Mad doctors in smoky labs might be more common than you think.

The medical profession had a significant history of violence. We often ignore that. In 1963, Linda McDonald from Vancouver was suffering from mild post-partum depression. Her doctor suggested that she go visit Dr. Ewan Cameron, President of the American and Canadian Psychiatric Associations, at Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal. She was sent upstairs, to the sleep room, where she spent 86 days in an artificial coma. She underwent 102 electro-shock treatments at 30 times the normal intensity. When she was released, she was unable to recognize her children. He had to learn to talk, how to read and how to use a toilet. Dr. Cameron had cured her post-partum depression by amputating her past.

Dr. Cameron died of a heart attack during a mountain climbing expedition in 1967, and his family burned all his papers. The testimony against him comes from survivors. He was once considered the upcoming authority in the treatment of schizophrenia. His theory was to erase the mind, with all its memories, and start over. Dr. Cameron was approached by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. They offered to fund his research, if he would swing it their way. Ecology was still an unknown word. In that context, it had an ominously euphemistic sound.

The Society was a front organization for the CIA. They sent Dr. Cameron some Nazi scientists. Some of them were actually convicted Nuremburg war criminals. Guys with experience. The idea was to ramp up the voltage and see what they could do. 

Dr. Cameron’s mad science laboratory was not the only horror show in town. We probably know more about his lab than other labs because his was in Canada, where it was harder for the CIA to shut people up. The CIA was everywhere. They had infiltrated not only psychiatry, but most other aspects of the medical profession, as well.

The program began as part of Operation Paperclip in 1946. Army intelligence conscripted hundreds of Nazi scientists. They were told to bring their Nazi science projects with them. Project Artichoke (1951) was one of those. It was your garden variety study of interrogation methods, using hypnosis and LSD. That grew into MKULTRA. A 1952 memo stated the objective of MKULTRA thus: Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation? The man in charge was Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. He was a medical doctor, a man trained to cure people. His supervisor was Richard Helms, then undersecretary to CIA boss, Allen Dulles. Those were guys trained to protect people. None of them ever went to prison.

There were upwards of 80 universities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies working for the CIA on mind control, behavior modification and torture. Harvard, Stanford and Tulane are on the list. Most of them were in the US. It was the other space race. Dulles and the boys were sure that the Soviet Union, China and North Korea were doing it. They didn’t want to fall behind. They thought they could use it, among other things, to wipe Fidel off the map.

MKULTRA was cut back in 1967. It was supposedly dissolved in 1973. Read, deeper cover. The Church Committee (Senator Frank, not Roman Catholic) investigated MKULTRA in 1975, but Richard Helms, CIA Director in 1973, had ordered all the records destroyed. Some documents were later recovered because they had been misfiled. Thank God for government negligence and inefficiency. Most subjects had no idea they had ever participated in an experiment at all. Amnesia had been a principle objective. And, most subjects had been unconscious or in trances during the studies. They were often incapable of recounting what had happened to them. But, not all.

The Supreme Court case, when it finally got there (CIA vs Sims, 1985), wasn’t about torture. It wasn’t about mind control. It wasn’t about drugs or erasing memories. It wasn’t about Mary Shelley’s horror-show. It was about informed consent. It was about getting the papers signed and filed so that Director Helms could find them next time he decided to burn them. It was about people with money not getting sued for their participation. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example. They had philanthropically put big money into MKULTRA.

The MKULTRA subjects were soldiers, mental patients, heroin addicts, homeless people, abducted children, college students, prostitutes and convicts. Even some CIA agents. The experiments included the application of torture, rape, electroshock, psychoactive drugs (especially LSD), exposure to radiation and hypnosis. Birkenau in California, minus the ovens.

Dr. Cameron’s particular contribution was a process he called “psychic driving”. Once he had erased a subject’s memory, he would play a recording, over and over, until it became imprinted on that person’s empty brain. Things like, I killed my mother; or Senator Kennedy must die. They wanted to know if they could program people to do stuff. It was all pretty secret for a while, but the cat got out of the bag. That’s the problem with having a Congress, a free press and a Bill of Rights. This was before the Patriot Act, of course.

MKULTRA has some famous alumni. Ken Kesey took LSD at Stanford, and then he got everyone to try it. Tom Wolfe wrote about that. The book is called, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It came out in 1968. We devoured it on the sly in high school. Searching for the truth (with a capital “T”) and for a reason to try something stupid.

Robert Hunter wrote some crazy lyrics for The Grateful Dead after doing LSD for the CIA. You have to be really high to understand them. Oh, and then there was Ted Kaczynski. He was the subject of an experiment at Harvard, designed to see what would happen if you could crack a bright young man’s ego with abusive treatment. Little Ted became the Unabomber.

Kubrick saw it. Space Odyssey was about the system becoming more important than the reason there had ever been a system in the first place. There was something to that. The health care machine had sold its erstwhile compassionate soul to Satan. Following in the patriotic footsteps of the war machine, it had let itself be dragged down into the sulfurous abyss. It had its own agenda. Once it had you, it would never let you go.

The CIA has done its share of selective funding. After World War II, they began trying to discover new ways to enhance and control human beings, to get agents to do really dirty work in an extremely effective way, and then, forget that they had ever done it. They were trying to invent the jihadist suicide bomber, but one that worked for Uncle Sam. Or, more accurately, for Allen Dulles. It didn’t matter what they had to do to make it work. Everyone was expendable.

Bobby Kennedy was murdered in July of 1968. He had just won the California primary and so it was on to Chicago, and let’s win there. He would have won. He would have become President. He would have stopped the war in Vietnam, and he would have ordered a new investigation of the JFK assassination. He would have reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba because grudges are bad strategy.

But he was gunned down in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he worked the crowd. His handlers took him through the kitchen with the pretense of avoiding the multitude, but the kitchen was full
of folks. And two of them had guns.

Of course, we were led to believe that only one had a gun. A lone gunman with three names. Crazed. Foreign. Suspicious. The official story was just exotic enough to be credible in suburbia. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was obsessed with killing RFK, they said. Something about Israel and the Middle East. So, he went into the Ambassador Hotel and shot the Senator. He was immediately apprehended, charged and convicted. Open and shut case.

Dr. Thomas Noguchi was the coroner. The prosecution pressured him to change the results of his autopsy. Because he refused, the report was not admitted into evidence. Dr. Noguchi lost his job, accused of negligence and being Japanese. He eventually sued the county and got his job back, but only after Sirhan had been convicted of first-degree murder.

It’s not rocket science. The Senator was shot three times from behind. The fatal shot penetrated the brain stem. It was fired at point blank range, execution style, leaving powder burns on his skin and on his clothes. Sirhan was standing in front of him. Five feet away.

Sirhan’s gun held eight rounds. He fired all of them. An audio recording registered thirteen shots. LAPD filed no ballistics report. They even trashed a wall at the hotel because it had too many bullet holes in it. It didn’t fit the official story.

Then, there is the puzzling testimony of Sandra Serrano, a Kennedy campaign volunteer. On live television, the night of the killing, she told reporters about a girl in a polka-dot dress with a pixie-cut, running out of the kitchen, gleefully. We shot him, we shot him.

Who?, Serrano asked. 

Senator Kennedy, said the girl in the polka-dot dress.

Serrano had seen the young woman in polka-dots with two Hispanic-looking men earlier in the evening. She came out with only one. Sirhan, a small man with a dark complexion, was the other one. But he was already in
custody and has been ever since.

Police interrogator Hank Hernandez was tasked with browbeating Serrano until she recanted. He wanted her to say that the girl in the polka-dot dress had shouted, They shot him, they shot him.

After several hours of being told that she did not see what she saw, and that what she was doing was terribly wrong, she broke. A recording of her debriefing has survived. Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say. Her original testimony would have saved Sirhan. Instead, he was sentenced to the gas chamber. That was commuted to life in prison when the state of California repealed the death penalty in 1972.

Sirhan was the ideal subject for this kind of project. He was highly susceptible to hypnosis. In fact, the prosecution hypnotized him to try to help him remember what had happened on the night of the murder. He never said he didn’t do it. All he could say was that he did not remember. He talks about a girl leading him into a dark place. The jury believed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Sirhan was a fake.

Experts, on the other hand, agreed that he genuinely had no recollection. The defense pleaded temporary insanity. If they had presented an autopsy and a ballistics report, they could have pleaded not guilty.

When confronted by his interrogators, Sirhan’s words were, It’s against my conscious, sir, my whole upbringing… it’s just not me. This was not jihad. Sirhan was a Christian, and a devout one. Unlike the CIA mobsters, he believed in things like, Thou shalt not kill.

His family had come to the United States when he was an adolescent. He worked as a stable boy, walking hot horses, brushing them down and feeding them. But his diaries said things like, RFK must die, RFK must die. When confronted, he said, It’s my handwriting… but I don’t remember them. They are the writings of a maniac. In fact, they were the kind of phrases used in Dr. Cameron’s psychic driving experiments: short, extreme and repetitive. They were, what’s the word? Yes, hypnotic.

Two years before his death in 1976, Dr. William Bryan bragged to two prostitutes who serviced him regularly that he had programmed Sirhan. Dr. Bryan was reputed to be a brilliant psychoanalyst. Like Dr. Cameron.

Sirhan’s diary makes a curiously unexplainable passing reference to Robert de Salvo, a.k.a., the Boston strangler. Dr. Bryan’s other claim to sordid fame was that he debriefed Robert de Salvo. Perhaps, he mentioned that name to Sirhan during his “programming”.

Following in the distinguished footsteps of Sigmund Freud, Dr. Bryan frequently had sex with his patients, to help them get over their sexual traumas. Dr. Bryan weighed 386 pounds. His nickname was Big Daddy. They also called him Dr. Pompous Ass. Sounds traumatic.

Freud gave his patients cocaine. Dr. Bryan gave them LSD, angel dust and mescaline, the whole CIA medicine chest. So that they would remember to forget everything that he had done to them. Remember to learn to forget. Whiskey shots and cheap cigarettes.

Dr. Bryan died of a heart attack, too, just like Dr. Cameron. But he was not climbing a mountain. He was laid low by his own orgasmic fury in a lethally reactive combination with his morbid body mass. Yeah, he blew out a coronary artery while screwing a patient. It took a tractor and a winch to get his stinking body out of the laboratory.

Sirhan was no Manchurian Candidate. He was hypnotizable, but he was not a good shot. Besides, in his hypnotic daze, he couldn’t remember who he was. Enter the girl in the polka-dot dress. She and the supposedly Hispanic man led Sirhan into the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel. They got him close to Senator Kennedy and triggered the hypnotic program. Sirhan shot wildly about the room and wounded several people. None of them died.

The failure of the MKULTRA program was that you could drug and hypnotize some people and get them to do some surprising and terrible things. But they showed up for work as semi-catatonic zombies. They had slow reaction times and bad marksmanship. Manchurian Candidates were way too stoned to do anything hard. But, for this job, all they really needed was a patsy to take the rap. This wasn’t the first time out for the CIA.

One of Kennedy’s bodyguards killed him. He was shot three times from behind, the fatal shot severing his brain stem. It took him 26 hours to die, but Mrs. Richardson told us that as soon as they said a bullet had penetrated his medulla oblongata, she knew that he was as good as dead. She was our sixth-grade science teacher. It’s the HAL 9000 of the human body, the main control center. We prayed, but to no avail. There weren’t enough rosaries in the world to overcome a bullet in the medulla oblongata.

Kennedy’s security detail that evening had come from a rent-a-cop company. Ace Security employee, Thane Eugene Cesar, was walking behind Robert Kennedy when he went into the kitchen. He was armed. His job was to cover the candidate’s back.

Cesar voted for George Wallace in the 1968 election. He publicly stated that he hated Kennedy and black people and foreigners. I was only there for the money, he said. He had been hired by Ace a week before. Reporters saw him draw his gun and fire three times. The FBI was not interested, and neither was LAPD. This was supposed to be an open and shut case.

Cesar was wearing a clip-on tie. Senator Kennedy grabbed the tie of his killer as he fell. That tie is the one you see in the iconic photo of his assassination. Cesar left without a tie that night. The busboy beside Kennedy, in the photo, is 17-yar-old Juan Romero. He was shaking the Senator’s hand when the shooting began. He put his rosary in the Senator’s pocket before the paramedics loaded him into the ambulance. He’s gonna need it more than me.

CIA operative David Morales was there that night. Morales was a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, and a Dulles man. He and Gordon Campbell; also, CIA; have been identified in the video record. What were they doing there? Were they Kennedy supporters? In fact, Morales later admitted to his lawyer that he had been involved in both Kennedy assassinations.

The simplest explanation, taking all facts into account, is the most probable. Sirhan shot wildly about in his hypnotic confusion. Several people were hurt. Meanwhile, Kennedy was shot at point blank range, twice in the back and once, behind his right ear. We can’t be sure who did that, because there was no autopsy and no ballistics report. But if this were a sixth-grade science project, I would have a pretty good hypothesis about where to start looking for answers.

It was the opposite of the JFK murder, in a way. JFK died from a massive close-range gunshot wound that travelled through his head from front to back, supposedly fired by a lone gunman who was behind him and far away. RFK died of a gunshot wound that entered the back of his head at point blank range and fired by a lone gunman standing several yards in front of him. And the crowd went wild.

In the UK, they have gotten very good at royal weddings. That's what Prince Charles said to American reporters impressed by the storybook quality of his royal wedding to Diana Spenser. They have done that sort of thing a few times over the years. In the US, we have gotten good at presidential assassinations.

Sirhan the unstable stable boy was set up. To this day, he has never said that he didn’t do it. What he says is that he can’t remember. That was precisely the point. Drugs and hypnosis. MKULTRA. To make you forget what you had done. To make you forget who told you to do it and why.

If Sirhan was set up, then Lee Oswald might have been set up. If those are both true, then it might be important to investigate the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. We have another crazed killer with three names, and a ballistics report with unusual trajectories.

So, there you have it. Paperclip begat Artichoke; Artichoke begat MKULTRA; designed to fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark had it right. The system has taken over the mission, and it is killing the crew.