and their elected representatives resultantly appropriating billions of dollars to Cold War military preparedness efforts and intelligence schemes, some of them very costly and very bizarre.

When Kennedy took office in January 1961 the United States had been on a permanent warfare standing for twenty solid years, from the lend-lease and early preparedness of the beginnings of World War Two through the subsequent Cold War. Moreover, for the last ten of those twenty years the United States had been on a hairtriggered nuclear missile standing. And this almost came to a head and very nearly precipitated total nuclear destruction in October 1962, after Kennedy had been in office for over a year and a half.

On October 16, 1962, Kennedy had to call together advisors for a grim task. Good reliable intelligence had shown that the USSR had been constructing possible nuclear ballistic missile installations in Castro's Cuba that could be aimed at the United States. The missiles themselves were now en route from the USSR to Cuba. A nuclear confrontation had a potential to develop as the United States moved to effect a blockade of Cuba and prevent the Russian ships from delivering their deadly devices. Top-level meetings and exchanges over newly established hot lines between Moscow and Washington, as well as diplomatic exchanges through normal channels, defused the frightful danger on a nuclear war. In a secret agreement the Russians settled for the removal of American missiles in Turkey aimed at them in exchange for the Russian ships turning back from destination Cuba and taking their deadly nuclear missile cargo back home. Cooler heads prevailed on both sides. On October 27 the Russian ships made a U-turn. Civilization was literally saved.

This was the Cold War background in which Kennedy assumed the office of President and executed its duties. But there was one more problem gnawing at the soul of the country. The racist remains of slavery were everywhere present but most obviously present in the old Deep South of the former Confederacy.

The Kennedy brothers, President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had initiated efforts to bring an end to legal and overt racial discrimination in the Deep South. As Kennedy began his presidency there were white-only and black-only public rest rooms, white-only and black-only drinking fountains, and traditions where blacks had to sit in the back sections of public buses. There were also white schools and black schools, supposedly separate but equal but in reality not so at all. And equal voting was denied by clever election legalistics like poll taxes and so-called literacy tests. Segregation was the law of the land in the states of the Deep South.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren and the Kennedy brothers, as well as small armies of very courageous people, sought to change this blot on the American nation. The charismatic personality and brilliant mind of Dr. Martin Luther King lead the ground forces of change, nonviolent marchers facing the violence of fire hoses, tear gas, police batons, vicious police dogs, and even firearms. And conservative traditionalists fought with a terrible fired-up fervor to prevent this change. Awful confrontations developed all over the country, but nowhere more plainly and bitterly than in the Deep South. So Cold War fears and race-related bitterness duped much of the citizenry into ridiculous appropriations of their time, effort, and money. And as if this were not enough as Kennedy began his presidency, into this boiling caldron came the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Three months after Kennedy took the oath of office a force of CIA-trained, paid, equipped, and transported Cubans and others landed at a place in southwestern Cuba called the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow the Castro government. Whether they further wanted to restore the old Mafia-friendly Batista regime is not known, partly because it is not clear what they might have done if they had been successful. In the heat of the cold War, the secretive powers-that-were in the U.S. government, the CIA, the military, and corporate leadership had been scared into action by an insidious drift of Castro's Cuba into the Soviet bloc. It became, in part, a self-fulfilling prophesy. The more they put pressure on Castro and Cuba, the more it forced Castro and Cuba into getting support from the Soviet bloc.

Kennedy was not immediately informed of the invasion plans. When he was, it was probably too late to back out. On April 15, 1961, some World War Two vintage bombers that probably should have been in museums bombed Cuban airfields in preparation for the invasion. They failed to damage most of the Cuban Air Force, but it probably tipped their hand as to their invasion intentions. When the small CIA army landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, the Cubans were there and fully prepared for them. A battle raged for three days.

The invasion force urged President Kennedy to authorize modern U.S. Air Force air cover support. He refused, citing dangerous precedents and the potential for worldwide protest, and especially Latin American protest, over the use of the legitimate U.S. military to invade a foreign country without provocation.

In the invasion force was one E. Howard Hunt, a high-ranking member of the Central Intelligence Agency. This was the same E. Howard Hunt who was, eleven years later, arrested as a result of the Watergate break-in of the Democratic Party offices on June 17, 1972, by Republican Party operatives during the Nixon presidency.

Hunt was one of many CIA officers who had been absorbed into the CIA from its predecessor, the OSS, the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Like all of them, he had developed his attitudes and skills as a hot warrior in a terrible and desperate hot war where successful dirty tricks won praise and rank, no matter how deadly. The new Cold War required more politically astute operations and less macho bravado. The Bay of Pigs Invasion seems closer to the old school than the new realities, and it may have failed for those reasons.

Hunt was captured when the invasion failed and he was held prisoner in Cuba until Kennedy found enough wealthy contributors to pay an effective ransom for their release.

He and others apparently felt that if only Kennedy had provided the U.S. Air Force air cover for the invasion, damned be the political consequences, it would have been successful. This seems unlikely, but there is no way to know. Kennedy refused it. A disproportionate amount of bitterness sprang from that refusal.

BACKGROUND TO THE MURDER OF A PRESIDENT In 2003, forty years after the murder of President Kennedy, surveys found that most people did not agree with the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report that Lee

Oswald acted alone in murdering the president. Ten years earlier the public felt the same way. A media blitz came in response to the economic success of Oliver Stone's film "JFK." Like the sleaziest used car salesman, media moguls sought to cash in on it. But much of the blitz seems to have been an attempt to counter widespread, and definitely accurate, belief that government agencies had large parts in covering up the assassination, and an increasing widespread apprehension that employees of certain US government agencies may have actually taken part in the murder.

The following is only a sketch of a hypothesis. It is largely in note form. Anyone who might have the energy and resources to fill it out into material that would be more readable and interesting should feel free to do so. But since this particular hypothesis has not yet been put forth and really should be, here it is in its "notes" form. I begin with a source list for most of the material that I used.

OVERVIEW OF GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENTS AND THE PARANOIA OF THE COLD-WAR ERA These were not isolated trivial experiments by graduate students. These were wellfunded experiments on a vast scale that reached across international borders and touched and destroyed many lives .

From Father, Son and CIA, by Harvey Weinstein, published by Formac Publishing Co, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 1988: The history of officially sanctioned mind-control experimentation in the U.S. began in 1950, when the Director of Central Intelligence approved the establishment of a project, codenamed Bluebird. Its objectives were as follows: •To discover means of conditioning personnel to prevent unauthorized extraction of information from them by known means •To investigate the possibility of control of an individual by application of special interrogation techniques •To study memory enhancement •To establish defensive means for preventing hostile control of Agency personnel Subsequently, a fifth objective was added: •To evaluate offensive uses of unconventional interrogation techniques, including hypnosis and drugs.

In 1951, the CIA decided to coordinate efforts with the army, navy and air force, and Project Artichoke was born. A 1952 memorandum describes its mission as follows: •Evaluation and development of any method by which we can get information from a person against his will and without his knowledge.

• •How can we counter the above measures if they are used against us?

•Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature such as self-preservation?

•How could we counter such measures if they are used against us?

Not all of these CIA and DOD experiments were done in the United States. There was, for instance, a psychiatrist, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University (often called the Harvard of Canada) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, who had the gall to use his own patients in some of these experiments. He gained enough notice from some of these to be elected president of the World Psychiatric Association in 1953.

He seems to have entered the CIA mind-control experimental scene around 1951 with the CIA's Project ARTICHOKE. In his book Manchurian Candidate John Marks says it was so named because some of its interest revolved around the creation of a vegetable, a human vegetable. Cameron progressed into such areas as "depatterning," rather selfexplanatory, and "psychic driving," where tapes of repetitive material would be played to subjects for days on end without breaks, to sensory deprivation, where subjects would be confined to a specially constructed "box" for sometimes more than a month. He then progressed to experiments involving LSD, and then to severe electroshock experiments that wiped minds clean and left patients unable to function normally for the rest of their lives.

McGill University eventually had to deal with multiple lawsuits over these. Dr. Cameron did not. Death came to him early, like it did to many who might have had some insider knowledge of the Kennedy assassination or secret illegal experiments on humans. He died in 1967 at the age of sixty-six while mountain climbing in the Canadian Rockies, four years after the Kennedy assassination.

It should be of some slight interest here that Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unibomber of the mid-1970s through the early 1990s, apparently had been a subject in the CIA's MK/ULTRA and related experiments. Around the year 1960 he volunteered to be an experimental subject for a Harvard researcher, Dr. Henry Murray, a former OSS official. The OSS, Office of Strategic Services during World War II, became the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, after World War II ended and the Cold War began. Among other things, Ted Kaczynski was apparently given several experimental mind-altering drugs similar to LSD and LSD itself.

What effect this may have had on his mind later on when he injured twenty-three people and killed three people with his bombs in his one-man war against technology is an open question. He was caught and sentenced to life in prison in May 1998. What the Unabomber episode may show, however, is the extent of the tragedy caused by these secret Cold War mind-control experiments largely done by the CIA. Not all of these experiments were CIA-related, and not all were drug-related. In the frenzied hysteria of the Cold War, some so-called researchers and their sponsors seem to have viewed the entire population of the planet as a pool of experimental subjects—that is, except for themselves. The Department of Defense had widespread experiments that used unknowing human subjects to test the effects of radiation. Some of the rational seems to have been to find out the effects of radiation on soldiers on the nuclear battlefield. Among other things, the radioactive element plutonium was injected into unknowing sick and dying

patients. When someone finally blew the whistle on these secret experiments, way too late for the people who suffered and died from them, Energy Department Secretary Hazel O'Leary, with the blessings of President Clinton, released all the data under her control to the public.

A program at the University of Cincinnati by Dr. Eugene Saenger that ran from 1960 to 1972 and was funded by the Department of Defense may offer some insight. In 1971 the Washington Post exposed his nefarious experiments that irradiated "mentally enfeebled" patients, all of them poor, most of them black, with doses known to be harmful. Dr. Saenger simply lived with the notoriety from this and died of old age in October 2007. Others who exposed wrongdoing by the Department of Energy or its predecessor the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) did not live to old age. There was Karen Silkwood, whose mysterious death in a one-car accident inspired a major motion picture and is thus well known, and there was the less known death of Dr. Dorothy Legarreta, co-founder of the National Association of Radiation Survivors (NARS) who died in a mysterious one-car accident. The aluminum briefcase that she always had with her because it contained evidence of massive wrongdoing disappeared from the accident scene. When a deputy was asked about it, he said that it had been too badly damaged and thrown away, which, of course, was a criminal act in itself, but never investigated.

Cincinnati was not the only location where ill patients were injected with radioactive and chemically deadly plutonium. It was done in hospitals in Rochester, Oak Ridge, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Alamos.

It appears that subjects for many of these experiments were subjects of convenience, patients. There were Dr. Cameron's own psychiatric patients. There were local students, as with Harvard math student Ted Kaczynski for Harvard researcher Dr. Henry Murray. And there were the "mentally enfeebled" poor patients used by Dr. Saenger in the University of Cincinnati radiation experiments.

But in at least one instance these CIA and DOD experiments used one of their own, a DOD employee and CIA affiliate named Frank Olsen. As part of an experiment to see what might happen if an unknowing subject took LSD, a meeting was held at an isolated former boy scout camp in the woods in western Maryland in a log lodge called the Deep Creek Lodge.

Here is a quote from The Search for the Manchurian Candidate; the CIA and Mind Control, by John Marks, Times Books, New York, c 1979. John Marks is a former CIA employee and co-author of The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence.

"Olson attended all the sessions and apparently did everything expected of him during the first two days at the lodge. After dinner on Thursday, November 19, 1953—the same day that a Washington Post editorial decried the use of dogs in chemical experiments—Olson shared a drink of Cointreau with all but two of the men present. (One had a heart condition; the other, a reformed alcoholic, did not drink.) Unbeknownst to the SOD men, Sid Gottlieb (a CIA executive in charge of these experiments) had decided to spike the liqueur with LSD.[4] "

Reference 4, from the Notes section of Marks' book reads: "4. Gottlieb stated just after Olson's death, at a time when he was trying to minimize his own culpability, that he had talked to the SOD (Special Operations Division, an Army chemical warfare developer unit) men about LSD and that they had agreed in general terms to the desirability of unwitting testing. Two of the SOD group in interviews and a third in congressional testimony flatly deny the Gottlieb version. Gottlieb and the SOD men all agree Gottlieb gave no advance warning that he was giving them a drug in their liqueur."

Less than a month after drinking the concoction, Frank Olsen, apparently believing that he was going crazy, leapt to his death from the thirteenth floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City. More than two decades later, and after much adverse publicity for the US Government and its CIA and resulting public outcry, Congress passed a special bill that awarded $750,000 to Mrs. Olsen and their three children to bring some closure to the incident.

The family of Harold Blauer, who was one of the top twenty championship tennis professionals in the United States before he was killed, also eventually reached a settlement decades later, but not so lucrative.

In 1979, Freedom, a newspaper of the Church of Scientology and handed out free at street corners by church members and associates published "The Murder of Harold Blauer."

It meticulously covered how forty-one year old Harold Blauer was admitted as a patient to the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan three weeks before Christmas 1952 and subsequently killed at the hands of CIA-sponsored psychiatrists on January 8, 1953. It during a series of military and CIA drug experiments on him, without his knowledge or permission, where he was injected with experimental substances identified only by code names EA 1297, EA 1298, EA 1316. These injections were not for any therapeutic purposes.

Blauer was injected with EA 1297 at 9:53 a.m, January 8, and it brought on his death at 12:30 p.m., January 8, 1953, while experimental personnel under the direction of Dr. Amadeo S. Marrazzi observed and took notes of the dying Blauer. The drug has since been identified as methyl-diamphetamine (MDA), a derivative of mescaline. Blauer was administered a highly toxic dose. Marrazzi was eventually charged with murder but was represented by top-notch CIA-associated lawyers and acquitted in a cloud of legal definitions and technicalities. Blauer's widow seems to have won a 1987 court decision awarding the Blauer estate a $707,044 settlement, decades after he was killed.

Strange and certainly not without a certain amount of levity was the San Francisco, California, brothel operated by the CIA under the direction of George Hunter White for an experimental program was termed Operation Midnight Climax. White had been an Army captain and OSS officer during World War Two. He later became a colonel in the California Highway Patrol and people affectionately called him Colonel White. In the early 1950s, he rented a house at 225 Chestnut Street in a residential San Francisco neighborhood under the name Morgan Hall and set up a brothel in it to explore the effects of LSD on behavior for the CIA. For several years he dosed unknowing brothel-using subjects, who had been

recruited, unwittingly, from San Francisco bars and nightclubs, with LSD. From behind a two-way mirror he observed and noted their behavior. When White died in 1975 at the age of 69, he willed his papers to Foothill college in the San Francisco suburb of Mountain View. There they almost immediately became public, caused an uproarious uproar, and led to a bronze historical plaque being affixed to one of the houses that had been used as a "CIA whorehouse."

In January 1990 a sixty-four-year-old former career model named Jessica Arlene Wilcox died of cancer in New York City. In her modeling and business career she had used the name Candy Jones. She was an intelligent and resourceful woman who had been a successful author and had owned and operated a modeling school for twenty years. But her real claim to fame was as a nonfiction character in a book, The Control of Candy Jones, by Donald Bain, first published in 1974. It was republished by Playboy Press in 1977 after the CIA's MK/ULTRA programs had been revealed to the public. In 1960, as a result of a need to treat mood swings, her second husband, John Nebel, used hypnosis on her. It was during these sessions that Nebel became aware that Candy Jones had been a subject in government mind-control experiments. The hypnosis sessions revealed a hypnotically created alternate personality called Arlene. And this person had been used for nefarious intelligence-related activities. She was also used in CIA demonstrations of how effective their hypnotic techniques were. Nebel is reported to have been careful not to plant any ideas in Jones' mind. If this is yet another instance of an unknowing CIA mind-control subject it might make one wonder just how many there were and what they may have been made to do, or at least made to demonstrate in closed CIA sessions.

And there were more experiments using military personnel as subjects. And at least one may have involved CIA-connected researchers and Civil Air Patrol cadets. Specifically it may have involved Civil Air Patrol officer and unit commandant David William Ferrie who was a professional hypnotist, sometimes characterized himself as a "doctor," and had a professional hypnotic therapy office, and a Civil Air Patrol cadet named Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Civil Air Patrol had been officially founded six days prior to the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Its original main mission was to locate German submarines in coastal waters near the United States. When the U.S. Air Force was assembled from the U.S. Army Air Corps and given equal service status in the new US Department of Defense in September 1947, the Civil Air Patrol became an official auxiliary, a virtual volunteer civilian arm of the U.S. Air Force. Members were mostly private plane pilots who obtained free fuel and Air Force perks for the volunteer work in search and rescue and patrolling.

It had a cadet corps of high school age boys, and occasional girls, that largely served as a pre-training program for the military. It funneled recruits toward the U.S. Air Force, a competitor with the other four services, the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard for young healthy capable warm bodies.

Cadets were drawn from a wide cross section. Some were noticeably bright and capable young men and women who expected to go to college and get officer commissions

through the Reserve Officer Training Program (ROTC). Some wanted a chance to fly in light planes, or any planes at all. Some wanted the companionship of other young people.

Some liked the prestige of wearing a military uniform some years prior to being old enough to actually join a military service. And some were just drifting around looking for some structure in their sometimes chaotic lives.

Cadets were paid nothing and had to purchase their own Air Force-style uniforms, usually from Army-Navy stores that were still common after the end of World War Two. This had an effect of restricting membership to those who could afford to buy uniforms and other military-related materials. In the 1950s this excluded most blacks, and the Civil Air Patrol Cadet program was almost one hundred percent white with prevailing attitudes of the 1950s.

Because the Civil Air Patrol was (and is) an official arm of the United States Air Force, some low level security check was done on all applicants to the Civil Air Patrol Cadet Program. After that, the cadet was given an official Civil Air Patrol Cadet six-digit serial number. One might imagine that in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the nucleararmed U.S. Air Force kept some tabs on these Civil Air Patrol members and their Civil Air Patrol Cadets. Through their ID serial numbers and their uniforms virtually identical to US Air Force uniforms, CAP Cadets and CAP volunteers had access to Air Force bases, facilities, and personnel.

In the mid-1950s, the New Orleans-based Civil Air Patrol units would have been seen as important to national defense. They would have patrolled a large swatch of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico that could have included not only Louisiana, but part of Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama. It would seem reasonable to assume that the volunteer members and cadets in the New Orleans area might have been carefully scrutinized as a result. In the mid-1950s David William Ferrie was a commandant of a Civil Air Patrol unit in the New Orleans area and was associated with another one in the New Orleans area. This Cleveland-born assassination figure and light plane owner had arrived in New Orleans after being commandant of the Cleveland Fifth Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol in Ohio.

Interestingly, another Civil Air Patrol and US Air Force officer named James Ronald Lewallen had also come to the new Orleans area from this same Cleveland squadron. He was associated with David Ferrie in New Orleans in that he was one of three other Eastern Airlines pilots who shared an apartment with David Ferrie there. There were two. One was stationed at the Moisant Airport. The other was stationed at Lakefront Airport.

Lee Harvey Oswald joined the Civil Air Patrol Cadet program at Moisant Airport in the summer of 1955. He moved to the Lakefront Airport Civil Air Patrol Cadet program about a months later. He was given an official Civil Air Patrol Cadet serial number through the U.S. Air Force, serial number 084965, although it was probably formally written 084965. Because both Oswald and Ferrie were in these units, several fellow Civil Air Patrol Cadets who served with Oswald at one or the other of the two New Orleans Civil Air Patrol units gave testimony. Cadet Edward Voebel, who died mysteriously in 1971 at the age of thirty-one, Cadet Colin Hamer, Cadet Fred O'Sullivan, and Cadet Anthony Atzenhofer, and some others, all remembered Cadet Oswald well enough to talk to investigators about him.

These investigators were either from the FBI, the Warren Commission, the Garrison inquiry, or the later "Oliver Stone" investigation that grew out of Stone's massively successful documentary movie JFK. Former cadet O'Sullivan told an investigator that David Ferrie demonstrated hypnotizing someone at a Civil Air Patrol meeting. Former cadet Atzenhofer, a CAP platoon sergeant in the Moisant Airport unit, gave an even more telling account. He said that Ferrie had tried to recruit his cadets for a medical experiment and that Oswald was in his unit at that time. Following the disastrous Garrison investigation a photograph surfaced that showed both David William Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald together at a small Civil Air Patrol gathering of about a half dozen. Clearly Ferrie and Oswald knew of one another. It the height of Garrison's investigation in February 1967, his star witness, David William Ferrie, died mysteriously. This undermined the entire case. On February 19, Ferrie, who had been in Dallas, Texas, on the day Kennedy was shot, November 22, 1963, had told some reporters that Garrison "apparently had me pegged as get-away pilot for the assassins."

Three days later he was found dead under mysterious circumstances.

But that case was not about the possibility that Oswald might have been a subject in CIA programs to create an unknowing hypnotically programmed assassin as in the Manchurian Candidate or at least a patsy for an assassination. It revolved around other accusations and theories.

Oswald's Civil Air Patrol experiences and connections, however, could – indeed should – lead one to wonder whether Oswald had, like Ted Kaczynski, volunteered for what he, as a fifteen-year-old kid, thought would be a small harmless supervised-and-safe medical experiment and had become entrapped in something beyond most people's wildest imaginations. Or whether, alternatively, he had become an unknowing subject in vicious Cold War CIA experiments that piled up data on his hot-buttons and manipulability so that those in the know might use him for nefarious purposes when the time came.

The reader may want to look further into the Ewen Cameron experiments for the CIA at McGill University in Montreal in Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control,

by Harvey M. Weinstein, MD (now Director of the Cowell Student Health Center, Stanford University), American Psychiatric Press, Washington DC & London, 1990.

There is interesting related reading in The Assassination Tapes; an Electronic Probe Into the Murder of John F. Kennedy and the Dallas Coverup, by George J. A. O'Toole, Penthouse Press, New York, 1975.

OSWALD AS "MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" (revised from second draft text of 1993) Introductory Note I wrote the 1979 draft before modern PCs with word-processor programs were developed. I rewrote it into the 1993 draft before the Internet came into full bloom. In this

2008 draft I am using a personal computer with a modern word-processing program and accessing the Internet's search engines for additional details, some of which are surprising even to me. With such amazing instruments as Wikipedia I have been able to fill in details and make this piece more interesting.

This essay is not entirely intended to demonstrate a theory that Lee Harvey Oswald may have been a CIA-programmed assassin. It is partly to leave an impression on the reader of a potential for secret government projects going so terribly wrong that they literally destroy democracy. Secrecy is the antithesis of democracy. While some secrecy is necessary to protect democracy, secrecy nurtures fear and fear calls for more secrecy. In no time at all secrecy gets completely out of control and its former protection becomes the destruction of democracy and even the destruction of civilized values.

Democracy utilizes honest citizen input. When manipulation alters it—from advertising to pressure groups and lobbies—the governed are removed by degrees from deciding the makeup and policies of their government. The result is government working poorly for the governed and increasingly working only for itself.

When government agencies themselves manipulate voters, we have, at very least, a paradox. That paradox must eventually lead to stalemate, stagnation, resulting unrest, and a downward spiral of increasingly hysterical efforts at manipulation by government. It is a formula for the destruction of democracy.

The election scams of 2000, and the subsequent use of electronic voting machines easily susceptible to tampering, have maximized voter distrust in the system. Recent publicized efforts by the Republican Party to target voting blocks and then minimize voter turn-out in them (and thus minimize voter input) should be a warning that our democracy is in deep trouble. Taking that only a tiny step further with modern psychological techniques spells an end to democracy.

Here, in this essay, is a suggestion—and not in any way a case or a proof—that one of our elected leaders lost his life, and therefore his elected office, as a result of a CIAmilitary project to use psychological techniques to create an assassin. This is not to say the CIA itself did the dirty deed, but to illustrate how tax-funded CIA research may have gone terribly out of control and could conceivably have been an influence in this undemocratic removal-by-murder of an elected president from office.

Even if this shaky hypothesis turns out not to hold water, it points out a particularly dangerous direction of secret psychological experimentation on human beings by the apparatus of national security. Like earlier warnings about ill considered experiments in physical sciences in the nuclear age, that potential should be taken seriously.

CIA and FBI cover-ups in the Kennedy assassination investigations are now well known. Many feel that these were due to bureaucratic incompetence, honest regard to national security, and exchanges of finger pointing. The CIA had been involved in the now known plots with the Mafia to assassinate Castro. The FBI not only had Hoover's possible

sexual blackmail but massive illegal political spying on American citizens. None of it would have served the country well in the aftermath of the president's murder.

But I present another more sinister possibility here—a possibility that not only suggests a deliberate criminal cover-up but extrapolates a new threat to our always fragile American democracy.

OSWALD AS "MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" A SORDID SORT-IT-OUT Entangled in the powerful suggestions of conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy are: elements of organized crime, members of the intelligence community, contractors with the intelligence community, upper-echelon Republican Party magnates, well-funded right-wing extremists, and Cuban anti-Castro groups. (Some of the same actors and some of the same questions also turn up in the Watergate fiasco and coverup. And some turned up even later in the "October Surprise" conspiracy to continue the detention of US Embassy personnel in Teheran to affect the US presidential election, and following that, the "Iran-Contra Conspiracy" setting up a secret government in the White House basement.) A thin thread running through the bizarre complexities of the Kennedy assassination is the CIA, most notably, the CIA "mind-control" experiments of the 1950's and 1960's.

In his book The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate"; The CIA and Mind Control, former CIA executive John Marks retrieved enough of a smattering of overlooked financial records to reconstruct and outline of some of these experiments.

What happened to the bulk of the documentation? Within days of the Watergate break-in, CIA director Richard Helms personally supervised the destruction of what he believed were all documents relating to the CIA "mind-control" experiments. The timing of the destruction of these documents would be strange enough, but the personal involvement of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency cries out for explanation.

From what remained, Marks painted a tragic and frightening story of a US government agency so consumed in Cold War paranoia that it licensed a gang of yahoos with advanced academic degrees to destroy innocent and unsuspecting people's minds. It drove some of them insane, and even literally killed unsuspecting people in pseudoscientific experiments performed in the name of national security.

A CIA inclination for subjecting double agents, defectors, and helpless incarcerated persons—mental patients and prison inmates—to dangerous and possibly even terminal experiments permeates the book. But the CIA also subjected its own employees—most of the time without their direct knowing consent—to these experiments.

Marks chronicles the LSD-related death as the direct result of a CIA experiment of Dr. Frank Olsen, a CIA employee, but his account overlooks an even more sinister CIA experiment with psychedelic drugs that deliberately killed ranking amateur tennis player Harold Blauer in January 1954. A detailed account of this murder, "The Killing of Harold Blauer," appeared in the Scientology Church magazine Freedom, in late 1979.

Both Blauer's and Olsen's widows eventually received compensation for their husbands' wrongful deaths at the hands of CIA and military experimenters, but only after massive obfuscation efforts by the CIA and after the CIA sent in their best high-priced lawyers to fight it tooth and nail. Marks' book would appear to have may have hit the bookstores just prior to the Freedom article on the CIA killing of Harold Blauer, but it notes enough potential similar cases to horrify readers.

Marks does more than horrify readers. He presents a reasonably thorough history of the CIA mind-control experiments, beginning with a project named BLUEBIRD, which, among other things, used a couple dozen North Korean prisoners of war in its experiments.

BLUEBIRD was organized in 1950 by Morse Allen, who previously gained dubious fame for putting together dossiers on "Communists" when he worked for the U.S. Civil Service Commission. Morse Allen was instrumental in setting up BLUEBIRD in Japan.

In 1951, BLUEBIRD was renamed ARTICHOKE. The CIA's ARTICHOKE superseded and absorbed the Office of Naval Intelligence's similar program called CHATTER. Included in the experimental mission was the construction of a small a gas chamber at a yet undisclosed location in the United States where various psychoactive gases were tested on human subjects.

An article in the January 1980 High Times by Martin A. Lee notes that an ARTICHOKE document dated April 11, 1952, refers explicitly to the use of gas chambers in oxygen deprivation studies. According to the report, oxygen deprivation "affects the higher brain centers, resembling alcoholic inebriation. Some subjects become exhilarated, talkative, or quarrelsome, with emotional outbursts or fixed ideas. Some complain of headache or numbness. Voluntary coordination and attention are impaired ... burns and bruises are not noticed."

On April 13, 1952, another set of mind-control experiments using psychedelic drugs, including LSD, then called MK/DELTA, was renamed MK/ULTRA (and again renamed MK/SEARCH shortly after the Kennedy assassination) in a bureaucratic reorganization within the CIA. A year later the CIA was receiving the total world production of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. The nefarious spooks were so worried about worried about their monopoly on LSD that when a rumor surfaced that Sandoz might sell 22 pounds (a hundred million doses) of LSD to someone else, the CIA sent top Agency people to Sandoz to make sure they did not.

A year later, in 1954, ARTICHOKE experimenters discussed using an unsuspecting subject in a hypnosis experiment designed to create an unsuspecting assassin. As Marks puts it, "The Agency plan was to hypnotize him and program him into making an assassination attempt. He would be arrested at the least for attempted murder and `thereby disposed of' (page 184 -- the quoted phrase apparently from an involved CIA official)." That particular plan was apparently not put into operation, but it illustrates the thinking.

That was what the CIA was doing. What was Lee Harvey Oswald doing? Well, most of that time he was simply growing up in a working single-parent household. Here is a brief biographical look from the British site Sparticus Educational, a part of Schoolnet.

"Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans on 18th October, 1939. His father, Robert Oswald, died two months before his son was born. At the age of three his mother, Marguerite Oswald, sent him to live in the Bethleham Children's Home.

"Oswald went to live with his mother in Benbrook, Texas when she married Edwin Ekdahl.

The marriage did not last and Marguerite Oswald took her three sons to a new home in Fort Worth. The two elder brothers, John and Robert, found work and in 1952 Marguerite and Lee moved to New York. Although considered an intelligent boy, Lee Harvey Oswald's behaviour at school deteriorated. He was sent to a detention centre and underwent psychiatric treatment.

"In 1955 Oswald joined the Civil Air patrol where he served under David Ferrie. The following year Oswald became interested in politics. He read books written by Karl Marx and told friends that he was a Marxist. He also joined the Young People's Socialist League.

He later told a friend that his involvement in politics dated back to reading a pamphlet about the execution of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg.

"Oswald left school at sixteen and the following year joined the U.S. Marines."

Two things stand out in this brief biographical outline from Sparticus Educational. One is that Oswald had less than a normal family and social framework while growing up. The other is that he was, to utilize the clichĂŠ, a "disturbed child" who eventually required psychiatric treatment. Given the use of psychiatric patients, one might wonder In 1955 Oswald joined the Civil air Patrol and became Civil Air Patrol Cadet Lee Harvey Oswald, serial number 08-4965. At least one group Civil Air Patrol photograph shows another major Kennedy assassination figure, then Civil Air Patrol captain and prior Civil Air Patrol squadron commandant David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald in the same picture. It would seem they more than just casually met each other. New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison opened his investigation of Ferrie partly on the basis of this Civil Air Patrol connection.

As Wikipedia notes, "Ferrie was born in Cleveland, Ohio (on March 28, 1918). A Roman Catholic, Ferrie attended St. Ignatius High School , John Carroll University, St. Mary Seminary, where he studied for the priesthood, and Baldwin-Wallace College. He next spent three years at the St. Charles Seminary in Carthagena, Ohio."

Wikipedia follows Ferrie's Civil Air Patrol association with this. "Ferrie was involved with the Civil Air Patrol in several ways: He started as a "senior" with the Fifth Cleveland Squadron at Hopkins Airport in 1947. The Squadron Commander tried unsuccessfully to bounce him in 1949. When he moved to New Orleans, he "transferred" to the New Orleans Cadet Squadron at Lakefront Airport, first as instructor and later as Commander. After a

Ferrie-trained cadet pilot perished in a December 1954 crash, Ferrie's annual re-appointment was declined. He was asked to be a guest lecturer at the smaller squadron at Moisant Airport, and he did so, lecturing from June to September 1955. On July 27, 1955, 15-yearold Lee Harvey Oswald joined this squadron. In March 1958, a former cadet-turnedcommander invited Ferrie back to the New Orleans Cadet Squadron. He served unofficially for a time and was reinstated as Executive Officer in September 1959. Ferrie quit the squadron in a huff in June 1960 after a disagreement during a bivouac. In September 1960, he started his own unofficial squadron, called the Metairie Falcon Cadet Squadron. An offshoot of this group was the Internal Mobile Security Unit, a group formed for the fight against Castro's Cuba."

Wikipedia goes on to quickly link Ferrie with a CIA-connected anti-Castro group in New Orleans, with former FBI agent Guy Bannister there, link Ferrie with Mafiosi Carlos Marcello, head of the Cuban Mafia prior to Castro's overthrow of the Batista regime. And then it notes how Bannister and one Jack Martin got in a fight over a file in Bannister's New Orleans office on November 22, 1963, hospitalizing Martin.

Martin had no small tale to tell. He told reporters and investigators that Ferrie had been involved in the assassination, that Ferrie had known Oswald since the Civil Air Patrol, and had given Oswald lessons on shooting a rifle with a telescopic sight.

To borrow one more paragraph from Wikipedia: "On November 25, Martin was contacted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He told them that he thought Ferrie had hypnotized Oswald into assassinating Kennedy. The FBI considered Martin's evidence unreliable. Nevertheless, they interviewed Ferrie twice and interviewed about 20 other people in connection with the allegations. They were unable to develop a substantial case against Ferrie."

Whatever the CAP connection between Ferrie and Oswald may have been, there are several interesting considerations that should be taken into account. Not only is there a possibility that Ferrie and Oswald knew each other, but there is the inadequately investigated fact that Oswald had been a Civil Air Patrol cadet. The Civil Air Patrol was then, and continues to be, an auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force. Civil Air Patrol personnel had intriguing access to U.S. Air Force facilities, equipment, and personnel. As a result, those who needed to be in the know about Civil Air Patrol personnel would have been in the know.

It is possible that very young, and to use another clichĂŠ, "mixed-up" Oswald, a boy whose single-parent family lived on the edge of poverty, was chosen precisely because he lacked connections to any power source that might later prove troubling. This would have made him a desirable subject in military-CIA "mind-control" experiments, known now to have been in progress when he was a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol.

A background check was made of each applicant in this time of McCarthyism and high Cold War paranoia. It took months to get a Civil Air Patrol identification card with its quasi-military serial number, but such a card was necessary due to Civil Air Patrol access to

U.S. Air Force bases, facilities, and material for training. Such a background check created a usable military file, including peripheral personality assessments.

There is something even more troubling about the apparent Oswald-Ferrie-CAP connection a decade prior to the Kennedy assassination in Dallas.

At the time of the assassination, the New Orleans City Directory listed Ferrie as a "psychiatrist," a term that generally requires a medical or osteopathic degree even though Ferrie had no formal training or degree in the field. What Ferrie actually had done was to set up a private practice as a hypnotist, a hypno-therapist.

An anonymous CIA agent who had been assigned to Oswald is reported to have been convinced that Ferrie had hypnotised Oswald to kill Kennedy in a hypnotic trance. If some may doubt it, it still calls into additional question the coincidence of a hypnotist who apparently knew of Oswald, and therefore to know of Oswald's hypnotic susceptibility, for years prior to the Kennedy assassination. In the same year that Ferrie and Oswald are pictured together at a Civil Air Patrol function, the CIA began its research to create a "Manchurian Candidate" who would assassinate under the influence of hypnotic suggestion.

One can only wonder.

Garrison's Kennedy assassination investigation of David Ferrie—now famous as a result of Oliver Stone's film in which the late Jim Garrison can be seen in a cameo playing the part of Earl Warren—centered on Ferrie's skills as a pilot. Ferrie had been a CIA contract pilot flying missions over and in and out of Cuba, a U-2 pilot, a fired Eastern Airlines pilot, and the pilot of a plane that flew out of Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

On that fatal day, Ferrie had spent much of the day waiting at a telephone booth in a metropolitan Dallas ice skating rink—and left after a single call to that phone booth. When Oswald was arrested he had on him a current New Orleans library card made out to David Ferrie.

Garrison's investigation never got as far as inquiring into or testing Ferrie's skills as a hypnotist. In the middle of the investigation this star witness became another of the many mysterious deaths associated with the Kennedy assassination. Before the district attorney could even finish questioning him, David Ferrie died under strange circumstances of a brain hemorrhage.

In 1956, four years before President Kennedy was elected and three years before he was murdered, two CIA researchers, Harold Wolfe and Lawrence Hinkle, completed a study into brainwashing methods for then CIA Director Allen Dulles.

Also in 1956, Oswald began making inquiries into left wing organizations such as the Young Peoples Socialist League. It is difficult to see how this would not have been noted. It was recently revealed that the government had "mail covers" on all of these organizations. Moreover, one might wonder why Oswald began making these inquiries. Was it part of building a new identity, possibly under post-hypnotic suggestion? Someone who could be termed a "Socialist" or a "Communist" would, after all, make a much better assassin or patsy for an assassination for a group of vicious murderous right-wingers than just some troubled kid.

In those pre-computer days cross-referencing would have been a laborious task.

While a Civil Air Patrol military file for Oswald was by then in existence, it is unlikely that anything red-flagged it—unless Oswald had, as a psychological warfare subject, been included in a much more sensitive and secret national security file.

Oswald joined the U.S. Marine Corps on October 24, 1956, at the age of seventeen.

After an almost three-month delay, he was sent to boot camp at Camp Pendleton, California, on January 20, 1957. After finishing several months basic military training there, he was sent to the U.S. Naval Technical Training Center, Jacksonville, Florida, to learn the latest functional military radar techniques. On May 3, 1957, he was routinely graduated, made an "Aviation Electronics Operator" (MOS 6740), and given a "confidential" security clearance.

Back at the CIA in 1957, researcher Alden Sears, doing his work at the University of Denver, complained that his hypnosis experiments could not be further developed in the restrictions of the university atmosphere. He wanted more serious experiments to ascertain whether a "Manchurian Candidate" subject could be made to kill, forget (presumably a killing), and otherwise be manipulable. Sears also wanted to perform other hypnotic experiments to aid CIA spy activities.

Known or unknown to Sears—one has to wonder—on September 12, 1957, Oswald's brief journey through life brought him to Yokusuka U.S. Navy Base just south of Tokyo, Japan, after fourteen days at sea that it took to cross the Pacific Ocean. He was quickly assigned to high national security radar duty in Marine Air Control Squadron One at Atsugi U.S. Naval Air Station in southwest suburban Tokyo, where unidentified radar blips were reported to Iwakuni Air Base for immediate tactical air response.

Atsugi was also Asian headquarters for top secret CIA surveillance overflights of the USSR, China, and other Asian areas by U-2 spy planes. This would have been a reasonable place for all varieties of CIA personnel, possibly including those involved in psychological experiments. Oswald's barracks were barely a football field length from the then top secret U-2 spy plane hangers, and Oswald, of course, would have seen their strange activities on his radar screen. It is very difficult to imagine a bright young Marine not asking at least a few bewildered questions about the strange sleek aircraft and the odd character of their flights on the radar screens.

Oswald celebrated his eighteenth birthday at Atsugi on October 18, 1957. One might wonder why a seventeen-year-old had been assigned to such sensitive and important military duty adjacent to such a top-secret intelligence operation. It is in this time period that very young Lee Harvey Oswald was seen several times with a sleek and expensive-looking Eurasian woman at the Queen Bee entertainment emporium in the heart of the Ginza, the downtown Tokyo department store shopping and entertainment area. The Ginza was thirtyfive miles from Atsugi, over an hour-and-a-half ride by commuter train in those days. The Queen Bee was an up-scale bar and prostitution pick-up place catering to well paid American military officers A "date" there would have cost $60 to $100, and Oswald made less than $85 a month Marine take-home pay.

The Queen Bee was definitely not, that is to say, one of the numerous sleazy joints frequented by U.S. military service people near the Atsugi base and the adjacent U.S. Army Camp Zama base complexes. Oswald's reported presence at the Queen Bee in the distant Ginza of downtown Tokyo has always raised questions.

Speculation about the "Eurasian" woman has ranged from prostitute to Russian spy.

Recently released KGB reports from the now defunct USSR on Oswald fail to show any contact with him in Japan, "Eurasian," or otherwise. In fact, the Soviet intelligence services seem not to have known anything about Oswald when he later arrived in the USSR. f she was not a "Russian spy" or a prostitute, the "Eurasian" woman may well have been a CIA "operator" or at least somehow involved in the now known ongoing CIA mindcontrol experiments with goals to create a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin.

Oswald had been at Atsugi a little over a month when on October 27, he claimed to have shot himself accidentally with an illegal small pistol. The minor wound was officially covered up as resulting from an accidental discharge of a legal weapon.

About a month after that, on November 20, 1957, presumably with the wound largely healed, Oswald was shipped to the Philippines aboard the LST USS Terrill County in a military exercise named "Coffee Mill." At the time, the CIA was involved in a massive effort to create an insurrection against left-leaning Indonesian president Achmed Sukarno, next door to the Philippines. The effort so strained the precariously balanced collective CIA mind that it broke down into a ludicrous scheme of plastic surgery to create a Sukarno lookalike who performed in pornographic movies, presumably for surreptitious distribution in Indonesia.

U-2 and other tactical flights would surely have been involved in the insurrection assistance effort, but there is no information on any direct or indirect involvement by young Oswald.

The CIA-sponsored Indonesian insurrection failed in 1958. President Eisenhower ordered Vice President Nixon to purge the CIA. Heads rolled. Nixon, who would later resign in disgrace from the presidency, brusquely relieved from duty popular CIA deputy director Frank Wisner (who committed suicide in 1966).

On January 15, 1958, Oswald and his Marine buddy from radar school days, Private Martin Schrand, were still involved in the "Coffee Mill" military operation. That night, Schraud, assigned to guard duty at an aircraft hanger where members of the unit remember that the sleek blue-black U-2 spy planes were sometimes housed, was found dead of a gunshot wound not likely to have been self-inflicted.

The death of apparently his best buddy would have represented a terrible psychological shock to a young man, but there has also been speculation that Oswald was somehow involved in the murder. But anyone who has read John Mark's book about the CIA

search of a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin will recall repeated mentions of "terminal" experiments. One has to wonder about Martin Schrand's death.

A few days later the military exercise in the Philippines was disbanded, perhaps just another coincidence.

The Marine unit was shipped to Corregidor, sight of the famous World War Two battle in the Philippines, probably for the usual rest and recuperation after a large military exercise.

On March 7, 1958, seven weeks after Schrand's death, the unit returned to Japan aboard the LST USS Wexford County. There, on April 11, 1958, Oswald was found guilty of discharging an unregistered weapon in the October incident. He was sentenced to 20 days hard labor, but not imprisoned. Oswald apparently took it hard and immediately applied for a hardship discharge from the Marine Corps.

In 1958 -- among other things, but to illustrate the Cold War desperation and paranoia—the CIA was sponsoring "depatterning" experiments by the notorious Dr. Ewen Cameron, professor at McGill University in Montreal and president of the World Psychiatric Association. Cameron's CIA funds were laundered through the Rockefeller Foundation.

CIA "depatterning" meant zapping people's brains with overdoses of electro-shock to destroy their memory, theoretically to make them susceptible to new memory encoding. (see: Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control, by Harvey M. Weinstein, MD [Director of the Cowell Student Health Center, Stanford University], American Psychiatric Press, Washington DC & London, 1990) Dr. Cameron utilized his own patients in these "treatments," without their knowledge or consent, and destroyed many of their lives by making near zombies out of them and even, eventually, killed some. One woman, for instance, came into his office for a mild case of neurosis and was given massive electro-shock every two hours. She now survives as a fragment of her former self, not able to remember routine details for normal living, required to write down everything on a note pad and refer constantly to it.

Dr. Cameron suddenly quit his job in 1964 -- not long after the Kennedy assassination—and died, perhaps mysteriously, while mountain climbing in Canada in 1967.

In the meantime in Japan in May 1958, Oswald, just after having finished his twenty-day hard labor sentence for the gun incident, tried to pick a fight with one of his superiors, Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez, a Texan. According to the reports, Oswald spilled a drink on Rodriguez at what appears to have been a U.S. Marine and especially "Coffee Mill" hangout bar named the Bluebird Cafe, an name that suspiciously recalls the early CIA mindcontrol experiment series code-named Project BLUEBIRD (see above), organized in Japan by the CIA in 1950 and renamed ARTICHOKE in 1951.

If nothing else, the "Bluebird Cafe" adds one more curiosity to a great number of coincidences surrounding the Kennedy assassination of interest to students of Jungian "synchronisity." But more seriously, the derivation of names of military hangout bars, especially in Asia, are often conjured up from local military nomenclature.

As a result of the fracas in the Bluebird Cafe, young—and on the face of it, clearly destabilized—Lee Harvey Oswald ended up in the brig, a military prison situation designed to make punishment very stressful and uncomfortable. The stress, exertion, and minimal sleep associated with this type of punishment would also lend itself to making an experimental subject very susceptible to programming and hypnotic suggestion.

In fact, way before his April 11 minor court martial for the gun discharge, Lee Oswald had become just the kind of human subject that the CIA and military mind-control experimenters liked to use. He was essentially helpless and vulnerable, from a poor and unstructured home, without helpful family backing, and far from home and familiar surroundings. But after April 11, convicted Oswald was a social outcast and misfit, alienated, physically and mentally exhausted as part of the punishment, and thus hostile.

Being so in the tight regimented conformist machine of the military reward system, he was even more susceptible to aims of experimental designers.

After he was sent to the brig on July 27, 1958, to serve a twenty-eight-day sentence he would have been even more so. But this is only speculation. Thus far no concrete evidence has been found to demonstrate that Oswald was, in fact, a knowing or unknowing experimental subject at this time. One can see, however, opportunity and CIA mind-control experimenters needs and will.

At this time in 1958, for instance, Morse Allen, organizer of BLUEBIRD (later renamed ARTICHOKE), and another CIA researcher named Maitland Baldwin were doing secret CIA "black box" sensory deprivation experiments with eventual goals to create a "Manchurian Candidate." Allen was known to object to obtaining consent from subjects because he thought since they knew they were part of an experiment, they would have certain attitudes and confidences about it that would not hold in real life situations. A "black box" is not so much an instrument as a technique.

The basic idea is to deprive a person of light, sound, touch (as much as possible by creating carefully temperature-controlled super-comfort) and even smell. Often the subjects are confined to small totally dark rooms that are padded to minimally reflect sound and completely insulated from outside sound. At best, the average person can remain in one only for a few days before becoming so disoriented as to be temporarily insane. Longer confinement in one can lead to permanent mental instability.

A person who had been confined to a "black box" would probably be aware of it and leave a gap in his or her personal history, and therefore make a poor assassin. Obviously less conspicuous techniques had to be found.

Oswald was apparently granted and early release from the horrors and stress of the brig on August 13. In September 1958, he and his unit were sent to Taiwan aboard the attack cargo ship USS Skagit, probably as part of the effort to contain the Quemoy-Matsu flareup of the ongoing Chinese Civil War. On Taiwan we see a first tangible hint—and nothing more—of Oswald possibly being a knowing or unknowing subject in the CIA mind-control experiments. possibly MK/ULTRA or ARTICHOKE. Soon after the unit arrived there, Lieutenant Charles R. Rhodes, an immediate commanding officer Oswald's Marine radar unit, reported a strange incident that remained in Oswald's permanent Marine Corps file.

Oswald had been assigned nighttime guard duty with Rhodes acting as officer of the guard. It was a "wartime" situation. In the radar unit a fear of spies abounded after the Communist Chinese had gotten hold of or discovered for themselves the overflight identification coding system, presumably for U-2's. But the island of Taiwan itself was fairly secure, and small temporary Marine post would not reasonably be considered a target of an infiltrating or raiding party. Thus the routine posting of Oswald for what was on the face of it expected to be uneventful guard duty was just traditional Marine practice.

But it would not be uneventful. Around midnight Lieutenant Rhodes later recalled that he was startled by "four or five shots fired from the position Oswald was guarding." The lieutenant drew his issued forty-five caliber pistol and ran toward some trees where the gunfire sounds seemed to come from. He found Oswald slumped against one of the trees, holding his issued M-1 rifle across his lap. "When I got to him, he was shaking and crying," Rhodes later said.

According to Rhodes, Oswald said he had seen men in the woods, that he had challenged them, and then began shooting. Rhodes, in his capacity of fatherly unit officer, put his arm around Oswald's shoulder and slowly walked him back to his tent.

"He kept saying he just couldn't bear being on guard duty," Rhodes said.

Rhodes, of course, reported the incident to his superiors. Almost immediately, Oswald was shipped back to Japan.

Keeping in mind that his Marine buddy and friend Private Martin Schrand's death from a gunshot wound while on similar guard duty in front of a U-2 hanger at Cubi Point in the Philippines, some of young Oswald's strange behavior might be somewhat understandable. And if that were the case, this would seem to rule out Oswald's alleged involvement in his friend's death.

But does it really make sense?

Would an armed Marine in a wartime situation, who had recently seen his friend killed on similar guard duty, be slumped up against a tree crying with his rifle on his lap if he had really seen "enemies" lurking in the area? Nor does Lieutenant Rhodes' behavior really mesh with his reported facts of the incident.

Keeping in mind the earlier mysterious death one of the men in his unit on guard duty, would an officer of the guard relieve Oswald of further duty and slowly walk him back to his tent if spies or infiltrators were even vaguely insinuated?

On the other hand, the incident on Taiwan does suggest an LSD or related psychedelic drug experiment. When this happened in 1958, LSD was unknown outside a limited and largely secret community of professional experimenters. Even if Lieutenant Rhodes had been peripherally on the inside in a secret CIA-military experiment,it is unlikely he would have known of the existence, let alone the effects, of LSD or similar hallucinogenic drug.

It would appear that Oswald had a hallucination that someone or something was lurking out there in the dark—and it could very well have been a drug-induced hallucination —and Lieutenant Rhodes may have been aware something strange and not related to "enemy" activity could happen that night.

Moreover, Oswald's strange reaction of slumping against a tree and crying would be typical of someone under the influence of LSD. In addition, Oswald, who had already been punished for an discharging an unauthorized weapon and served additional severe punishment in the dreaded brig, would not have been likely to have discharged his Marine weapon unless under either the duress of a real threat or a hallucinogen-induced mental state. And it is clear that he felt no real threat of the kind that would force a trained Marine whose buddy had been killed on guard duty to seek cover from enemy fire and search the nighttime area in an extremely agitated state of alert, rifle ready.

In short, the Oswald incident on Taiwan looks for all the world like a CIA-military hallucinogenic drug experiment.

The Marine Corps by then had Oswald's application for a hardship discharge. If no hallucinogenic drugs were involved, Oswald after that incident certainly would have appeared too unstable for continued military duty, at very least too unstable for continued duty in the high national security radar outfit monitoring Cold War enemy air intrusions, including potential nuclear intrusions.

And indeed, shortly after the incident, on October 6, Oswald was returned to Atsugi, Japan, for "medical treatment," but this appears to have been for a lingering minor case of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease not uncommon to military personnel serving in Asia. Oswald attempted to disguise this by complaining that the urethral discharges were

from "heavy lifting" on Taiwan. In other words, the record shows the Marine Corps treating a "normal" young Marine behaving like a normal young Marine.

It should be noted here for future reference that the MK/ULTRA researcher later in charge of LSD experiments in San Francisco and Marin County, California, was one David Rhodes, probably no relation, but a curious coincidence.

Another item of interest is that one of Oswald's Marine buddies from this late 1950s period, Kerry Thornley, began in early 1962 -- about the time Oswald returned from the USSR—to write a book about a Marine's gradual moral breakdown. He used a character named Lee Shellburn, drawn rather directly from Oswald. It not only points out Oswald's visible mental and moral deterioration, it raises questions as to how much Thornley may have found out about or been in on the possible use of Oswald in mind-control experiments —but they are only vague questions, without answers.

More to the point is the mention at the beginning of chapter six of Marks' book on CIA mind-control experiments. He notes that after the death in late 1953 of Frank Olsen as a result of a CIA LSD experiment, CIA experimental director Sid Gottlieb cabled two field stations that had LSD supplies, Manila, and Atsugi, Japan. The cable told them not to use the hallucinogen for the time being. One can only speculate that they might have again been using it when Oswald was at Atsugi and in the Philippines when Oswald was there four years later.

And, of course, one can only speculate on Oswald's strange behavior in the Taiwan incident and whether experimentation, if indeed there had been, came to an end with that.

With the rest of his Marine unit still on Taiwan, Oswald was reassigned to Iwakuni Marine Base just south of Hiroshima—at the other end of Japan from Atsugi where, among other things, there would be very little risk of his running into old buddies. He was thus thrown into a completely new social environment and totally alienated.

There was, however, one person from the old days, a fellow radar school graduate named Owen Dejanovich. He also saw Oswald with a strange "Eurasian" woman—now several hundred miles from the Queen Bee in Tokyo, perhaps, though, not the same one.

"She was much too good looking for Bugs (Oswald's nickname)," Dejanovich is reported as saying.

It has been speculated that the so-called "Eurasian" woman during the Atsugi period was actually Oswald's cousin, Marilyn Dorothy Murret, described a tall attractive woman with long black hair, known to have been in Japan at this time. Murret is reported to have "been linked in some manner" with a research associate of the CIA-connected organization, Center for International Studies at MIT, Professor Harold Isaacs, who was also an occasional Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek reporter.

I find this speculation possible but unlikely. As an American who not only lived in Japan for several years but worked on a project with "Amerasians" there, I have difficulty

believing that Americans would not recognize other Americans and repeatedly label one of them "Eurasian."

Whatever it was, it did not last long. A little over a month later, on November 2, 1958, after thirteen months in Asia and largely in Japan, Oswald boarded the USS Barrett at Yokusuka U.S. Navy Base in the Tokyo area and sailed on this troopship for San Francisco.

It should noted that Oswald's military pay records do not entirely agree with his military personnel file during this period. This may have been due to military records sloppiness or it may have been to provide cover in case something went wrong.

Shortly before Christmas 1958, Oswald formally reported in to his new unit, Marine Air Control Squadron Nine in Santa Ana south suburban Los Angeles, California. The area has long been known as a center for intense radical right-wing political activity and philosophy.

While at the Santa Ana facility Oswald was observed in contact with people who appeared to be Latin American, in itself not remarkable because even then there was a large Mexican-America population in the area. What is remarkable is that while there, young unstable Oswald gained a proficiency in Russian language that exceeded Berlitz and military test levels.

In addition, he openly—in the fishbowl military atmosphere during the height of Cold War paranoia—subscribed to Russian language newspapers and, interestingly, the Communist Party daily, Peoples World. One might be tempted to wonder. Either Oswald had become apathetic (drug-induced apathetic?) to his intensely Cold War anti-Communist surroundings, not only in the distinctively patriotic Marine Corps itself but in the heart of ultra-conservative southern California. Or he was consciously going about constructing a new public image of himself. Or someone or some group was constructing a useful representation of his person for their own purposes.

In addition to making these overt and hardly unnoticeable representations, he also applied for admission to liberal Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, not far from where Swiss corporate drug giant Sandoz Laboratories was still making the total world supply of LSD exclusively for the CIA. After less than a year at this southern California Marine facility, Oswald, on August 17, 1959, applied for a dependency discharge, ostensibly to help in ailing mother. He was granted an honorable discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps for reasons of dependency on September 3, 1959.

Two weeks later, on September 17, 1959, Oswald boarded the freighter Marion Lykes and arrived in La Harve, France, on October 8. A week later, on October 15, three days before his nineteenth birthday, Oswald crossed the USSR border from Vainikala, Finland. Thus began his now well-revealed sojourn in the old USSR, where he married a lovely young Russian woman, Marina Nikolaevna Prusakova, whose maternal uncle,

Colonel Ilya Vasilyevich Prusakov, was an engineer for the MVD, responsible for internal civil law enforcement.

Oswald was not the only American defector to the USSR in this time period. There were at least another half dozen. For whatever reasons, the CIA set up an "SR/6 soft file" in 1960 entitled "American Defectors to the USSR" that included defectors in 1959-1960.

There had been others prior to these years, but they were not included.

It was late 1959. In the United States, John F. Kennedy had been working all year initiating a campaign for president, but not even the New Hampshire primary had yet been held. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, and Richard M. Nixon was vice president with an assumed access to most national security data. If, at this point, Oswald had been "programmed" in a "Manchurian Candidate" experiment by the CIA, it could hardly have been to kill a still-to-be-nominated future President Kennedy. At this point, if that might have been the case, it would seem that he had either been one of the numerous experimental subjects who had turned out bad, or he might have been a "resource" for some yet unknown operation.

The swiftness of the change from U.S. Marine to defector living in the old USSR has caused many to wonder whether Oswald was not some kind of CIA agent. Released KGB files and interviews with KGB personnel show that the Russians, after interviewing and watching him, apparently concluded he was too young, too unstable, and too unknowledgeable to be a CIA agent, although they wondered exactly what he was throughout his stay.

If Oswald had been a subject in what now appear to be a very preliminary level of mind-control experiments funded by the CIA, he may have sensed, as a smart unstable young person could, that something was terribly wrong. There would have been, after all, no place he could feel he could hide in the so-called Free World. If the foregoing is even minimally correct, he could well have been experimented on in several countries in Asia and in the United States.

While Oswald was clearly an alienated and mixed-up teenage Marine, he was also undoubtedly quite intelligent, and he might have found out some of the people ostensibly working with him but apparently working on him were, indeed, associated with the CIA. Who could he—a teenager from a poverty-stricken single-parent family—talk to about it?

Who would believe him if he did? While it is not greatly likely, he could thus have discovered some things that he kept bottled up all his life until Jack Ruby murdered him. We may never know.

Another more likely possibility is yet one more CIA human-subject experiment—to create a defector or even an assassin in Russia, it doesn't matter—out of control. Could Oswald have gotten from the Santa Ana Marine facility to Russia entirely on his own? It is possible, but it stretches the imagination.

All during the time Oswald was in the USSR, from October 15, 1959, until he arrived from there in the United States aboard the Holland-American Line's SS Maasdam at Hoboken, New Jersey, on June 13, 1962, all mail from the USSR to the United States was being opened and read by CIA people from the office of Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton. A significant part of this information was forwarded to the FBI. Moreover, it should be noted here that since 1960 the CIA Technical Services Staff had been cooperating with Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff in "operational" uses of hypnosis.

From reading his mail and applying psychological profiles and analyses, CIA personnel could have understood Oswald's feelings and intentions considerably in advance.

It is almost impossible to imagine that both the CIA and the FBI would not have been acutely interested in Oswald after the Russians shot down Francis Gary Powers' supersecret U-2 spy plane on May 1, 1960, while on a CIA mission. The CIA had to know by then, if not much earlier, that this type of spy aircraft had been at least peripherally connected by proximity to Oswald's Marine radar unit and his other Marine Corps units when he had been stationed in several places in Asia.

It is therefore interesting to note that the Oswalds were met at the dock in Hoboken by one Spas T. Raiken, ostensibly because Raiken worked for Travelers Aid International, certainly an international organization in a position to provide the CIA and others with needed intelligence information. A journey to the United States that began with an apparent ticket from one Michael Jelisavcic of American Express in Moscow who had possible CIA ties ended with a greeting from Spas T Raiken as the boat docked in New Jersey. One might be forgiven for coming to a conclusion that the CIA was guiding and even protecting the Oswalds all the way back from Moscow to Fort Worth.

Raiken came to the attention of the CIA as a recruit either from their efforts or his in 1960, two years before he greeted Lee and Marina Oswald as the ship docked. There is a CIA document: TITLE: Routing Sheet Note About Potential Contract Recruit (Spas T. Raiken). DATE: 07/22/60. But Raiken was also active in a number of anti-Communist fronts and organizations and their counterparts in Asia and elsewhere overseas. And it should also be noted that Raiken was a prominent member of the "Fairness to the President Committee" that attempted to salvage Richard Nixon's presidency during the Watergate Hearings. There would seem to be too many Watergate and JFK assassination overlaps to be just sheer coincidence.

With money that Travelers Aid and welfare agencies managed to extract from Oswald's brother Robert, who had to mortgage his car to provide it, the hard-pressed Oswalds headed for Fort Worth, Texas. The Delta Airlines flight was routed through Atlanta.

Apparently some of the Oswalds' luggage was lost en route.

Before continuing with possible MK/ULTRA and other experimental so-called mind-control programs sponsored by the CIA that may have connections to E. Howard

Hunt, something that did not exist until recently must be brought in. There is his now well reported "deathbed confession" to his son St. John Hunt. In it the dying and said to be occasionally delirious Howard Hunt asserted that Vice President Lyndon Johnson was behind the murder of President Kennedy. Hunt, one must be reminded, was a professional spy skilled at deception and dirty tricks.

The accusation of involvement by Lyndon Johnson seems far-fetched and may have been a calculated smear meant to damage the reputation of the outstanding liberal Democrat.

Hunt, a friend and former CIA boss of conservative talk-show host and publisher William F. Buckley, hated liberals and Democrats and is said to have resigned from the CIA on May 1, 1970, because there were too many Democrats in it. And Hunt was not only associated with groups in Watergate days that utilized smear fictions and dirty tricks, he was a published creative writer of legitimate fiction. Hunt authored 41 novels published under his own name or under pseudonyms as well as three nonfiction books. He sold the film rights to one of his novels to Warner Bros, and his last novel, Sonora, was published in the year 2000. He could and did create salable fiction before and after the Kennedy assassination and Watergate. The inclusion of Lyndon Johnson in the list below has a dull unpleasant ring of smear fiction.

The others, however, seem disturbingly credible.

Here is what Hunt told his son, taken from "The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt: US government/CIA team murdered JFK," by Larry Chin in Online Journal, April 3, 2007, three months after Hunt died on January 23, 2007. According to E. Howard Hunt, these were participants in the murder of President Kennedy: _ Lyndon B. Johnson: LBJ, whose own career was assisted by JFK nemesis J. Edgar Hoover (FBI), gave the orders to a CIA-led hit team, and helped guide the Warren Commission/lone gunman cover-up. _ Cord Meyer: CIA agent, architect of the Operation Mockingbird disinformation apparatus, and husband of Mary Meyer (who had an affair with JFK). _ David Atlee Philips: CIA and Bay of Pigs veteran. Recruited William Harvey (CIA) and Cuban exile militant Antonio Veciana. _ William Harvey: CIA and Bay of Pigs veteran. Connected to (Havana, Cuba) Mafia figures Santos Trafficante and Sam Giancana. _ Antonio Veciana: Cuban exile, founder of CIA-backed Alpha 66. _ Frank Sturgis: CIA operative, mercenary, Bay of Pigs veteran, and later Watergate figure. _ David Morales: CIA hit man, Bay of Pigs veteran. Morales was also a figure involved with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.

_ Lucien Sarti: Corsican assassin and drug trafficker, possible "French gunman," Grassy Knoll (second) shooter.

Keep in mind that Hunt himself fingered these men in his so-called deathbed confession, partly tape-recorded from Hunt's own mouth by his son nicknamed "Saint," and partly handwritten by E. Howard Hunt himself. These are not unsupportable accusations by one or more assassination buffs. Chin's article continues with more details about the confession. Readers can access the article through Google and other search engines.

The three tramps that Chin mentions in his article are now part of Kennedy assassination folklore. Three tramps were arrested on the Grassy Knoll immediately after the shooting because witnesses said some shots had come from there. News photographs were taken of their arrests. These tramps were not held and no identifications were taken. Nine years later, after publicity from his arrest as a result of the Watergate break-in, people called attention to the fact that one of the three tramps looked exactly like Hunt. Another looked somewhat similar to Sturgis.

In his assassination book Plausible Denial, Mark Lane showed how Hunt lied about not being in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

While the so-called deathbed confession does not say Hunt was in Dallas, it says that Hunt knew beforehand of the plot to kill President Kennedy and chose not to stop it or tell anyone about it. It is therefore not unreasonable to say that E. Howard Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Attorney Mark Lane proved in court that E. Howard Hunt was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Photographs of a so-called "tramp" arrested on the Grassy Knoll who looks remarkably like E. Howard Hunt were taken by news photographers immediately after the shooting on November 22, 1963. And Hunt himself admitted in his deathbed confession that he had been included in the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.

In view of this, one might be tempted to wonder if Hunt might not have actually pulled a trigger on the Grassy Knoll that sent a fatal bullet into Kennedy. His deathbed confession could have been couched in terms that revealed damning facts but purposely left out those facts that could have led a sick old man to be charged with murder, for which there is no statute of limitations.

In 1961, during Oswald's two-and-a-half years in the USSR, E. Howard Hunt was involved in the CIA's Domestic Operations Division by the new CIA Director of Plans, Richard Helms. Helms would later become director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973 and was in that position during the Watergate break-in. Shortly after the Watergate break-in was discovered in 1972, Helms had all of the MK/ULTRA files covering about 150 separate projects destroyed. No one will ever know what was in them. One might, of course, wonder about an E. Howard Hunt connection to these MK/ULTRA files and a desperate effort at damage control by CIA Director Helms.

E. Howard Hunt had earlier been a personal assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles who headed the agency between 1953 and 1961. Hunt was an old hand at the CIA from its earliest days as the World War Two Office of Strategic Services. He clearly was close to the awesome levers of executive power and had all-encompassing top-secret knowledge. Dulles resigned from the agency in November 1961, closely following the resignations of Director of Plans Richard Bissel and Deputy Director Charles Cabell who had been more directly responsible for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. (Ironically, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Allen Dulles as one of seven members of the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President Kennedy.) When Dulles resigned in 1961, Hunt went to work for Helms. E. Howard Hunt remained with the CIA until 1970 and then was employed by the Nixon White House as a "plumber" and became involved in the Watergate fiasco.

It is difficult to see how the later world famous "dirty tricks" artist of the 1970s Watergate Era could not have been a party to the planning and development of the CIA mind-control experiments to create an assassin in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. At very least, it probably can be assumed that Hunt was extremely knowledgeable from the onset.

As noted above, following the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba fiasco in April 1961, President Kennedy, only in office for a few months, forced CIA Director Allen Dulles to resign. Hunt who had played a major role in the invasion planning, had been captured by Castro's Cuban forces and understandably bitter at Kennedy, whose last minute withdrawal of U.S. Air Force air cover contributed to the invasion's failure.

President Kennedy also forced CIA Deputy Director (at the time also a U.S. Air Force Major General) Charles P. Cabell to resign. General Cabell, who had planned the air cover for the ill-fated Cuban invasion, had called President Kennedy a "traitor" for his last minute decision to withdraw that air cover from the invasion, one of the several reason the effort failed.

One of the many fascinating coincidences surrounding the murder of President Kennedy is that General Cabell's brother, Earl Cabell, was Mayor of Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

His brother General Charles Cabell's name joined long list of mysterious deaths connected in some way with the Kennedy assassination. On May 25, 1971, a year before the 1972 Watergate break-in and ten years after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, General Cabell died of an apparent heart attack just minutes after a physical examination in which he had been given a perfect bill of health at Fort Meyers Army Hospital near the Pentagon.

That aside, the America to which Oswald returned in June 1962 with his Russian wife Marina and their baby was different from the America that he had left and had renounced. Kennedy had been president for a year-and-a-half. The Civil Rights Movement was beginning to show its strength. CIA and military people were visibly nervous over perceived easing of confrontation with the Soviets, including nuclear test ban initiatives.

It created great anxiety in conservatives and drove the right-wing into frenzies. The newly created ultra-right John Birch Society fed on it. Birch members and sympathizers,

whose cars often sported the old Ku Klux Klan slogan "Support Your Local Police," now also added "Impeach Earl Warren," aimed at the liberal Chief Justice of the Supreme Court —later head of the Warren Commission—whose liberal civil rights decisions worried conservatives and angered the lunatic right.

Everyone was aware that the lunatic right ground their collective teeth even more viciously over the mere fact that liberal John F. Kennedy was president.

In Cuba, Castro had declared himself a Communist and sided with Russia in the Cold War, and US policy was midway between the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco and the yet-to-come October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Castro had kicked out the last of the Mafiosi who had run lucrative Casino Havana prior to his takeover, and bitter Cubans had fled their country and were plotting, with massive CIA help, to overthrow the Cuban Communist dictator.

Often noted is the fact that the Oswalds, one a Cold War defector, the other a Soviet citizen and niece of a Russian security colonel, had less trouble than one might think in slipping through the paperwork, travel, and emigration-immigration barriers to get from Moscow to Fort Worth, Texas. But one might wonder if a serious effort to use Oswald and thus to begin manipulating him did not begin then. Cost may have been a factor in not putting the Oswalds on a two-or-three-day flight from Moscow to Texas. But one may wonder. It took the Oswalds, Lee, Marina, and their baby, twenty-two days to go from Moscow to Fort Worth by train, ship, and then plane, the first part of it a grueling three days and nights on a train from Moscow to Rotterdam. Intentionally softening them up for manipulation is not out of the question. And if not that, they still would have been exhausted and somewhat disoriented due to the exhaustion and as a result easier to manipulate.

On an excellent small website created in 2007 Perry Vermeulen reveals details of the journey from the USSR back to the United States by Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald and their infant child. They obtained tickets from the earlier mentioned Michael Jelisavcic, a Yugoslav-born naturalized American working at the American Express office in Moscow who may have had CIA ties. Due to Vermeulen's clever research we now know that Marina and Lee Oswald departed Moscow on Friday, June 1, 1962, at 04:10 p.m. and began a grueling three-day train trip that would get them to Rotterdam, Netherlands, on Sunday, June 3 at 11:22 a.m.

Jelisavcic, or somebody, apparently had made arrangements for them to pick up their steamship tickets at the American Express outlet in Rotterdam. In addition to that, he may have found them a pleasant place to stay at 250 Mathenesserlaan, away from the tourist hotels near the docks. Curiously, this was a pension, a long-term apartment for older people and not used for hotel-like overnight stays. The manager at the time denied that he rented any rooms overnight to the Oswalds or anyone else. So one can only wonder what kind of unusual arrangement had been made for them to stay one night in this apartment for older people and what the place really may have been, as for instance a safe-house of some kind.

Vermeulen's research shows that they stayed in that Rotterdam pension only overnight. It was clearly necessary after that grueling three-day train trip across Europe, but hardly offered enough time to fully recover from it. Oswald then had to go to the American Express outlet at 92 Meent to pick up his steamship tickets. The ship, the SS Maasdam, departed Rotterdam for Hoboken, New Jersey, at about noon on June 4, 1962 for a nine-day voyage across the Atlantic.

Vermeulen also found that in a letter to her aunt and uncle Valya and Ilya Prusakova in Minsk, Marina Oswald said that it took twenty-two days from the time they left Minsk with their baby to the time they arrived in Fort Worth. Constantly traveling without a home of their own with a baby for twenty-two days and then only to find themselves staying at Oswald's brother's house would have been exhausting and disorienting.

Oswald was now a family man with a wife and a child to support. Oswald was also a notorious and world famous political defector who had returned home to a very uncertain future. For two-and-a-half years he had enjoyed being an interesting and decently established foreigner with a steady job, adequate income, and satisfactory apartment in Minsk. Now he was back in a world he understood all too well, a lone poverty-stricken pariah in a very unsympathetic culture.

As the child of a poor and wandering single-parent family, he had grown up with no father for future family input and amid instability that left him with few examples and values. The police and intelligence agencies who began watching him of course knew that and knew all his vulnerabilities due to it.

As might be expected with his background and that situation, Oswald was a miserable—in all senses of the word – family man. He apparently beat his wife. He tried hard but could not adequately provide for his family. And all this, of course, must have been terribly frustrating to both Lee and Marina Oswald. The marriage was foreordained to failure and all the additional stress and trauma of that.

On their arrival in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the Oswalds were forced to stay with his brother and sister-in-law Robert and Vada Oswald at their house. His first project was to contact a professional typist to assist him in writing a book about "My Life in Russia."

Oswald claimed to the typist, Pauline V. Bates, that he had a friend in Texas, an engineer of Russian origin in the oil business, possibly George de Mohrenschildt or Peter Paul Gregory, was going to help him publish the book.

I should be noted here that high-school dropout Oswald almost certainly could not drive a car and could not type. Those theorists that suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been a CIA agent might wonder what he may have had to offer the agency that was so valuable that they could overlook the fact that he was inadequately educated and could not drive and type.

After paying ten dollars that his mother had given him for ten single-spaced typewritten pages, Oswald told Bates he could not afford any more typing. Oswald rejected Bates' offer to type the rest without payment and took his material and left.

It is curious that no one was interested enough in Oswald's Russian experience to purchase rights to a book, almost as if he had been shielded from either the monetary gain or the publicity for more nefarious purposes.

The Texas Employment Commission recommended Oswald to Peter Paul Gregory as a translator. He had, after all, good Russian language skills and an ear for recent idiomatic uses. Gregory appreciated Oswald's command of Russian but had no immediate work for him.

With the FBI and other intelligence agencies watching him closely, Oswald attempted to restore his honorable Marine discharge, which had been summarily changed to dishonorable while he was in Russia. It was one more handicap to gaining employment in addition to his widely known defection and lack of a drivers license.

Although he may have had useful skills in language and background in military radar and electronics, exactly one month after the boat docked at Hoboken, Oswald finally went to work for $1.25 an hour (minimum wage) on July 13, 1962. He assembled doors and windows Leslie Welding Company in Fort Worth, undoubtedly by then providing a desperately needed paycheck.

After cashing his second $56 weekly paycheck at the end of July 1962, Oswald rented an apartment, the first privacy for his wife and him since they had left Moscow at the beginning of June 1962.

After they had lived in that apartment for two weeks, they were visited by FBI agents John Fain and Arnold J. Brown, who further interviewed Oswald alone, outside by their car. Oswald was uncooperative. Mysteriously, according to the records, the FBI national security case on Oswald was temporarily closed four days later.

Oswald, a pariah making minimum wage, trying against all odds to be a father and support his family, was, of course, extremely manipulable by an assembly of powerful forces all around him. In view of the now known desperate acts of the CIA, other government agencies, and right wing extremist groups in the Cold War hysteria of the time, how could any or all of these have passed up the various chances to utilize him?

The CIA apparently continued its interest in Oswald through other channels, some of which were apparently included in the central Texas White Russian community.

As the summer progressed, the Oswalds became more and more involved with staunchly anti-Communist and financially well-off White Russian emigres, including George de Mohrenschildt, understandable on the face of it in view of Marina's isolation from Russia and Russian-speaking contact other than these people. The Warren Commission

interview with de Mohrenschildt may offer a glimpse into a social networking of the displaced elite of Russia. Educated, sophisticated, and comfortable in social situations, they offered small and large support to one another. In addition, they were understandably antiCommunist and found a new political home in the prevailing militant anti-Communism of the Cold War. Lee and Marina Oswald were thrust by the circumstances of their lives into the midst of this community. They were by and large pleasant people trying to live in a world that circumstance had thrust upon them. But for Lee Harvey Oswald they may have seemed a singularly unpleasant group of people with strange aristocratic etiquette and conventions.

Moreover, the extremities of their rather clubby little group reached out into the more vicious far-right and racist elements of marginally Deep South Texas and Louisiana.

So when they connected Oswald with always minimum-wage jobs, he ended up working for racists, right-wingers, and Cold Warriors. With skills and experience that he felt he could sell, he ended up being required to work for people that he did not like in miserable survival-wage jobs. Either the group of people who were ostensibly helping him were actually taunting him, or circumstances had made his life a miserable mockery from which there seemed no escape. He was, to say the least, vulnerable to manipulation.

George de Mohrenschildt is prevailingly referred to as Oswald's "CIA handler."

Whether this may be true or not, de Mohrenshildt seems to have initially come into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald at the request of J. Walter Moore of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service in Dallas.

George de Mohrenshildt was born to an aristocratic family in Russia in April 1911, three years before World War One broke out and six years before the Bolshevik Revolution.

He died in Florida in the United States as a result of an apparently self-inflicted 20-gauge shotgun blast into his mouth on March 29, 1977. When this fatal gunshot wound occurred he had been been on a lunch break from and interview with assassination author Edward Jay Epstein, who expected him to return after a lunch break and continue the interview. Within this timeframe, but not on that day, de Mohrenschildt was also continuing conversations with Dutch journalist and investigator Willem Oltmans. And he had had just received a notification, a virtual summons, from Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. (later Willem Oltmans played de Mohrenshildt in Oliver Stone's film JFK.) In his interview with the Warren Commission over a dozen years earlier, de Mohrenschildt said he had been in Haiti since April 1963, and far from Dallas in November 22. Nothing has been found to contradict this claim. But one might wonder what information he might have been willing to divulge to one or both investigative writers a dozen years later or to the second committee investigating the Kennedy assassination that had just notified him of their additional interest in him. If he might have been in Haiti on November 22, prior to April, de Mohrenschildt had been rather deeply involved in the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina. And at least one curious claim in on the Internet that de Mohrenschildt reported directly to George H. W. Bush, then with

connections to the CIA, later Director of the CIA, after that Vice President or the United States, and then President of the United States.

According to Wikipedia George de Mohrenschildt's father had been named Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt and was a wealthy Russian before the Bolshevik revolution.

He escaped into Poland from Russia and died a refugee living in Germany during World War Two. The Mohrenshildt family had settled in Russia from Sweden, and George de Mohrenshildt told the Warren Commission that Swedish custom allows one to use either "de" or "von" before a family name. His brother, however, used the "von" form of the family name.

George de Mohrenschildt received the equivalent of a doctorate in international commerce from the University of Liege in Belgium in 1938. He received a master's degree in petroleum geology from the University of Texas in 1945 and was working for the U.S. State Department as a petroleum geologist when President Kennedy was assassinated.

He had a long history of suspected intelligence connections, apparently including some contact with Nazi German intelligence in Mexico during World War Two. He publicly stated that he had been connected with allied intelligence during World War II. While George de Mohrenschildt's application to join the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) was rejected, his older brother Dimitri von Mohrenschildt's application was not rejected. He went on to become part of the CIA's Radio Free Europe complex. Also according to Wikipedia, Dimitri's "contacts included top officials of the agency." He died at the age of 100 in 2002.

George de Mohrenschildt's former son-in-law, Gary Taylor, told the Warren Commission "whatever his (Mohrenschildt's) suggestions were, Lee (Oswald) grabbed them and took them, whether it was what time to go to bed or where to stay." Many have assumed that George de Mohrenschildt was Oswald's "operator" (in the hypnotic sense of the word).

George de Mohrenschildt's death in March 1977, just as he was about to be interviewed by a reporter and while the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the second official inquiry into the assassination of President Kennedy was ongoing, silenced whatever he knew and might have been willing to tell. Mohrenschildt apparently first met Oswald at the home of Admiral Henry C. Bruton, U.S. Navy, connected with the Office of Naval Intelligence. He probably would have had some access to the CIA through his rank as an admiral. Ostensibly these meetings were part of a local Russian-speaking group.

Oswald's wife Marina was Russian. Oswald also spoke Russian. But whatever these meetings may have been, one is forced to ask questions about poverty-stricken defectorpariah and self-proclaimed Communist's inclusion in the circles of the powerful military elite and extremely wealthy anti-Communist Texas oil figures.

Mohrenschildt is known to have been in Guatemala City as part of a "long vacation" in April 1961, coinciding with training for the Bay of Pigs invasion taking place in Guatemala then, training directed by E. Howard Hunt, among others.

Through Mohrenschildt's connections, Oswald got a job at the Jaggers-ChilesStovall map printing company and started there on October 11, 1962. Among the items printed there were maps derived from photographs by U-2 aircraft. These U-2-derived photos arrived at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall even before they got to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. As an employee, Oswald had to walk through the room where these U-2 photos were laid out in order to get to the darkroom for his own regular work. It would appear that the national security apparatus was very confident about having Oswald under their control.

On March 25, 1963, on the same day that the now famous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle arrived for one "A. Hidell" at Klein's Sporting Goods store in Dallas, Oswald was psychologically dunned with a notice that his job with the map printing company would be terminated on April 5, 1963. One might wonder whether this was coincidence or design.

About a month earlier, Oswald had been introduced to one Volkmar Schmidt who had studied under a professor named Wilhelm Kuetemeyer at Heidelberg University. The phonetic spelling of the first two syllables of the university name might have been the derivation of the name "Hidell" Oswald apparently used to purchase the rifle. Schmidt's professor, Kuetemeyer, taught psychosomatic medicine and religion. Schmidt brought up the subject of General Edwin Walker, U.S. Army, who lived in Dallas and had been fired by President Kennedy for distributing John Birch Society literature to his troops in Germany.

Like Kerry Thornley and his book about a Marine's moral breakdown, questions can be raised about Schmidt. His interest in Oswald seems to have been research into the mind of a fanatic. Some of the CIAs "terminal" mind-control experiments had been done in Germany in the 1950s, and there may well have been some awareness of these in a department teaching psychosomatic medicine. De Mohrenschildt had brought Schmidt into contact with Oswald.

But testimony about Oswald's personality to the Warren Commission and others shows a reasonable and stable young man who in addition liked Kennedy as president. (some material below drawn from an article "Hasty Judgement" by Michael T. Griffith, 1998) In her book Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities and the Report, Sylvia Meagher lists a number of people who had in testimony and public statements vouched for Oswald's character. In introducing this list of people and her careful analyses of their statements, Meagher says that there is "no basis in any of the available medical or psychiatric histories for allegations that Oswald was psychotic, aberrant, or mentally unsound in any degree. His life history is consistent with the conclusion that he was a rational and stable personality (which is not to say that he was appealing, admirable, or untroubled). He was capable of marriage and fatherhood, with responsibility and devotion, particularly to his two children. He was conscientious in his punctuality and work, completed military service satisfactorily, paid his bills and repaid his debts promptly, and managed his practical affairs capably."

Meagher first lists the person closest to Oswald, his wife Marina, who testified to the Warren Commission that she considered Oswald "mentally sound, smart and capable, not deprived of reason." George de Mohrenschildt himself testified that he did not think that Oswald had any hatred in him.

Additional people who knew Oswald made similar comments to the Warren commission or note that Oswald did not appear to be capable of the crime: Sam Ballen of the Russian-speaking community who knew Oswald.

George Bouhe, his former boss, who did not think Oswald capable even though he did not like Oswald.

Anna Meller, Elena Hall, Michael Paine, Paul Gregory, Lillian Murret (Oswald's aunt), Marilyn Murret (her daughter), Lt. Donovan (Oswald's Marine commanding officer), Adrian Alba (who knew Oswald in New Orleans in 1963), Tommy Bargas, (another of Oswald's employers), Helen P. Cunningham (an employment counselor), FBI Agent Quigley (interviewed Oswald after his arrest in New Orleans), Lt. Francis Martello (intelligence division New Orleans Police Department) all found Oswald to be stable, could not believe that he would kill anyone let alone President Kennedy, and said that Oswald liked Kennedy as president.

Widespread belief that Oswald was some kind of a nut would seem on the surface to have naturally grown from the audacity and national shock of the dastardly November 22 deed. But it does not seem totally impossible that some of it may have been carefully planted and nurtured by highly skilled disinformation professionals hoping to cover criminal tracks. And if this might have been the case, some groundwork smearing Oswald could have been carefully laid prior to the November 22 murder.

It is now widely assumed that it was Oswald who shot at Walker on April 5, the day his map company job was terminated, but evidence of this alleged act, as with most things in the Kennedy assassination including Oswald's marksmanship, is ambiguous. General Walker, before and after that after that a looming figure in far-right-wing Texas politics, would be arrested years later for soliciting prostitution in a public men's restroom. It was Marina Oswald's testimony that de Mohrenschildt had come over to the Oswald house and shouted an ambiguous seeming taunt about firing a shot and missing General Walker that brought de Mohrenschildt to the attention of the Warren Commission.

Two weeks after that incident, on April 25, Oswald arrived in New Orleans. Two weeks after that, on May 9, he got a near minimum wage job with the William B. Reily Company, importers and roasters of Latin American coffee. Owner William Reily was a supporter of the militant right-wing and CIA-coordinated "Free Cuba Committee," sometimes called the "Crusade to Free Cuba Committee," which unabashedly mixed Mafiaconnected and CIA-connected Cuban exiles in anti-Castro activities. Through that connection he probably would have had some acquaintance with David Ferrie, and David

Ferrie probably would have known of Oswald for eight years by then, from their days in the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans.

Oswald may have gotten the job there through an aunt whom he had not had regular contact with since childhood, Lillian Murret. She was the mother of Marilyn Dorothy Murret, the tall attractive woman with long black hair who had been in Japan while Oswald was at stationed near the U-2 hangers at Atsugi and may been the "Eurasian" woman at the Queen Bee in Tokyo.

Lillian may have had some loose and possibly unknowing connection to the CIA through employment with the Mullen Company, a CIA-associated company which apparently was caught laundering money during Watergate. Oswald put down her son, his cousin John Murret, as a reference on the job application form. But however Oswald got his job, it is strange in view of widespread CIA and right-wing knowledge of his past that this company hired him.

In their 1992 book Deadly Secrets (Thunder's Mouth Press), Warren Hinckle and William Turner noted that several men who had been hired by Reily Coffee at about the same time as Oswald left to work at an NASA facility that had a CIA stations associated with it. In attempting to debunk this in his article "Lee Oswald: Space Cadet?" Dave Reitzes reveals that the source for this was probably the Garrison investigation made famous by Oliver Stone's film and only two of those men went to work for NASA contractors in the area.

Garrison had found the name of Dante Marochini (although he misspelled it, and as a result it turns up misspelled in several accounts) who had been a William B. Reily Company employee at the same time as Oswald. He had been employed at Reily's nearby Standard Coffee Company facility and it is certainly not impossible that through that he could have been aware of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Marochini resided at 1309 Dauphine Street, although the address notation has been somewhat muddled. Garrison's investigation and charges centered on wealthy New Orleans businessman and CIA associate Clay Shaw and noted that Shaw lived at 1309 Dauphine Street and that another resident of the building was James Lewallen, who had once, with other Eastern Airlines pilots, shared an apartment with David Ferrie. James Lewallen was also connected with David Ferrie through the Civil Air Patrol. Both had been officers in the Cleveland Fifth Squadron before coming to New Orleans.

Reitzes notes that two fellow contemporary employees of Oswald at Reily Coffee did go on from that job to two different NASA-associated facilities after Oswald left. Alfred Claude went to the Chrysler Aerospace Division of NASA, and John Branyon, who went on to the Boeing Aircraft Division of NASA in Michoud. It is possible that both of these men simply went on to better jobs at these NASA-related facilities.

But Reitzes notes something interesting. James Ronald Lewallen, David Ferrie's friend, fellow Eastern Airlines pilot, and fellow Civil Air Patrol officer, worked as a quality

inspector for the Boeing Company at the Michoud Saturn rocket plant in the New Orleans area. It is a stretch. But it is also an awful coincidence.

The minimum-wage paycheck was enough for the Oswald family to rent a $65 per month apartment on Magazine Street and set up housekeeping.

On May 26, 1963, about two weeks after beginning work at the Reily Coffee Company on May 9, Oswald wrote a letter to the Castro-supporting "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" proposing to set up a branch in New Orleans. He asked for applications and "a picture of Fidel suitable for framing." One might wonder if something stirred him up to do that or if someone manipulated him into doing something like that. Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife and child were getting settled down to a normal life in an apartment at 4905 Magazine Street after she had moved there from Texas on May 11.

Three days after writing this letter to the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" and without bothering to wait for a reply, Oswald, using the name Lee Osborne, ordered a thousand copies of a "hands off Cuba" flier from a downtown New Orleans printer, the Jones Printing Company.

Then he rented the famous office at 544 Camp Street, in the same building but around the corner from the 531 Lafayette Street offices of the "Cuban Revolutionary Council" headed by former FBI agent and far-right-wing supporter of anti-Castro causes, Guy Banister.

In the early 1960's, the CIA had assigned E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Barker of later Watergate fame to consolidate anti-Castro Cuban efforts, and both spoke of their deep involvement with the "Cuban Revolutionary Council."

Banister, who died of a "heart attack" in 1964, also had ties to New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, the former Mafia boss in Havana whom Castro had kicked out Cuba.

Because Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, the president's brother, had unceremoniously forced Marcello into exile in Guatemala, The Mafia kingpin hated the Kennedy brothers and swore revenge.

An associate of Banister in his detective business was David Ferrie, the professional hypnotist who had been the commanding officer in Oswald's Civil Air Patrol unit in the early 1950s. On November 24, 1963, immediately after the assassination of President Kennedy, Banister closed his 531 Lafayette Street office.

David Ferrie had been involved in the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, presumably as a pilot. The Garrison investigation focused on possible assassination planning links between Ferrie and Oswald, clearly unaware at the time of the massive CIA mind-control program to create an assassin under way during the very minutes of the Kennedy assassination.

It is now well known that Ferrie not only had strong CIA ties but worked for exCuban Mafia chieftain and at that time New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, this at a

time when there was an ongoing CIA program to utilize Mafia people to assassinate Fidel Castro.

In July 1963, the CIA's ARTICHOKE (formerly BLUEBIRD when it was set up in Japan) project attempted to demonstrate instant hypnotic techniques on a "double agent" in Mexico. The experiment, however, was recorded as a laughable failure. One has to recall, though, proposed earlier ARTICHOKE experiments along this line going back at least to 1954.

People have claimed that in September 1963, when Oswald took a bus to Mexico City, Hunt was CIA Station Chief there. He probably was not. E. Howard Hunt admitted working at the Mexico station several times, but denied he was there in 1963. But researcher and journalist Tad Szulc says that he was the station chief there. The credible rumor does raise questions as to how much of the truth Hunt may have been telling. People seem to remember seeing him in Mexico at this time.

On September 25, 1963, Oswald crossed the Mexican border aboard a Continental Trailways bus bound for Mexico City, arriving there after a grueling overnighter on September 27.

On September 28, he seems to have gone to the Russian embassy, but the photographs supplied by the CIA show, for whatever reasons, someone who is clearly not Oswald. Recent records and testimony made available by Russian and Cuban embassy officials seem to support the allegations that Oswald did, indeed, visit these embassies, so the apparent CIA deception with the surveillance photographs is puzzling. Was someone in the spook bureaucracy initially afraid that "Manchurian Candidate" programs would be revealed?

CIA Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton handled the release of the mysterious non-Oswald photographs. Additionally, CIA surveillance tapes of Oswald's conversations in these embassies were—in a suggestion of later Watergate tactics— mysteriously destroyed. What was the CIA trying to hide?

After failing to obtain visas to either Cuba or the USSR, Oswald returned to Texas aboard a Transporte del Norte bus on September 28.

A few days later, through the Oswald's friend Ruth Paine, apparently then working for the American Friends Service Committee, Oswald heard of a minimum-wage warehouse job opening at the now famous Texas Book Depository Building. Mrs. Paine, who had been introduced to the Oswalds by de Mohrenschildt on February 22, had become a good friend and supporter of Marina Oswald.

In 1976, Senator Frank Church's intelligence committee found a large number of classified documents relating to Ruth Paine and her husband Michael. Perhaps these have been released unaltered by now. A Warren Commission document belatedly released in 1976 (#206, page 66) discloses a wiretap on Michael Paine apparently shortly after the

assassination. It concerns a conversation between his wife and him: "advised that male voice was heard to comment that he felt sure that LEE HARVEY OSWALD had killed the President but did not feel that Oswald was responsible." He further stated: "We both know who is responsible." Could this mean that they were aware of some external psychological or hypnotic control of Oswald?

It is also interesting that there is no record of any FBI or CIA wiretaps on Oswald prior to the Kennedy assassination. Here was a man with a Russian wife related to an MVD officer, a man with military radar knowledge who had defected and lived for years in the USSR before returning, and a man who had recently visited the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City. Why not?

On October 20, 1963, the Oswalds' second child was born at Parkland Hospital, where both the president and Oswald would die about a month later.

On November 21, the evening before the fatal and fateful day, Oswald hitched a ride with fellow Texas Book Depository employee Buell Wesley Frazier to suburban Irving, where both Frazier and the Paines lived. Oswald's wife Marina, separated by then, was living at the Paine's house.

Frazier claimed that Oswald told him he was going to pick up curtain rods. But former CIA voice stress analyst expert George O'Toole (The Assassination Tapes; an Electronic Probe Into the Murder of John F. Kennedy and the Dallas Coverup, by George J.A. O'Toole, Penthouse Press, 1975) used his sophisticated instruments on tape recorded answers to questions. O'Toole concluded that Frazier was not telling the truth.

While the Psychological Stress Evaluator my not in itself be convincing, especially when used as a lie detector, the difficulties O'Toole had in locating Frazier in 1974, eleven years after the assassination, strongly suggest either a continuing FBI investigation or a continuing FBI coverup. Frazier was then in the U.S. Army and unusually isolated from public contact at Fort Hood, Texas, south of Dallas.

O'Toole's publisher had to pay a private detective to locate Frazier and record answers to questions so O'Toole could test these with the Psychological Stress Evaluator. If the device is to be given any credibility as a lie detector, Frazier flunked it. Might Frazier have been in on a CIA operation to manipulate Oswald?

The assassination was, by then, only hours away. And a murder is a comparatively easy thing to accomplish. Any brainless nut with a weapon can murder.

The assassination of a great imperial head of state, however, is hardly just any old murder. For one thing, the intent is not necessarily to kill the human being but to change the direction of bitterly opposed policy. When Brutus, Cassius, and the others killed Julius Caesar in 44 BC, it was not because they disliked Julius but because they hoped to save the Roman republic from looming dictatorship. The lesson of history is that the murder succeeded And Julius Caesar died. But the assassination—partly because Brutus, Cassius

and the others were identifiable and strikingly obvious about their intentions—failed. The death of Julius Caesar marks the end of the Roman republic and the beginning of Imperial Rome.

An assassination by calculated design needs to distance itself as much as humanly possible from the political motives of the murderers, even more so if the motives are well into the political minority and poorly understood by the public.

In other words, a patsy has to be found—someone appearing to have quite different political motives who can take the public rap for the act. A patsy may be someone totally innocent of the crime, or he or she might be stirred up by others to participate in committing it, and the CIA mind-control experiments seem to have pursued this line. But the CIA mindcontrol experiments went a step farther and tried to create an assassin who would murder on hypnotic suggestion—still, of course, a patsy even though the actual murderer.

O'Toole suggests that Frazier bought financially strapped Oswald's MannlicherCarcano rifle on the evening of November 21. Oswald had in his possession at the time of his arrest almost exactly the amount of money he had originally paid for the gun, and this sum would represent the least amount an anxious buyer would have had to put up for it.

The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle was the one left in the Texas Book Depository Building that linked Oswald to the murder of President Kennedy. It had been wiped clean of fingerprints except for an Oswald palm print in a suspect location.

As for Frazier, he was arrested after the assassination with a British 303 rifle in his car and was, for a time, as much a suspect as Oswald.

Another interesting discovery O'Toole's psychological stress evaluator made from the private detective's tape recording was a moderate stress reading indicating deception when Frazier commented that he thought Oswald was more intelligent than most people thought. Might Frazier have known of a scheme to make Oswald seem more intelligent than he really was? There are certainly suggestions of the creation of a "legend" around Oswald going at least as far back as his ostensibly unaided circuitous route into the USSR. It was Frazier's testimony about the curtain rods wrapped in brown paper he said Oswald brought into the Book Depository Building that linked the alleged murder weapon, the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, to both Oswald and the scene of the crime.

All we know now is that the rifle Oswald had recently owned was found by the building window where witnesses said they heard the shots come from and that Frazier said he saw Oswald carrying "curtain rods" into the building that morning.

Dallas police officer Marrion L. Baker leapt from his motorcycle at the moment of the shooting and ran into the Book Depository Building. Joined by Roy Truly, the building manager, they found Oswald standing calmly by a soft drink machine on a different floor

than the noticeably open window where the shooting seemed to have been done and where the rifle was later found.

Officer Baker asked the building manager if Oswald worked there. Roy Truly told him he did, and they went on to search the building.

Though later arrested for the murder of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippet, with probable cause links that stretch the imagination—from the mob of police personnel present to arrest Oswald for sneaking into a theater without paying admission of less than a dollar, to the link, because of the distances and times involved, with the murder of Tippet. Oswald was never given the opportunity to explain himself in a courtroom. He was murdered by Jack Ruby on November 24, two days after the murder of the president.

During his interrogation on November 22, Oswald said, "I haven't any views on the President. I like his family very much."

O'Toole's voice stress analyses of Oswald's media recorded statements as he was being brought to and from his jail cell for interrogation indicate he is probably telling the truth in his famous "patsy" comment.

It is not surprising that a defector who knew he was being watched—and had been interviewed—by police officials would suggest that he was being set up as a patsy. One has to wonder, though, how much Oswald really knew.

O'Toole, a former CIA employee, offered a unique theory, and considerable voice stress data to back it up, that the assassination and conspiracy came from within the Dallas Police Department. It is interesting as far as it goes, but might O'Toole have somehow limited and restrained himself?

Earl Cabell was mayor of Dallas and nominally the police chief's boss. Earl's brother was fired by Kennedy. He was CIA deputy director and Air Force major general Charles Cabell, who had expressed his hatred toward Kennedy. E. Howard Hunt and General Cabell worked together on Bay of Pigs invasion planning and operations, and it is difficult to imagine that Hunt would not have at least once briefly met the mayor of Dallas, Texas.

There was, therefore, a potential "Bay of Pigs" and CIA connection with the Dallas Police Department, and possibly O'Toole unknowingly uncovered some parts of it. But there is another potential connection going back prior to 1961 between the federal government, including the CIA, and the nation's police forces. Housed in the Treasury Department was "The Technical Investigation Aids School."

After 1961, more centralized similar training was set up in Florida called "The National Intelligence Academy," (later the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit) using "untraceable" Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funds.

Alumni of these went on to participate in Watergate-famous illegal operations such as COINTELPRO, operation CHAOS, and operation SHAMROCK. It brings to mind Richard Sheridan's famous humorous drama, "School for Scandal," except that there was nothing funny. These schools became training centers for quasi-fascist tactics and might even be said to have evolved into sinister criminal organizations threatening the fragile American democracy while piously concealing criminality in law enforcement nomenclature and purposes.

In the fear and paranoia of the Cold War Warfare State, Congress became exceedingly liberal in funding harebrained hair-raising secret projects, and many went haywire without effective oversight. The point is that the CIA did not have a complete monopoly.

Government secrecy, of course, leads to trouble. There is no dispute that the coverup, for sinister reasons or not, began immediately after President Kennedy was shot.

Three so-called "tramps" who had been on the railroad tracks behind the Grassy Knoll when President Kennedy was shot were briefly arrested by police. They wore disheveled old clothes but had on expensive new shoes. News photographers, suspecting these three gentlemen might have something to do with the shooting, took a number of photographs. Strangely though, these three "tramps" were taken down the street by FBI agents and released—without so much as getting their names as potential witnesses.

If one looks at the good glossy photographs, the "tramps" do not look at all like tramps or winos. They are all clean shaven and have a healthy glow and military bearing.

One of the tramps, moreover, looks exactly like E. Howard Hunt making a contrived "funny face" to minimize recognition or identification, probably a taught skill at the CIA. In 1963, nearly a decade before Watergate, no one knew who E. Howard Hunt was. Following Hunt's arrest for his part in the Watergate break-in, a number of assassination researchers pointed out his amazing resemblance of one of the "tramps." On his deathbed Hunt admitted to being knowledgeable of the plot and is said to have admitted being in Dallas.

One has to wonder how much Hunt knew and took to the grave with him.

A sharp-eyed man named Lee Bowers saw the "tramps" in a freight train beginning its scheduled move out of the rail yard behind the Grassy Knoll. He called police attention to them before the train got away. And he was one of the many witnesses who died mysterious deaths after the assassination. He was killed when his car hit a bridge, and one has to recall the attempts related in Congressional testimony to put a CIA-developed substance on the steering wheel of Jack Anderson's car in the Watergate era. One has to wonder at the long list of mysterious deaths of witnesses to the Kennedy assassination and other knowledgeable people. It also recalls whistleblower Karen Silkwood's fatal car accident.

One has to wonder what the mysterious Watergate burglary was all about. Did guiltridden former and active CIA personnel think the Democrats had some goods on President

Nixon or his immediate associates? Nixon, as vice president during the Eisenhower administration, had to be "inside the loop" on Bay of Pigs planning and the CIA mindcontrol efforts to create a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin or patsy.

Richard M. Nixon is perhaps the only American who did not know exactly where he was on November 22, 1963. He was, in fact, in Dallas earlier in the day. But in testimony to the Warren Commission, he claimed he could not remember where he was.

Another Republican president, George Bush, seems to have been involved in the CIA Bay of Pigs operation, around which both the Kennedy assassination and the Watergate burglary seem to swirl. There is a large gap in Bush's biography at the time of the invasion preparations in Guatemala. Bush, at the time, was ostensibly involved with offshore oil drilling in the Caribbean, but may well have really been involved with shipping CIA supplies to the Cuban exile and CIA forces training for the invasion, forces led by E. Howard Hunt.

After Hunt was arrested for his part in the Watergate burglary, he made at least one attempt to stay out of jail. In the June 21, 1972 White House tape recording Nixon was forced to release, Nixon, who was himself aware of the White House taping for historical purposes, says to Haldeman: ". . . this Hunt, that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab and there's a hell of a lot of things . . . This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky. . . . just say (unintelligible) very bad to have this fellow Hunt, ah he knows too damned much, if he was involved—you happen to know that? If it gets out that this is all involved, the Cuba thing, it would be a fiasco. It would make the CIA look bad, its going to make Hunt look bad, and it's likely to blow the whole Bay of Pigs thing which we think would be very unfortunate—both for the CIA and for the country."

The Bay of Pigs was history by then, and E. Howard Hunt's involvement in it was well known. So what was Nixon really worried about? The "Cuba thing" may well have been the now well known but then highly secret CIA use of the Mafia in attempts to assassinate Castro, something extremely damaging to a Nixon White House already under stress for connections to the Watergate burglary. But "Bay of Pigs thing," as used here by Nixon, clearly indicates something even more damaging than that. Could it be a code phase for known CIA programming of Oswald to kill Kennedy, or to be a convenient patsy to cover the tracks of the real killer or killers?

In the final chapter of his book, John Marks notes that a few months after Richard Nixon was re-elected and while the Watergate investigation was still largely being done by obscure news people yet to make a big name for themselves, Nixon decided to "purge" Richard Helms from the CIA directorship. For whatever reasons, Nixon appointed Helms as ambassador to Iran. Before leaving the CIA to accept that post, Helms personally supervised the "wholesale destruction" of all MK/ULTRA and its successor MK/SEARCH "documents and tapes."

A CIA director presiding over such mundane matters as document destruction has to remind one of Oliver North's later efforts as part of the Iran-Contra cover-up, participants of which turn up in both Watergate and the Kennedy assassination investigations. It raises a question as to whether it might not have been a similar situation—even whether there might not be a thread running through all three of these great American criminal investigation cover-ups.

Marks felt that Helms destroyed the CIA mind-control experiment documents to minimize information that might later be used against him. And who would a CIA director like Helms most fear but the growing eventuality of Congressional investigations? These very investigations—that forced President Nixon to resign from the presidency before being impeached—were then getting under way. If these documents had not been destroyed, might they have linked Watergate to the Kennedy assassination through the CIA efforts to create a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin?

Were top Republican Party and CIA officials knowledgeable of a CIA use of Oswald as a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin, or patsy for an assassination? Is this what Nixon was really worried about?

Or, in view of the revelations coming out of Watergate, one has to wonder how far upper echelons of the Republican Party might have begun to use CIA mind-control data in American politics. If the chief strategist of large political party publicly brags about efforts minimize minority voter turn-out in a recent state gubernatorial election campaign, what might such a campaign do with hypothetical but probably researched sophisticated psychological warfare techniques to maximize and minimize voter turn-out in elections?

Watergate revealed a whole closet full of dirty tricks, and large numbers of people have voiced concern over numerous Kennedy assassination and Watergate links. If another of those links turned out to be the application of secret CIA mind-control research to American politics, we might have need for far greater effort to insure genuinely democratic elections.

What really concerns the public in the Kennedy assassination is not the sloppy police work in a non-routine murder, but the strong suggestions of skillfully executed political assassination and subsequent careful cover-up for the sole purpose of bypassing Constitutionally elected government.

Watergate was, of course, another, apparently less lethal, attempt and was met with a similar public reaction. And the chief architect of Watergate was E. Howard Hunt.

While E. Howard Hunt was in jail, his wife flew to Chicago. The plane crashed and she and all of the other passengers were killed. Something like fifty FBI agents immediately pounced on the crash site, strange because the FAA, not the FBI, investigates airplane crashes. Were they looking for a link between Oswald and the CIA mind-control

experiments to create a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin that Hunt planned to use to extort himself out of jail?

My objectives are not so much to add more Kennedy assassination questions to the already considerable heap. I sought here to set JFK assassination questioning off in a different direction, not only in respect to the Kennedy assassination itself but the larger issue of democratic government in an age of increasingly sophisticated psychological technologies, technologies only minimally understood by the voting public.

There is no argument that the CIA did years of considerable research to create an assassin. Was that research used in any way, manner, or form to undemocratically and unconstitutionally remove a president of the United States from office by assassination?

Might the taxpayers have funded the murder of their elected president? Was Oswald a CIA "Manchurian Candidate" assassin or programmed patsy for an assassination?

There is no direct evidence, but there is a suspicious trail of coincidences.

And as a final thought let me add this. It is from "Truthout" on January 9, 2007, and titled "Bush Senior Early CIA Ties Revealed," by By Russ Baker and Jonathan Z. Larsen of The Real News Project.

George Herbert Walker Bush long denied that he had any connections to the CIA prior to becoming its director in 1976 under President Ford.

The article says, however: "According to a CIA internal memo dated November 29, 1975, Bush's original oil company, Zapata Petroleum, began in 1953 through joint efforts with Thomas J. Devine, a CIA staffer who had resigned his agency position that same year to go into private business. The '75 memo describes Devine as an "oil wild-catting associate of Mr. Bush." The memo is attached to an earlier memo written in 1968, which lays out how Devine resumed work for the secret agency under commercial cover beginning in 1963."

Researchers have apparently linked the Zapata Petroleum to operations linked to the Bay of Pigs invasion. And the failure of the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion would appear to have links to the Kennedy assassination. Possible use in the assassination of secretly developed CIA mind-control techniques in programs like MK/ULTRA to create an assassin or patsy for an assassination by rogue CIA personnel and associates may have stemmed from this.

The foregoing is not meant to be an accusation or yet another JFK assassination theory. I toss it out into the Internet ether as a raw suggestion so that others with better minds and access to more facts might look in this direction. Who knows what they might find?

Berkeley, 1979-80 (revised, Bay Village, December 1993, January 2008) Other Books by Tom Slattery Books by Tom Slattery published by iUniverse.com in 2000 and 2001

1. End of the Road

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-15902-8 / Paperback Kent State University students interview a 110-year-old man in a nursing home in 2050 about his drive around the USA at the turn of the century in a $200 car.

2. The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-10070-8 / Paperback Begun as a modernization of the Adam and Eve story, this novel eludes to nudity and pornography, but is not in any way a porn novel. It is a love story about a nude model and a nude stripper who are thrust into the world of art, attempt to become successes in it, but succumb to tragedy. In the end their art becomes more of a success than they ever would have dreamed.

3. Immodest Proposals Through the Pornographic Looking Glass

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-15974-5 / Paperback This is a nonfiction work exploring pornography from its historical beginnings and questioning its impact on the modern world.

4. Norikaeru

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-15248-1 / Paperback This is a short science fiction novel playing with crossing dimensions and largely set in a dimension where the American Revolution failed because Thomas Jefferson had a horse-and-buggy accident at a critical time in its beginnings.

5. Open 25 Hours Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Ghost Stories

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-14022-X / Paperback This is a collection of science fiction and ghost short stories by Tom Slattery. It contains "The Spore," a science fiction yarn not without some satire that is remarkably similar to the much later movie "Evolution" starring David Duchovny.

6. Preshrunk Ponderings and Rumpled Rememberings

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-16349-1 / Paperback .

This small book is a collection of largely autobiographical essays around technology and social change.

7. Sinking Into Summer's Arms

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-09673-5 / Paperback This is a short science fiction novel that opens with the discovery of a body of a Neanderthal in a rapidly melting Alpine glacier in the early 21st century. The body is secretly taken to a lab in the Netherlands, but the group of scientist there become entangled in a plot to assassinate the new United Nations Secretary for Global Warming.

Simultaneously this United Nations Secretary learns that global warming is about to precipitate a new ice age. The Neanderthal does play a part, but not what one might expect.

8. The Tragic End of the Bronze Age A Virus Makes History

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-12146-2 / Paperback This is a nonfiction book centering on the author's apparent discovery of the initial smallpox pandemic that wiped out bronze-age civilization in the mid-twelfth century BC. In addition, the politics and economics of comparatively rare tin ore, the strategic mineral of the Bronze Age, similar to the strategic mineral petroleum today, are explored.

To be pulished. Or posted on the Internet: 9. In the Year After Mom Died

By Tom Slattery To be published in 2008 by iUniverse.com as a paperback book.

This nonfiction book is a mix of biography of a woman born in the early years of the twentieth century who lived into the twenty-first century and additional autobiography of her son. A very famous American author and a moderately famous American author in the family had minor influences on their lives. But mostly it is a book about dealing with grief after the death of a loved one.

10. The Last Human

by Tom Slattery This novel that modernizes Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, posted on scribd.

11. Forethought

by Tom Slattery This is a full-length one-act stage play modernizing Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, complete play posted on scribd